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• [HOW TO] Links and photos in Red Bubble
  by Craig Shillington

  I thought I would do a separate and hopefully less complicated How To in regards to making links and showing Jpg files in RB. There s…

  I thought I would do a separate and hopefully less complicated How To in regards to making links and showing Jpg files in RB. There seems to be a lot of confusion as to how these things work. So find the part you are interested in learning, maybe open up and edit an old Journal Entry and practice. VBS A URL is simply the text that shows up in your Browser Window Address Bar (up the very top), the line that starts with http:// If I refer to the URL, that is what I am talking about. ALL CODE IS WRITTEN WITHOUT SPACES Some wrapping of longer lines of code will occur within this Journal Entry, regardless of what the lines look like, code is always one continuous line WITHOUT spaces TEXT LINKS Sometimes it’s nice to have a text link when we are conversing to others in Red Bubble to help people share information, or to allow them to see another web page that has something to do with the convo. Maybe you like to include songs from YouTube with your work and want to share those Videos and music with others. Anytime you want someone to be able to link to another webpage somewhere, you can make a line of text (or one word) clickable to that link and it’s really easy to do. :) All you do is wrap the text you want people to see as a link, in qoutes {“} then add a colon {:} and then the URL. So let’s say you wanted to link to my Porfolio so people can have a look at buying something off me HEHEHE ... all you need to do is open up my portfolio page in your browser to get the URL from your browsers address bar and just type the name of the link text wrapped in quotes, followed by a colon, then the url so it would look like this (with no spaces) : ” Craig Shillington’s Portfolio ” : http://www.redbubble.com/people/crackers1967/portfolio Craig Shillington’s Portfolio is wrapped in quotes, so that is the text people will see. http://www.redbubble.com/people/crackers1967/portfolio is the link we want the text to click too When you type that within Red Bubble without the spaces you get this : Craig Shillington’s Portfolio So, abbreviated – to make a text link in Red Bubble you would type this in as code: ” text ” : link Replacing the text and link for yours and no spaces. DISPLAYING JPG’S GIF’S PNG’S ETC Please try to keep the size of these files small, both in dimensions and in download size, as if you use a lot of bigger files, the pages you put them on will load more slowly and that might piss people off!! Okay, you look around and you notice somehow people are actually making it so that you can see the thumbnail photos of thier works, or others have cool little animated gifs showing. Well … if you can bring up a photo by itself in your browser, you can show it in Red Bubble!! And again, it’s really really easy. If you want to know the link to any photo you can see in your browser window, right click on the image itself (PC Users … sorry Mac users, maybe someone can help me here) and go down to properties. In the window that opens up you will see a section that has the image properties and the location (or URL). That is the link we need to show that image. I use a little rotating Note near all the links to Videos throughout my Portfolio, so I will be using that as an example here. This applies to ANY image you want to display though. First, right click on this LINK and open in a new Window or Tab. That way you can still read this and flick back to the link to practice. :) You will notice at the top of my description for the photo, I have used the Text Link method described above to link to the Video of that Song in YouTube. And right next to that link, to draw attention to the link, I have my little rotating Note :) Right Click on the little rotating Note and go to Properties. In the box that opens you will see the Image Properties and A URL to the Image. It should be this: http://home.people.net.au/ ~ casphotography/notes-15.gif That is the link to where I have the Note.gif Stored. And that is all you need to know for any image, the URL that will show just that image in your Browser. If you copy that link to your browser Address Bar (with no spaces) and hit Enter … all you should see is an empty page with the little note rotating in the top left corner. PERFECT!! If you can open any image in this way, you have the URL in the Address Bar. If you copy a link to your Address Bar and it doesn’t just show the image, something is wrong. Most Image URL will end in JPG, GIF or PNG. There are some exceptions, but there should be one of those somewhere in the URL. Okay, so we have the URL, how do we make the image show in Red Bubble. Where you want the image to be shown, paste or type the URL. Then at the very start and the very end of the URL (with no spaces) put EXCLAMATION MARKS {!} So my note would then be (without spaces): ! http://home.people.net.au/ ~ casphotography/notes-15.gif ! And in Red Bubble will look like this: So, abbreviated – to make an image show in Red Bubble you would type this in as code: ! URL ! Replacing the URL with the URL for the image and no spaces. IMAGE LINKS Okay, so we know and understand now how to make links and also how to display images in Red Bubble. If you don’t, go back and understand it because this next bit could be very confusing if you don’t ;) We know we can show an image, and we know we can make links to text. So can we make an image work as a link? YES!! VBS And it’s sorta easy if you understand what the code is doing and how it works. I will be using my Message Me button link in my profile for this example. Because that is an Image that links to my message board and so you can leave me a message ;) Here is the link to my Profile The very first button I have in there is the Message me Button. When you click on it, it takes you to my Journal Entry I set up for people to message me in. So I know the link … all I need to get now is the URL of the button. Easy, again, right click the Message Me Button and goto Properties, look at the Image Properties and the URL there … It should be this: http://home.people.net.au/ ~ casphotography/m.gif We know from above, to display an image we wrap it in Exclamation Marks, so to show that in Red Bubble we’d type (no spaces): ! http://home.people.net.au/ ~ casphotography/m.gif ! Which will show as: Okay, we have the image up and working, how do we link to it? Exactly the same way we link to text from above. Simply follow the code with a colon {:} and the link you want people to goto when they click the image. In this case my Message Board: http://www.redbubble.com/people/crackers1967/journal/show/30445 So the whole line of code would look like this (no spaces .. and ignore the word wrap, this is all one single line): ! http://home.people.net.au/ ~ casphotography/m.gif ! : http://www.redbubble.com/people/crackers1967/journal/show/30445 When typed with no spaces and on one line it looks like this: So, abbreviated – to make an image show in Red Bubble that links to a URL you would type this in as code: ! URL ! : link Replacing the URL with the URL for the image, and link for the URL of the link to click to and no spaces. View all my HOW TO’S

• [HOW TO] Sets in your Profile
  by Craig Shillington

  A lot of people are asking how to do the links to sets of photos or works in our profiles … so I thought I would outline it here for th…

  A lot of people are asking how to do the links to sets of photos or works in our profiles … so I thought I would outline it here for those of you that would like that option. First thing is to have sets in mind and tags to associate with those sets. Then … make sure you have those tags on the photos you want in each set. This way a photo can actually be in more than one set if you like :) Then …. to make the links in your profile: (I’ll use my tree tag as an example) / you type the set name followed by the link to all your photos tagged with tree like this ….. but without the spaces: ” Trees ” : http://www.redbubble.com/people/crackers1967/art/everything/tags/tree When you do this without the spaces you get this: Trees / Edit your Profile and place the set code somewhere within the About Me section. I place mine down a little lower because for some reason long lines get cut when you view your Profile on your Overview page, it looks neater down lower and only viewable when someone clicks on the more link. You should be able to copy and paste that line with the spaces and just change the word, tag name and username, then remove the spaces and go for your life. :) You can also bullet the list by placing a hash and then a space before the whole lot and it looks like this: Trees / / The easiest way to see what your username is, is to open up RedBubble and click on View your public Profile. Look in the address bar of your browser and it will show you your username at the end of the address: http://redbubble.com/people/ username View all my HOW TO’s

• [HOW TO] Buttons and links to Sets in your Profile.
  by Craig Shillington

  Okay … we have discussed how to set up Sets in your Profile, if you are not up to speed with doing that yet, I’d advise understanding a…

  Okay … we have discussed how to set up Sets in your Profile, if you are not up to speed with doing that yet, I’d advise understanding and get that working first before attempting this next step. You can view that [HOW TO] HERE At the moment my Profile looks like THIS As you can see I have used the same type of button to try to keep my profile looking neat and tidy. First thing you will want to do is decide on what STYLE you want your profile to be, as the button choice will make all the difference. I liked mine because it sorta had a Red Button feel to it. You can either make your buttons online, the site I used was Button Generator , or you might want to have a go at making your own buttons (my buttons are about 135×25 pixels). Which ever you decide to do you will need somewhere online to upload your button to, that way when people view your profile the links to the buttons will work. I used my ISP’s storage space to store my buttons, you can also use free online storage spaces such as Image Shack to store them. Once you have this sorted out and the images uploaded, you are right to move onto the step of placing the images in your profile and linking those buttons to your Sets. We already know that we can link to text by placing quotes around the text and adding a colon and the link afterwards. That’s how we made the Sets and the links to them before. So we understand that putting a link directly after a colon links whatever is before that colon to that URL. Such as: ” link text ” : http://www.thelink.com The ” linktext ” part shows the text {linktext} as a link … and it links to the URL www.thelink.com because of the use of the colon. Of course when we put these links in our profiles, there are no spaces in the line at all … that way the whole thing works. When you understand how this works, you will see now that we can actually change the TEXT part for an image. In this case, instead of showing the sets as text links, we can change that for an image of a button. In Red Bubble, if you want to show ANY image all you need to do is know the link to the image and wrap that link in Exclamation marks. Easy eh. So to show a text link, you wrap the text in quotes … to show an image you wrap the image link in !’s. The MESSAGE ME button in my profile is stored at my ISP. The link is: http://home.people.net.au/ ~ casphotography/m.gif You can copy and paste that to the address bar in your browser (remove the spaces around the Tilde { ~ }) and press enter, it will open up the Message Me button in your browser window. What you then need to figure out is what the links to YOUR buttons are going to be. You can test if you have your links right by copying the links (like mine there) into your Browser Address bar and pressing enter. If the only thing you see in your browser window is your button (and it usually ends in jpg, gif or png) then THAT is the link to THAT button. All is working well :) :) To make the button visible in Red Button, all you need to do is wrap the LINK in !’s without any spaces at all so for my Message Me button it would look like this (again, without spaces): ! http://home.people.net.au/ ~ casphotography/m.gif ! You can play with that by editing your profile and going right to the bottom and putting the code in … then viewing the public version of your profile to make sure it works. Once you are happy with that, you can then move onto linking your sets to the buttons. :) Once again we know to link to stuff all we need to do is type a colon and the link we want to link to. :) As we have all already worked out how to do the TEXT versions of sets in our profiles, we are half way there already :) All we need to do now is replace the TEXT links we have with the BUTTON links. So really it is just a matter of removing the text parts and replacing those with the button codes. I will use my Trees Set as an example. As a text link it would look like this in my profile {again, no spaces} ” Trees ” : http://www.redbubble.com/people/crackers1967/art/everything/tags/tree If you have set the Text links up to your Sets in your Profiles you will already have lines like this there. What we want to do now is replace the TEXT link for Trees, with the button. So all we do is replace the ” Trees ” bit with the button photo. In my Profile it looks like this: ! http://home.people.net.au/~casphotography/RB/Profile/treesbutton.gif ! : http://www.redbubble.com/people/crackers1967/art/everything/tags/tree That is probably not showing as one whole single line, but when you put it in your profile it is … one single line of text without spaces. Then it will look like this: So, go edit that line you put in to show your button at the bottom of your profile before. Have the Button link wrapped in !’s … then a colon {:} then the link to your set. Save and preview your Public profile and click the button and make sure it works. If it does you can now add more buttons and links. :) If you want more than one button on a line (I have 2 per line) just do each button code with a space between them. so you will have code for 2 or 3 buttons all on one line with a space between the 1st and 2nd and a space between the 2nd and 3rd button codes. It will look strange in your Profile when you are editing it because the long lines will wrap back to the start, so it will look like they are broken, but as long as you have spaces where you are meant to, and no spaces where there aren’t meant to be, all should work. Again, practice at the bottom of your profile and keep checking it till it works, then when you have it working, move the text up in the About Me box till you have it placed where you want it. I have found that placing a line of space between each line helps too. Good Luck :) :) Just a warning on using MS Word or other programs for editing text. These programs have a funny way of formatting text and as such using them will make all the code not work. IF you are going to use such a program to edit text I would suggest using MS Notepad ….. or simply type out the code in RB and copy and paste and edit within your About Me Box View all my HOW TO’S

• [HOWTO] Want to be recognized .......
  by Craig Shillington

  I just thought I would sit down and write out a few of the things I do that make my experience in Red Bubble a lot more enjoyable. I’m pu…

  I just thought I would sit down and write out a few of the things I do that make my experience in Red Bubble a lot more enjoyable. I’m putting these ideas down in a form of tips, please don’t take these as Gospel!! These are the things I do that I find helps my work get recognized. Things will be different for each of us and we all find our own place. With that said, a lot of these tips will be placing emphasis on recognition. If you wanna be noticed within the Bubble, you have to know what the best way to do that is. Hopefully you can take a little something with you from this that helps you out too :) Oh and just a sub note … I am a photographer, so a lot of my experience is with getting my works seen. Hopefully I don’t place too much emphasis on JUST that side and anyone else can apply some of these tips to whatever creative works you do :) If you can think of any more tips you use … or you are a better writer than I am (THAT MEANS MOST OF YOU!!! LOL) feel free to ADD to this and post it in your own Journal!! PLEASE!! :) Just link back to this original :) Part One – Uploading Choose what you upload carefully It’s soooooo easy to have a group of wonderful works you want to upload and share with everyone that you upload work after work after work. My advice … don’t do it. Why? Because your work will pass so quickly through other people’s Activity Monitor that by the time they look at it again, they probably would have missed a lot of them anyway. Another reason is that if you do this on a regular basis … you may actually stop a lot of people from seeing other works on their AM and so, they may even unadd you as a contact for that very reason. Assume most people are only going to have the time to comment on ONE of your uploaded works. We all have a lot of contacts in RB and like to keep up, so doing the rounds is a Quick way of visiting. It isn’t an indication of our work … it’s a matter of time restraints. Think about what you are going to upload. Have a small list of choices and pick the better 3 or 4 of them. If you have 12 really cool works you want to upload … split the uploads into Days of 4 each … or Half Days of 3 each. And always upload what you consider to be the BEST in these Groups ….... LAST. There are two main reasons for this. Usually the last thing you upload is going to be the FIRST thing others see of you. The other reason has to do with timing which I will touch on now. Choose when you upload Timing when you upload your work has such a significance on the reaction and response to it. Think about it … you are up late … it’s 3am and you just finished working on something and are so excited. So you uploaded it to the Bubble and wait. And wait and wait and wait. Hmmmmmmm. No one is there!!!! Maybe in the morning when people start getting up and load up bubble, the first few might see it … IF they get that in their AM’s. For the most part as people start getting up and posting stuff … suddenly yours starts disappearing off their AM’s and even off the Recent page on the Gallery Page. The best time to upload is when your work is going to be see by the Maximum amount of people. I find the best time for this is in the morning (Before work) or in the evening (After Dinner). It’s most likely at this time you will receive spontaneous responses. And as a last point with timing …. again … upload the 3 or 4 you have picked … timing it so that the LAST and BEST is uploaded at the time that it is going to receive maximum exposure. If you like to see your photos on the Popular pages … try to follow these tips but upload in the morning. The more views, comments and favs you get .. .the higher up the pop. lists your work is going to move .. especially in Today’s most popular list. View all my HOW TO’S

• [HOW TO] RSS is here YEAH!!!!
  by Craig Shillington

  Well, some of you may have noticed that Red Bubble has introduced RSS Feeds to our JE’s and our Portfolios :) VBS WELL DONE RED BUBBLE!!!...

  Well, some of you may have noticed that Red Bubble has introduced RSS Feeds to our JE’s and our Portfolios :) VBS WELL DONE RED BUBBLE!!! I can’t wait for feeds on comments and a feed on our Activity Monitor. For those of you unfamiliar with Feeds … You will notice when you look at someones Portfolio or JE’s now, you will see the little Feed symbol and the words subscribe to the left of it. What this means is that if you have a Feed Reader (I will mention those a little later) you can subscribe to a feed of that page and will be notified of any updates on that page at set intervals :) So now, rather than having to manually check to see if people have updated their Journal … or added new works …. you can have all the new stuff FEED right to you automatically :) Okay … my Feed Reader of Choice is called OMEA but I have a fairly fast system with 2Gig of Ram, so for me it’s not a problem to run. It’s a very big program and takes up a LOT of resources. Anyway … I thought I would try another Lighter Feed reader from a LIST of Ten. I am currently testing RSS Bandit and as far as I can tell so far it’s a great program for keeping up in RB :) I have added the Forums .. and also added Whirli to test …. all works really well :) :) Thanks Whirli ;) You can even send comments from within the program (on Journal Entries or works) so there is no need to flip back and forth from RB in your browser and the Feed Reader :) I haven’t looked at all the options in there yet, but so far it’s doing a good job of basically keeping me informed. It will take a while to add and categorize everyone … but once done .. adding new people will be easy and I will no longer need to manually check in RB for peoples updates etc :) I’ll leave this JE now …. if anyone is interested in using RSS Bandit … I can add to this to help you set it up … most other Programs would run similar so any instructions here would probably help with those too :) :) Happy RSS’ing :) :) VBS View all my HOW TO’S

• [HOW TO] Portfolio banner as a Link in Red Bubble
  by Craig Shillington

  Okay … so Xavier has implemented an awesome random banner generator (which shows three works fr…

  Okay … so Xavier has implemented an awesome random banner generator (which shows three works from our portfolios) which can be used as an email signature. Read about it in the Forum If you wanna use the code for placing a clickable link in your Email Sig file (Or on a web page somewhere that uses HTML code) use your own Promote page to get the code for your banner. If you have any problems getting the Email Sig to work … please post your questions in the Forum topic about that. Now, for the profile bit you don’t need all this code you only need one part and you don’t even need to use the Widgetinator to get it …. I am going to make it easy for you ;) First you need your Username. That is the text you type to LOG ON to RedBubble, not nessecarily your Name as shown in RedBubble to others. My Username is crackers1967. My name in here is Craig Shillington. So we can’t get those confused. The easiest way to see what your username is, is to open up RedBubble and click on View your public Profile. Look in the address bar of your browser and it will show you your username at the end of the address: http://redbubble.com/people/username To get the link to the three thumbnails randomly pulled out of you portfolio, you use the following link {just put your username in place of where I have typed username http://redbubble.com/people/username/recipe:banner/username_banner.jpg If you want to test the link, simply type (or copy and paste it) in your browser address bar and if all is working you should open up a small jpg of three of your own works. If that doesn’t work, try making the second username with Caps. Try again. Hopefully then it works. When it works, THAT is the code to put in your Profile. Okay …. now that you have the address, edit your profile and where you want to show the three random photos (in the About You box) type an exclamation mark ! , then right after that (without a space) copy that address, then put another ! again without any spaces. Save your profile then view it and see if it works :) :) To turn the banner into a clickthru link … simply add a colon {:} and the link you want it to click to; after the colon (no spaces) Then if anyone clicks the banner, they will be taken to the url you put in there. :) Good luck :) View all my HOW TO’S