How to get a blinkie

Blinkies are everywhere. They represent a myriad of things: advertising a designer’s store, showing membership on a creative team, expressing a fan club, etc They can also spread news. They’re a phenomena all in themselves & when they’re blinking in everyone’s signature, they are also very decorative. Clickable links provide a doorway to wherever you’d like the viewer to go. Blinkies are a lot of fun! Shouldn’t you be wearing one or two yourself?!

There are 3 ways to get a blinkie

1) by copying someone’s blinkie

2) by copying & pasting in a link

3) by making your own & animating it

Here are the steps in each case:

1) Saving a blinkie and hosting it

When people share blinkies, they will usually tell you what they prefer. To save them or just link directly. It depends on what it is for. In case #1 - we are ‘hosting’ our blinkie. This means that the image is located at our site. And if people wear it (use it in their signature), then it uses our bandwidth.

If you see a blinkie you’d like to wear here is how you can put it in your signature:

a) Right click on the blinie & choose ‘Save to’ somewhere on your computer. I have a blinkie folder

b) Now the blinkie is located on your hard drive, but you need to upload it to be hosted on the internet. Most people use photobucket.com It’s easy to set up an account there & upload your blinkie image in ‘gif’ format.

c) After uploading it to photobucket (or another hosting site), you’ll be given an address that starts with ‘img’.

It will look like this:

[img]http://link_to_your_blinkie[/ img] (remove space between / img)
Use ctrl C to copy it. Then use Ctrl V to paste it into your signature editing box (I usually have two windows open). d) to create a clickable blinkie - surround the above text with [url=http://link_you_want_to_go_to]BLINKIE LINK[/ url]

2) Sometimes a link is given to you. There are spaces put in the link though, so it doesn’t blink (or become a graphic). The spaces need to be taken out to make it work properly.
An example of a link would be:
[url=http://www.digiscrapinfo.com][IMG]http://www.digiscrapinfo.com/digiscrapinfoblink.gif[/ IMG][/ url]

Go to the site that you would like it in your signature & click on your profile or User CP. Choose to edit your signature.

Copy that link using Ctrl C and paste (Ctrl V) that into your signature and remove the space in front of the last I & the last u.

Then when you save it will blink. If it doesn’t, check to make sure you’ve removed the spaces.

Feel free to wear our DigiScrapInfo blinkie and we don’t mind you directly linking to it. (That link is a clickable blinkie - so when people click on it, it takes you to their site). If you don’t want a clickable blinkie - then you would use the following link:

[IMG]http://www.digiscrapinfo.com/digiscrapinfoblink.gif[/ IMG]

and remove the space in front of the last I

3) how to make your own blinkie — I made my first blinkie a week ago! A friend had to animate it though because I don’t have PS.

a) create a new document that is 150 x 50 at 300 dpi

b) create each layer with what you’d like to flash, resize to 72 dpi, but don’t ‘resize objects’

c) stack the layers with the first on the bottom, on up into a layered tiff or psd file

d) I sent this file to a friend who animated it in PS. If you have PS - you may want to check around for tutorials on how to do it.

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