Silent Giving

The gifts of caring, attention, affection, appreciation, and love are some of the most precious gifts you can give, and they don't cost you anything. When you meet someone, you can silently send them a blessing, wishing them happiness, joy, and laughter.  This kind of silent giving is very powerful. (Deepak Chopra, The Seven Spiritual Laws of Success, p. 32-3)

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Last night and this morning I created some new YouTube playlists.

Google Sites

Roy Orbison

Jackie Evancho

This morning I signed up for the "free" Plaxo address file.  This works with the Avery/Dennison label site.  I don't want to wait until Christmas season to start planning how I am going to create address labels.

Mr. Dickie

21 February 2012

Adding Color to My Blogs

Photo: Aztech New Media

Look at your family history as a blessing. Yes a blessing! It's precisely what you had to go through to arrive where you are today. (Wayne Dyer, Excuses Begone!, p. 56)

The biggest obstacles to understanding the truth are lies disguised as truth. (Anonymous in A Calendar of Wisdom by Leo Tolstoy, 15 September)

We don't get to know today what will happen tomorrow. (Courage to Change, 16 September)

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Yesterday I finished the project to add "labels" to the postings on my genealogy "News" blog. There were some obsolete postings that I deleted and some postings that I modified because they included links to webpages no longer available. Currently this blog has approximately 230 postings.

I realized that my blogs needed changes in the blog settings. For example, the "links" weren't changing color when visitors viewed them. I set the unvisited "links" color to a shade of blue and the color of the visited "links" to a shade of red. I didn't have time to make these changes on all four blogs. There's always something to learn.

Mr. Dickie

Some Projects

I can change nothing but myself. Do I need changing? If things are going wrong - or seem to be - maybe it's because of the way I'm reacting to them. If I accept the fact that the principal source of my unhappiness is in me, I'll be giving myself a good reason to do something about me. It isn't easy - but the rewards are beyond reckoning! (One Day at a Time in Al-Anon, 3 August)

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Yesterday the two of us worked on the project to redo the large flowerbed in the front of the house. We bought twenty-four tan concrete blocks to put about the outside in a circle. We were nine blocks short of laying one course. It was just as well. I was a physical wreck by the time we placed the blocks we bought.

I discovered a way to quickly find my Google blog entries that don't have "labels." Once I realized that I could look at the listing of all of the blog entries to see which ones had "labels" I was able to quickly post the indexing information to all of the postings that needed them.

Yesterday I completed the project to upload the fourteen Wills to my Google Obits blog. This information hasn't been available on the Internet since AOL dropped website support in October 2008. Thanks to Google the information is once again on the Internet.

Mr. Dickie

Windows Live and "Labels"

I will try to overcome my tendency to react to what people say or do. I can't know why they do it, because I cannot understand their inner unhappiness and compulsions, any more than they can understand mine. When I "react," I put the control of my peace of mind in the hands of others. My serenity is under my control, and I will not relinquish it for trivial occurrences. (One Day at a Time in Al-Anon, 15 September)

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I'm trying to learn more about Windows Live and in particular the part of it called, Skydrive. Apparently Microsoft is willing to provide 25 GB of free space to get us to use this tool. I signed up in July of 2008 and then never used the tool. I'm interested in this because I think it would be a good idea to store some of my files outside of the house.

The other day I installed a "Labels" gadget (widget) in my four Google blogs. Finally I understood how the "labels" that can be assigned to each blog posting can be used. The gadget reads those "labels" and displays a list in a sidebar box. I elected to have my list displayed alphabetically with the number of "label" hits displayed in parentheses. This makes a big improvement in the usefulness of the blog. Visitors can look in the sidebar to see if some topic of interest has been written about. When they find something of interest they can click on that line in the sidebar and a "set" of just those blog entries will be presented for viewing. My genealogy "News" and "Obits" blogs have the most labels. Visit one of them to try this out.

Mr. Dickie

Labels (Tags)

Labels (Tags)

This morning I finally understood how I should use the Labels feature of Google blogs. Labels are sometimes referred to as "tags". It's a way to assign categories to information. What I didn't understand, until I took a look at Cyndi Howell's Blog, was that there is a Google Labels widget that can be installed in the sidebar. Once the widget is installed the usefulness of the "labels" is apparent. When you click on a "label" set of blog entries is created in which that particular "label" appears.

For example: If I used "WestVirginia" to label my blog entries about West Virginia you could click on that label to quickly create a set of all of the West Virginia blog entries. Neat!

I set my widget to list the labels in alphabetical order with the number of occurences in parentheses.

I'll install the widget in my "News" and "Obits" blogs first because I think I did a better job of creating labels in these blogs.

Mr. Dickie