Paint Your Soup with a Picture
Before we crack down on tBlog template basics, let's take a look at Paint.Net: a little freebie that can turn your blog around in a second. Some of you may be familiar with Photo Shop software. Others, those who can't afford such software trinkets--bankrupted students such as ourselves, for example--must use the $300 bucks that the Photo Shop crap usually costs to feed and water undernourished bodies.
Two years ago, a couple of undernourished undergraduates at Washington State University developed a terrific piece of free software called Paint.Net. First of all, New Soup isn't making one cent for spreading the gospel. No one does. It's free. The Paint.Net people keep adding new features to the software, and only ask for your feedback and suggestions. New Soup can't afford to make a donation, so we're fighting the good cause right here.
Paint.Net is invaluable for photo editing or creating image - text blends of your own, which in turn makes it invaluable for designing flashy headers, banners, clickable buttons and wallpapers for your blog. New Soup used Paint.Net not only to design the New Soup Banner and New Soup Profile Avatar, but also to draw the layout for our entire blog - click here to check out the Paint.Net design New Soup made before starting this darned-tootin' template.
And that's the first essential New Soup ingredient: knowing how you want your template to look before you get started. If you gave our template design a viewing, you'll notice a few things:
First, our template design is based on a screenshot we took of tBlog's Almovara template and pasted it into our computer's photo-editor: Paint.Net. Don't know how to take a screenshot? Don't want to take the time to download the free software? Don't worry! See Screenshot Instructions below .
Second: you'll notice that our template image is a little different than the way our blog looks right now. That's because our blog is a work in progress. We haven't figured out all the details yet. But we're getting closer (you should have seen the mess a couple days ago). Also, blogs look very different to different web browsers. We use Internet Explorer, Opera and Firefox to inspect our blog appearance. You wouldn't believe how depressing it is to spend days designing a template for one browser, Opera, for example, and then discover the disgusting mulch left by Internet Explorer.
Still, there are ways to customize the most stubborn templates so they look pretty much the same to everyone. However, that's a discussion for another post. If you have some time and would like to investigate the crazy possibilities of internet browsing, pick yourself up some Free Firefox (click, then slink over to your right and take a seat at the sidebar).
For now, get some free paint.net and start designing the template you want to respresent yourself with to the World Wide Web. Even if you don't have the time to download a free copy, you can still inspect their forums and gape at the groovy pics the artists are making.
Taking and Saving a Screenshot
1. To take a computer photograph of everything on your monitor right now, press the "Control" and "Print Screen" buttons simultaneously on your keyboard.
** Unless you're using an Atari joystick to navigate the Web, you probably have a "Print Screen" button on your keyboard. These "Print Screen" buttons usually can be found toward the upper right of your keyboard hanging out with the other buttons everyone typically ignores, like the "Pause", "Scroll Lock", and trusty "Sys Rq" buttons.
2. Open your favorite photo-editor (yes, ours is Paint.Net, but if you're not drooling over the freebie yet, you can paste your screenshot directly into any Word document. Wow. Nope, we didn't know we could do that until we tried two seconds ago. Yippie).
3. Press the "Control" and "V" buttons simultaneously on your keyboard to paste the screenshot into your photo-editor or Word document.
That's it.