Scraps Of Mind

Saturday Scrapbooking Ideas #30

When you’re making your Christmas cards this year, don’t confine yourself to just the traditional Christmas pallet of Red, Green and Gold.

Christmas symbols such as stars, snowflakes, bells and Christmas trees look fantastic against a more modern background.

So have a rummage through your stash and try picking some more unusual color combinations for your cards this Christmas.

Top 10 Scrapbook Ideas to rekindle your Inspiration

Welcome back to Five Freebies on Friday. That time of the week when Scraps of Mind brings you a great collection of Scrapbooking Freebie goodies.

Please don’t forget to leave a thank you when you download your freebie. A simple thank you comment makes all the difference to the designer who will have put a lot of time and effort into creating your freebie.

1. Petit Moineaux has this beautiful kit for you. I just love the shades of blue and mauve.
2. And Scrappy Pony Designs has a gorgeous frame. All shimmery and glittery.
3. Check out these super cute Chtistmas buttons over at The Maltese Scrapper.
4. Do you like a bit of gorgeous grunge? Well pop over to Pam Lefors and snag this Quickpage.
5. And how about some floral overlays? This and That by Claudie has some beauties, for commercial use too.

Other related posts:

Five Freebies on Friday 7 Nov 2008
Five Freebies on Friday 14 Nov 2008
Five Freebies on Friday 21 Nov 2008

—————————————-

Step by Step Digital Scrapbook
The digital scrapbooking site that ’s designed especially for beginners.
Create wonderful art works from your photos quickly and easily on your computer.
No mess, no special workspace needed, no cleaning up.

For bloggers everywhere comment spam is an ongoing problem. As a result, most blogs have some sort of security mechanism to try to filter most of the robot comment spam and general rubbish.

But is your security set up in a way that actually discourages genuine commenters?

Fortunately for bloggers using the Wordpress system, the Akismet security application that it comes with filters out the vast majority of comment spam (at least it does for me) without it clogging up my system.

But for a number of other blogging platforms the only control mechanism available seems to be those annoying CAPTCHAS where you have to enter a string of meaningless letters into a box before you can submit your comment.

Some of them aren’t too bad as they use words with some distortion applied to them rather than random letters. At least then you can read the word and type it in rather than have to keep flicking your eyes back and forth to the random letter string. And some of those letter strings are sooo long.

I find Typepad to be probably the most annoying of these systems. Just when you think you’ve submitted your comment and you wait for the page to refresh, it bumps you to another page where you need to enter the CAPTCHA info. I get caught by this all the time as I flit from tab to tab, not realizing that I haven’t actually completed my comment submission.

The most recent trend in comment submission controls seems to be a little drop down box where you identify which blogging platform you use before you can leave a comment. This is similar to the Blogger requirement where you identify if you are a Blogger user or not.

As someone who publishes on my own server I often find this frustrating. And frequently I am prevented from leaving a comment because the blog owner has not set up their system to allow owner-bloggers like me to leave a comment.

Now I know that pretty much everyone who writes a blog is excited when they get comments and they would want to encourage them. So I’m assuming that these bloggers don’t realise they are actually slamming the door in the face of potential commenters.

This could be you, and you don’t even realise it.

So perhaps you should take a look at your own blog security setup.

Are you inadvertently discouraging commenters?

Remember there are more people out in the blogosphere who use blogging systems other than the one you use. Why not let them into your blogging world too?

Other Related Articles:

Get a Traffic Rush to your Blog with StumbleUpon

4 Tips to Make Your Blog Interesting

Let your Blog Stumble…it won’t hurt

This is one of my favorite posts from a couple of years ago. It seems to fit well with all the current turmoil in the financial world so I thought I’d re-publish it. Hope you like it.

Back in the 4th century the Roman Emperor Constantine consulted his market analysts about investing in religion. They told him religion stocks were enjoying a boom but the outlook was for a crash in the near future. However Christianity was showing rapid growth and, with some good management, was set to become ‘the next big thing’.

Recomendation: buy buy buy.

So Constantine bought a controlling interest in Christianity, which at the time was a disorganised group of bickering departments, and he called the first Board Meeting.

One of the key resolutions of the Board was to select 25th December to celebrate Christ’s birthday. Since many of the other religions were already in party mode around this time it seemed like a smart choice. And we’ve stuck with that date ever since. Christmas has fallen on 25th December ever since. For the last 1700 years.

So can somebody please tell me why we get taken by surprise by it every year?
“Oh my God it’s Christmas already and I haven’t started my Christmas shopping yet.”
“We need to bring the delivery date for this project forward because it’s almost Christmas and we want to get it finished before people start going on holidays.”
“Has anyone done anything about organising this year’s Christmas party.”

We do it every year and we never seem to work it out beforehand that Christmas falls at the same time every year so we should be able to plan for it. It’s been 1700 years and we still haven’t learnt.

Anyway I have to close this post because I’ve just realised that it’s Christmas in a month’s time and I have to make my Christmas cards to send overseas and start thinking about Christmas shopping. Time for a pre-Christmas panic attack!

Ain’t tradition wonderful.

When I do digital scrapbook layouts these days I rarely use pre-made alphas. I find that there are so many great fonts that I can use with my Photoshop Elements type tool. And more importantly there are so many great techniques I can apply to them that will give an extra edge to my title.

One thing that I love to do is to give my title a reflection.

There are a couple of ways to do this and in my Step by Step Digital Scrapbook Mentoring Program I teach both a simple and a more complex approach. But if you’ve never tried it, I thought this snippet from one of the Step by Step Digital Scrapbook eClasses might be useful.

We join the eClass just after cutting our title out of a piece of patterned paper.

Read the rest of this entry »

Regular Scraps of Mind readers may recall a survey I posted a couple of weeks ago to try and find out where all the Scraps of mind readers live.

I thought I’d gather the results and present them back to you for your interest.

Typically speaking, only a small percentage of a total population will actually complete a survey. And this one wasn’t very well publicised anyway. But I figure that the sample of the Scraps of Mind readership that did complete it is probably a fairly representative sample of all of you. And it seems to tally with the data from my Google stats as well.

Click on the graph to see a larger, more readable version

As you can see, 50% of the Scraps of Mind readership lives in the USA, with 15% from my home country of Australia and the remaining readership distributed pretty evenly across the rest of the world.

I’m not sure what this proves, if anything. But it seems I’m better known overseas than I am at home.

Ah well, I suppose that means I don’t need to worry about fighting off autograph hunters for a while to come .