Category Archives: Technology

How to Create a Photo Silhouette

Computers & Electronics, Photo & Video, Technology,

If you are wondering how you can create a photo silhouette with some free software then you could try using Google’s Picasa shoto software to get quite a good effect.

If you use the Neon effect tool in Picasa then this might give you what you are after. Using the Picasa Neon effect is simple and depending on how you use it you can get a silhouette effect or else you can have a level of detail in your photo. Personally I wanted to create a kind of chalk outline sketch effect which blanked out the features and just left an outline of the body. The good thing with this though is that you also get some of the internal lines of the image rather than just having a plain black silhouette.

You can get a good silhouette effect using Picasa's neon tool
You can get a good silhouette effect using Picasa’s neon tool

How to Create This Effect

silhouette1To create this effect firstly open the photo you want to edit in Picasa. Although Picasa does create a backup of your photo itself, you may want to create a copy so that you can play around with that and not worry about messing up the original.

The first thing that I do is to crop the image to how I want it to look. The crop tool is on the first edit page and you can choose what format you want to use to crop the image to: you could keep the image in the same ratio as the photo was taken or you can just crop it manually to a size that you want.

 

Using the Neon Effect

The Neon Effect icon is on the last page of the edit icons. I actually first used the black and white tool to change my photo to black and white before using the neon tool. In this way the colour I chose in the neon tool would not be clouded by any other colours in the picture.

With the neon effect you have two decisions to make:

  1. firstly, the colour that you want to use for your neon effect. You can choose any colour you like with the drop picker. and you can choose how dark or light you want the colour to be.
  2. secondly, how much fade you want to apply to the picture. The less fade you apply, the more the rest of the picture will be dark and you will just have highlighted areas. The picture on the right (and the one at the top) have no fade applied to them so that they appear more as monochromatic pictures or a silhouette as per the top one.

silhouette2

Other Picasa Tools

There are many tools you can get in Picasa that you pay for in other software, it really is pretty versatile. Obviously it doesn’t come close to tools like PhotoShop that you may need if you are doing detailed changes to images but for the everyday photographer it has almost everything that you need.

I find the crop tool is one of the most useful and also the fill light tool for those photos that come out a bit dark due to lack of light. You can also use the ‘I’m Feeling Lucky’ button which sometimes can be a bit hit and miss but other times can give you a quick good result!

If you do use the fill light tool then it can also be good to add a bit more contrast. You are pretty much in charge of what you want to do and can cancel and undo any of the changes you have made if you do something wrong.

How Do I Back Up My Computer?

Computers & Electronics, Home & Garden, Internet, Technology,

I think a lot of people live in a world where they know the chances of their computer crashing are significant and yet they still put off backing up their data. I think in most cases this is due to their lack of knowledge of how easy it can be to back up your data. I know people who occasionally add the files in their documents folder onto a CD or thumb drive but it is not very frequent and chances are if their laptop or PC were to fail they would lose data for sure.

I myself have had no less than 1 PC and 2 Laptops die on me completely, without a hope of recovery, in the last 3 years. The first laptop died due to someone else trying to fix something by removing the operating system and not being able to replace it. I stupidly had not backed up my data before allowing them to do this, my bad. The 2nd one, the PC, died a few months later, it was a few years old and I had started slowly copying the data over but had not finished backing up before it went. Lucky for me I had a friend who, with a lot of effort, managed to rescue the data from both machines. So if you are wondering how do I back up my computer then I’ll tell you the easy way that I do it (although there are other ways but for someone who doesn’t want to delve into lots of settings this one is simple),

Set Up An Easy Plug and Play Back Up

And so it came that said friend decided that I needed an easy back up facility and bought me a Seagate FreeAgent GoFlex Drive with I think 500 Gb of space. Now I am sure that there are other easy plug and go back up drives available but as I have used this one I wanted to share my experience with it. Basically it has software installed that you can just run and once you have that installed, every time you plug the drive in afterwards it will automatically detect and new or changed files and back them up to the drive.

That is as simple as it is – plug it in and it will back up for you. For someone like me, who never quite gets round to doing a manual backup, it is a godsend. And that was shown to be the case when my 3rd computer, a laptop that was only about 18 months old, also died. Lucky for me that just the day before I had plugged in the backup (I had actually plugged it in to look for a file from one of my old computers that was stored on it but of course as I did that it backed up too).

So really, for less than 100 dollars (on Amazon anyway) you can have a very easy back up system that is suitable for any technophobe to use and really is the simplest back up out there as far as I am concerned. Don’t leave it until it is too late – it is not always possible to recover data from dead computers or can be expensive so save yourself the worry and trouble by getting a back up now.

You can check out the GoFlex drive on Amazon US and the equivalent in the UK below:

 

Hostgator Discount Coupon

Internet, Money, Technology, ,

So if you are looking for some web hosting and you want a reliable and great value host then I can vouch for the great hosting from Hostgator. In fact if you came here searching for a Hostgator discount coupon then you probably already know that Hostgator has really great hosting plans where you can create as many sites as you want all for one price. Personally I host all of my websites with Hostgator and of course you get economy of scale if you host them all in one place, so even when I create new websites I don’t have to pay any extra money for them.

Hostgator have lots of options on their hosting plans too. I create all of my sites in WordPress so you can get an unlimited number of WordPress websites with your hosting package but there are plenty of other options that you can choose form to create your websites.

So I have a couple of Hostgator discount coupons. All you need to do is to use the following codes as the checkout and you can get one of the following discounts on Hostgator web hosting:

AZURE25OFF This will give you 25% off whatever hosting you chose and however much you pay for up front.

AZURE994OFF This will give you $9.94 discount from your web hosting.

How to Create a WordPress Website – First Steps

Business, Internet, Money, Technology

WordPress

I started using WordPress websites a few years ago and to be honest to start off with I did not get on well with them. I guess it was just the fact that I was not familiar with how they worked and I didn’t find them to be that user friendly. After some time of using other people’s wordpress websites and now setting up my own I have really started to get to grips with them and find that you can make a quick and easy website with very little effort and no need for design skills.

I by no means profess to being an expert at WordPress websites (although I thought I had a good foundation, having worked as a Sharepoint website expert previously and having a lot of experience in HTML, Javascript and ASP) but I wanted to show you what I had learnt about setting up a WordPress website and what I do each time I set a website up so that firstly, any beginners might get a few tips that they didn’t know and secondly, anyone who is an expert can correct me and tell me if I am doing something wrong or missing something!

WordPress – Blog or Website?

Although WordPress was really set up as a blogging platform, it is also great to use for setting up a standard websites as you don’t have to design the whole site from scratch, there are lots of plugins that can do whatever you want them to do which saves you a whole lot of time if you want to start a website.

I currently have around a dozen WordPress websites set up with more in the pipeline and am using them for earning extra online income, primarily with adsense and Amazon. I don’t generally set them up as blogs, but more as standard websites using the blogging function to add news articles.

WordPress Hosting

I have all of my WordPress sites hosted by Hostgator which has a great plan for unlimited hosting so that you can have as many wordpress sites as you want to hosted on one account. I checked out a lot of hosting providers before choosing Hostgator and it seemed like they were not only the most recommended but also the ones with the best pricing structure. You can choose a plan that allows you to set up as many websites as you like so the more you build the less the cost per website. You can check them out here and if you want any more incentive then I have a discount code which will give you 25% off any plan you choose. use the code AZURE25OFF for this discount. Other hosting providers can also set up WordPress hosting for you but this seems to be the best one that I have found and was also recommended to me by an SEO expert.

WordPress Website – Step 1 – Choose Theme

So, let’s say that you have your website set up and have installed WordPress on it, so if you are using Hostgator then you will have the theme Twenty Fourteen used on your website.

The first thing that I will do with my website is to choose a suitable theme. If you go into the WordPress admin console and select themes then you will get a choice of a lot of free themes that you can choose to use for your website. Choice of a WordPress theme may depend on the layout – how many columns do you want and in which position? Or it may depend on the look of the website – you can search the themes by colour, description and layout amongst other things. if you google free wordpress themes for your category you can often find one that will suit your website.

If you don’t like any of the free themes that you see then you can buy custom themes or get someone to build one for you. once you have installed a theme you can also customise the style sheet and hence the appearance yourself.

WordPress Step 2 – Install Plugins

Plugins are the things that make WordPress sites do what you want them to do – there is pretty much a plugin for anything and most of them are free. There are many different plugins for each type of thing that I am trying to do but these are the ones that I have found suit my needs best. The plugins that I will install as soon as I set up my WordPress website are as follows:

  • WordPress SEO – this is a key plugin if you want to get more traffic to your website. This plugin ensures you maximise the SEO and create all the correct metadata for each of your pages.
  • AGoogle Adsense Plugin – there are quite a few to choose from and most of them will do a similar thing by enabling you to add Google Adsense blocks to your site. You can choose where to add them and whether you want to add them to pages, posts or just anywhere. This is a great way to monetise your site.
  • Easy Privacy Policy – this adds a privacy Policy page to your website which you will need if you are displaying adsense or selling affiliate products. Quick and easy as it says!
  • WP Amazon associate – again there are a few Amazon plugins that you can use. This one can customise the item you display to the location of the viewer (providing that product is available in their location) so is pretty useful.
  • Google XML Sitemaps – creates a sitemap that Google recognises and that can be added to the Webmaster tools.
  • Simple 301 Redirects – used so that affiliate links are not shown on each page but are instead on a 301 redirect from a web page (apparently Google recognises affiliate links and does not like them).
  • YouTube Embed – allows you to embed YouTube videos in your website if required.
  • WP Spam Free WordPress – you will find that you will get many spam comments and trackbacks on your website unless you ahve an anti-spam plugin so make sure you install one!

Plugins are constantly changing and becoming unavailable so if a particular one mentioned here is not shown then there are bound to be others that do the same thing.

In addition to these I may use other plugins that are specific to each site but these are my staple ones that I will pretty much always use.

Step 3 – Create Content and Set Home Page

One thing that I usually do is to change the WordPress website so that it looks less like a blog. I prefer to have a static home page with the ‘blog’ entries on another page so to do this I first add two new pages to the site – one called ‘Home’ and one called ‘news’ (or something similar). Then I go to Settings, Reading and change the home page to be a static one (Home) and the ‘posts’ page to be ‘news’ – in this way I can have plain text on the home page.

Once I have done this will create all of my pages (bearing in mind I will have already done the research on my keywords and so I will know what I want to call the pages) and will already have the content created that I can just insert into the pages. Whilst creating all the pages I will also fill in all the SEO information on them.

WordPress Websites – A Few Extras

Some of the extra steps I will take when creating my WordPress site are:

  • Install Google Analytics
  • Change the admin password that was automatically generated
  • Make sure in settings the site is set with the www in the site URL
  • Add the site to Google webmaster tools and register the XML file
  • Submit the site to Google and Bing

So Far So Good

So far I am happy with the way my WordPress websites are going. Within 2 months one of my sites has reached page 1 of Google (positions 3 and 4) and is getting some good traffic. I have a number of other sites that are on the first page of Google. The others have increasing traffic and a bit more competition to overcome! One thing I think is key is to get the right URL – in particular a .com if you can – and I focus on the URL as the first thing before I set up a site.