Scrapbook Saturday 25/10: Vintage Halloween

This week I have scrapped some great vintage postcards that my Great Uncle Willie sent my Granny from America in 1915. Papers and elements from Flash Graphics Creations, where Marie has some really lovely freebies.

Don't forget to hop on over to MammaDawg.com and check out all the other great entries for this weeks Scrapbook Saturday and add yourself to the blogroll.

Countdown to Halloween 3!: The Monster Mash

Bobby 'Boris' Pickett & the Cryptkickers - Monster Mash
Other posts in the Halloween Countdown series: Dressed Up Doggies! and The Time Warp!

Digital scrapbooking search engine boosts my traffic!

Over the last few days I have noticed a huge increase in traffic from all over the world. Fortunately I have Feedjit installed and was able to narrow the source to a website called DigiFree. This is basically a search engine that looks for blogs and websites with digital scrapbooking freebies. It then lists them all each week, with thumbnails of the available freebies, which run into hundreds and is a great resource for anyone who's into digital scrapbooking, or wants to get started.

Talking of Scrapbooking FREEBIES I have just found a great blog called Flash Graphics Creations, where Marie has some really lovely freebies. Her Christmas stuff is fantastic and she's well worth a visit. She has also started a new Scrapbooking Tutorial blog, which beginners will find useful.

Anyway, this week DigiFree seem to have picked up one of my old Scrapbook Saturday posts, in which I gave details of the FREE set I used and where to find it. If you would like to take a look the link is HERE. I have also now added links to other SS posts which have Freebie links on them.

I have been amazed by the response from Digifree. Just in the last 24 hours I have had visitors from the following countries, which has really boosted my Clustrmap!

USA, Canada, UK, Phillipines, Malaysia, Australia, France, Germany, Netherlands, Italy, Portugal, Czech Republic, Brazil, Austria, Indonesia, New Zealand, South Africa, Mexico, Korea, Israel, Sweden, Hong Kong, Hungary, Saudi Arabia, Russia, Denmark, Thailand, Greece, Romania, Spain, Singapore & Ireland.

New 3 column look for Blog!

As anyone who has visited in the last few days will have noticed, the blog has been undergoing something of a transformation. I have been in the process of converting from a 2 column layout to 3 columns. Not an easy process, especially with all the 'stuff' I have on my sidebar.

It was precisely because of these that I made the decision to try for a 3'er as my sidebar was becoming far too long. Initially I created another Blogger blog that I called 'Test' then downloaded a 3 column template from an excellent website called Webtalks. Here you will find a good selection of free to download XML templates which will work with the new Blogger {blogger beta}.Most of them are 3 columned ones.

Having created this layout I then copied over all the widgets and settings from this blog to it, thinking I could then carry it back over once set up. As you can imagine this is a very time consuming and fiddley way to go about it, with no guarantee of success when you try porting it over to the original blog. Especially given Bloggers propensity to have a hissy fit and produce error messages left & right!

However, on Monday I found a much easier solution to the problem while Googling about 3 column blogging. I came across a great site called Blogger Buster and an article titled 'Create a 3 column Blogger template', which of course was exactly what I was looking for!

With the advice provided I was able to insert a couple of very short pieces of code into my existing html template for this blog, to create the 3rd column. I had a few problems initially with the spacing and columns not appearing in the right places etc. But after reading all the comments, several of which had the same problems, I was able to sort it out using the solutions provided.

Having got all 3 columns in the right places and with the right sizing and spacing I then had to resize a lot of my widgets, which mainly consisted of going back to the original providers and either resetting the code provided or remaking the widget to fit.

This process is now complete and I am very pleased with the result. I have also reinstated my peacock background - I missed it and was only using the other one as a Halloween theme.

All this also explains why I have not had time to post for 'My Diet Monday', 'Ruby Tuesday' or 'Wordless Wednesday' this week, or doing much EC card dropping. But normal service has now been resumed and I will be posting regularly and try and catch up with all my EC card droppers as soon as possible.

I've joined the Blogger Followers Party!

Click on the poster to find out more