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I would be shocked if I were the only one on this planet with an IPOD that froze up on them now and then…I poked around on the Internet and found out how to reset these complete hard drives. This applies to my IPOD Classic. I don’t know why it would be different for the newer models, but since I don’t have one, I can’t validate this will work for them. So, when your IPOD freezes and you can feel the hard drive spinning endlessly in your hand and you can’t control it with the scroll wheel, you need to reboot it.

Rebooting is easy. Simply hold down the center button with one finger and then hold down the menu button with another. After about 10 seconds, your IPOD should shut itself off.

That’s it. It’s that simple. I’m surprised it’s not posted that many places on the Internet so I posted it here for your reference.

When you’re down and out because for some reason you can’t log into Word Press and the “create new password” link doesn’t work, because you either never get the email or your username is no longer correct, there is a cool tool from Villiage-Idiot.org you can use. You don’t have to be logged into Word Press to use it because obviously if you were logged in, you wouldn’t need it. You do however, have to have FTP access to your site.

Download the file > upload to your Word Press directory > call up page in browser > follow directions > delete file from server. It’s that simple. Give it a shot. I’ve used it and it works great.

I learned a super cool trick that is worthy of sharing. This is how you create a pattern and use it for different components. On a recent blog I installed and updated, I used a similar pattern to dress up the client’s blog because he wanted to match his existing business cards. No sweat. I used the pattern for the body background, the image background for the date, and then the background for the header because I didn’t like the sky blue I originally used. Here’s how I did it:

first set the background and foreground colors if you already know which colors you want to use. I’m going to use background #4b6ff7 and foreground #4b4640. Once the colors are set, hit CTRL+N to open a new document with both width and hieght each set at 4 px and the background set to Background Color. Select OK.

A little spec pops up with is a 16 px image of our background. Hit CTRL and the + sign nine times to make the image 1600%. and you’ll have an image like this:

Next step is to select the Pencil Tool from the tool menu. Select a 1 px brush, normal mode, and opacity to 80% in the settings menu at the top like this:

For this tutorial, you need a 1px brush, but you can toy around with mode and opacity all you like.

With the pencil tool selected, make a pattern you like. It will take you a while to get used to what the pattern will look like as a background pattern in full size, but you’ll figure it out in no time with a little trial and error. I’m using the following pattern:

If you’re happy with the final pattern, go to Edit > Define Pattern. Enter the pattern name you’d like to give it, I’m going to use samplebgpattern for mine as shown below:

Then open up a new file with a white background. I’m going to use an 800 x 200 header with a white background and fill it in with the new pattern. Once your image is open, create a new layer by going to Layer > New > Layer. You can name it whatever you like, I’m just going to use layer 1.

From here, select the paint bucket from the tool bar and set the options menu to “pattern” instead of foreground and then select the pattern you just made. There are a few preexisting patterns if you’ve never made one before. If you’ve made several in the past, you’ll know that the newest pattern you made is the furthest one at the bottom right. Here’s the menu settings you should have:

Click on the image to be filled and you’ll end up with something like this:

You can put text on it, insert images, do what ever you want. Enjoy.

I enjoy listening to audio books on my IPOD. It’s pretty cool to be able to listen to a wealth of information about a variety of subjects during my commute, chores, or spare time. It’s especially cool because I’m too lazy and too busy to read long books like Moby Dick, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea and other classics that I’ve always wanted to read.

For those that have added audio books to your I-Tunes, you have to be frustrated like I am, that my audio books get added as MUSIC and are listed under SONGS. Well those days are over. The newest version of I-Tunes has a great feature for those of you, like me, that are tired of it.

This new feature is pretty simple, in I-Tunes 8.01, simply highlight the tracks in your music library > right click and select Get Info > select Options > change media kind to Audio books.

It’s that simple. The cool thing is, the books will get skipped on shuffle and if you go to your settings, you can change the default settings of the audio book speed to play faster which means you can get through your books quicker and move onto the next one sooner.

Happy listening.

For the longest time, this newest version of Word Press has been kicking my butt on how to put breaks in my text so it wasn’t all bungled up. I typically post in the HTML tab and use the code but it no longer works:

<br />

The solution is simple. You need to add a bottom margin to your entry p tag. To do so, do the following: Design > Theme Editor > Select Stylesheet style.css if it’s not already open. Find the code on your style sheet that starts with .entry{ such as this:

.entry{
	line-height:20px;
	font-family:Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
	font-size:11px;
	padding-top:5px;
	padding-left:3px;
	padding-right:5px;
	padding-bottom:20px;
}

Add this code right below this symbol } at the end of it:

.entry p{
	margin-bottom: 1em;
}

The end result is to add 1em or 3px to the margin-bottom for the entry p tag. Doing this, you can now write your posts with the content between two p tags such as the following example, and you will be set:

<p>content content content content content content</p>
<p>content content content content content content</p>

The results will look like this with a natural space between the lines. Play with the size until you’re happy:

Open a new document, the size of a banner you wish to make. Standard banners are usually 468×60 or 120×60. I like 468 x 80. It’s a pretty simple process. Follow these simple directions:

Ctrl+N (to create NEW document) > select height and width in pixels and select white background.

Next, you’ll create a 2px black border. Create a new layer either (Shift+Ctrl+N) or Layer > New > Layer and name the layer what you like. Then, Use Ctrl+A to select all. > Then go to edit > stroke. A box will pop up and you fill in the following variables:

The end result will be this:

Keep in mind, all other layers have to be below this layer for this layer to be visible.

Best of luck to you.

CSS stands for cascading style sheets and it is the best thing ever invented for a web designer.  What CSS does is separate the content from the design. That sounds like a real wacky concept but it’s actually pretty cool. What it does is make a designers life easier by allowing you to update the design without altering the content. In the old days, about 8 years ago, everything was designed in tables. Imagine using a giant Excel spreadsheet to layout everything…images, text, forms…etc. Imagine having to use this Excel Spreadsheet to keep everything aligned and orderly. That’s what people did with HTML tables in early Dreamweaver and Front Page. With Tables, you had to edit EVERY page on your website and at times, alter your content to make it look right and this took hours and hours. Now with CSS, you can wrap some content in a simple tag and if you adjust the properties of the tag on the style sheet, all incidents of the tag’s use will be updated immediately. This is especially great for sites with several pages because doing every page at a time is very very very time consuming.

To change your blog’s appearance you click on the Design Tab in the main navigation. The menu will come up with the following sub-menu:

The custom header link may or may not be there. Not all templates have a custom header. If you want to change this, click the link and change the banner. Make sure you right click the existing image and click on properties to see what the dimensions are so you know how big your replacement image should be.

Clicking onto Theme Editor will get you to the coded versions of your template where you can make changes. The big forewarning here is to make a back up of the code before you manipulate it. Copy and paste all the code in notepad and save the file to your computer and then close it. Do this regularly throughout the code adjustment to ensure you can always go back to a previous point if you screw something up. Keep in mind, you shouldn’t be messing with these pages unless you know what you’re doing.

The main pages you’ll want to edit are the style.css, header, footer, and sidebar. I’ll cover each one of these shortly.

Adding a new page, not a post, but a page where you want to add static information, is simple. Just to be clear, static information is updated manually. So this is going to be a page such as Services, Contact, About Us, Products, etc.

To add a new page is just like adding a new post. You go to: Write > Page and then you fill out the title to be the title you want for the page, so give it a simple one. Next Add the content as you would a blog. It may be easier for you to create the page in Dreamweaver or some other external web design program and then transfer the HTML to your new Word Press page. Once happy with your page, select publish and go view it.

Categories are the perfect tool to help organize your posts by certain niche. Sometimes people have specific categories like Word Press, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Dreamweaver or they may have a general category for Software. It’s entirely up to the blogger. There are two ways to create categories. The first and easiest is shown in the image to the left, which you can click on to enlarge. When you’re adding a new entry, at the bottom, there is a section to select which category your post belongs in. If the category doesn’t exist, you follow these three steps:
1. Click on “+ New Category”
2. Enter the name of the new category.
3. Click add.

The category will appear with the box to the left selected next to it.

The second way to add categories if you’re just starting out to organize your blog at the beginning is to do the following: Manage > Categories > Add New

That’s it. That’s all you have to do. Isn’t Word Press user friendly?