Ok, this is just a quick tutorial on saving you some time when hosting images. When most people host images they go to a hosting website, such as: PhotoBucket, MyPhotoLodge, Flickr, and lots more . Sometimes this is not free and it takes a long time just to upload one image so you can link to it. This really got on my nerves so I started uploading to my own servers because that is pretty much the fastest way to upload anything. After a while I had a bunch of clutter on my server and so I looked for another alternative. I eventually came across a Firefox add-on called ImageBot. As Geico would say, “It’s so easy even a caveman can do it!”. This pretty much is the case with ImageBot.

Just go to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1174 click the download button, and restart firefox. Make sure you have the ImageBot plugin enabled and you should see an icon somewhere that says, “ImageBot”. If you click the little arrow next to it, it should bring down a a list that says, “Float, Tab, Patcher, and Help. If you click on the “Float” button, ImageBot will open in another window just like a regular program. If you click on the “Tab” button, ImageBot will open in a new tab within firefox. If you click on the “Patcher” button, it will give you options to patch the plugin if you’re having trouble updating it. Lastly, the “Help” button, this is for any help you need for anything that I haven’t covered or if you forgot how to do something.

Now for the next part, actually using the plugin. I usually just open it in a new Fire-Fox tab, but this is just my preference. In the bottom right corner you should see a button that says, “Upload Images”. Click that and you should have a box come up showing your computer. Now just navigate to your image or images that you would like to upload and select them all, click open, and wait a few seconds for it to show you a thumbnail of your pictures in ImageBot. Once this is completed just right click on the picture and click copy. You now have the link to the image copied so just go to the place that you wish to link to it from and paste it there.

There are many other options for sorting and tweaking things inside ImageBot, but I am going to let you mess around with those things because you don’t need to know how to use those to be able to use the plug-in.

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Over the past few days I have been redesigning my Extreme-Days banner. As you can see it’s up now, but we we were having some server troubles so that is why it took a few extra days. Anyway, if you have a WordPress blog and you have designed your own banner, or are in the process of designing one then I have a tip for you!

First off, I designed my banner as a .png file and when it was done it came out crystal clear just how I wanted it, but then when I re-saved it as a .jpg file, it came out blurry after I uploaded it to the site. So I did some thinking and then decided to mess around with it a little bit. I took the .png file and renamed the file extension to .jpg and then uploaded it to the site that way. Low and behold when I looked at it, it was nice and clear, just how I wanted it to be.

Some of you may not know what I’m talking about and thats ok. That is the reason that you’re reading this post, to learn how to do this. So I have a video that I made to help you along.

If you don’t want to read the instructions below, you can also watch the video which teaches you how to do the same thing.

To change your file extensions you must first have this option enabled. Double-click My Computer, and in the Tools menu, click Folder Options. Now click the view tab and look through the list untill you fine the “Hide file extensions for known file types”. Once you have found this, uncheck the box next to it and click ok. Now you should be able to see what type of file your files are. Now that you have done this you can change your .png or other file into a .jpg without it really being a .jpg file. This way you don’t have to mess around with the code of the template.

Now, you should already have an image that you want as your banner and a blog that is hosted on WordPress, but I think that this will also work with Blogger. Now you must set up your blog with an FTP client. I am just going to go over the basics of this because this can get very complicated. If you have a WordPress blog that is hosted on your own domain, then this should be a lot easier for you. So download an FTP program from somewhere, or open one that you already have. Next you need to configure your FTP program to have access to your blog. Go to configure or connect or something else along those lines and fill in your ip address. Next fill in your user name and your password. If you don’t know what these are you probably shouldn’t be doing this. Make sure the server type is FTP and that the port is 21. Then the rest just leave at default and you should be all ready to go.

Once you have done those things, connect to the new account you have just made. If it works, then you did it right, if it doesn’t you did something wrong. The most common thing that you will do wrong is use the wrong ip address, or the wrong user name and or password.

Now that we got all that working, you need to navigate through all of these files to find the file that needs replacing. In my case I need to go into the folder called “wp-content” and then “themes”. Now here it will show you all the themes you have downloaded for your blog. Choose the one you have installed on your site, and open up that folder. There should now be a bunch of files and a folder called “images”, just open that up and ignore the rest.

The easiest thing to do from here is to just import everything onto your desktop or somewhere easy to get to. Then you just need to open up all of the images until you see your header. Now just copy the name of that file and paste that banner name on yours, then just upload your banner with the new name onto your server in the same place you got the original one.

When you check your page don’t be too worried if you don’t see it right away, just refresh the page a few times and it should show up. This method can be used to replace any image that shows up in the template, but be careful because you can really mess up the template in here. If that does happen, just re-download it and everything should be back to normal.

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