Hello fellow bloggers! Thought I’d share a couple of tips today.

1. No Reply Comments – I love, love getting comments. Sometimes those comments include a question I’d like to answer or a particular thought I would like to acknowledge. I have my comments linked to my email address, so they appear in my inbox. If there is a question involved and your email address is part of your Blogger Profile, I usually respond immediately. However, when I receive a comment that has the dreaded ‘No Reply Comment,’ there is no way to answer you directly. In that case, I either have to try to track you down or I have to hope my already overloaded brain retains the question so that I can address it in a future post.

The retention? Doesn’t happen too often these days.

It’s so easy to take care of this problem!

a. Go to your Dashboard and click on Blogger Profile (right by your photo in the upper right hand corner.) Then click ‘Edit Profile.’
 
b. In the Privacy section, check the boxes next to ‘Show my profile‘ and ‘Show my email address.’

c. Then move on to ‘Identity‘ and enter your email address.

d. Save.

Easy. It just takes a moment. Then, when you ask a question, I can answer you directly. We can actually have a conversation! Isn’t that nice?

2. Photo Resizing. My friend Rita ran out of storage space for her photos yesterday. She had to buy more space. I know that this has happened to several of you in the past. I suppose at some point it will happen to me. However, I’ve been blogging for close to 4 years now. I post a lot of photos. I haven’t run out of space yet. Why? Because I resize my photos in a photo editing program. The one I use is Picnik. You can do the same thing in Photobucket or any number of other editing programs.

When I upload photos to Picnik, like this one of my piano, I usually get a message in the lower right hand corner:

See the large numbers there? That means that my photo is 2640 x 1980 pixels.  That takes a lot of storage space. That’s why you see the exclamation point next to the size. If I click on that exclamation point, here is the message I get from Picnik:

It only makes sense that if Picnik thinks this is a large photo which has a large file size, that size photo will take up a lot of storage space in Picasa, which is usually where all your Blogger photos are stored. In Picnik, there is a resize button. Photobucket has one, too. Picnik’s is on the left hand side of the screen. When I click on Resize, the current dimensions of the photo are displayed.

Too big. So I change them. In my case, I usually change the first number to 800. I know others who change it to 600. Either will work. You just want a more manageable file size.

Click apply and you’re done. Same photo but much less storage space. When you use the resized photo in your post, you can still make it small, medium, large or extra large in the body of the post. Resizing it prior to posting just ensures that the file size will take up much less space in storage. Some of you may have another way you resize. That’s fine. If you don’t normally resize or if this has not been on your radar, the next time you are ready to post a photo, quickly check its size. If it’s too large, resize it.

I learned this early on from Connie at Living Beautifully. It’s been invaluable. Thank you, Connie.

I know this will help those of you with storage issues. If Connie hadn’t passed this information on to me, I would have had to buy more storage a long time ago!

In other news, it’s finally sunny here.

And my birthday is Monday. How did another one come around so quickly?