If you organize by putting the Designer name into the Author box then this tip is for you.

Here is what my Author List pane looks like:

As you can see, one time I entered Deb F for my designer name and another time I entered Debbie Fisher. These are the same designer. How do I correct it and only have one?

1. First decide which one is the correct one. I want to keep Debbie Fisher and change Deb F.
2. Click on the one you want to change to return all images assigned to it. (Deb F in my case.)
3. Select all returned files (Ctrl - A)
4. In the Properties Pane, edit the author box to be the correct author. (Debbie Fisher in my case.) I always click in another box to make sure that it enters my changes.
   
5. Expand and Contract the Author box to update it.
6. The misspelled or wrong author name should be gone. If it isn’t, highlight the misspelled author and press F5 to force a refresh of authors.

Tonite Heidi & I worked on some things.  She has something exciting coming, but that’s all I can say.  She’ll be asking for your input once it’s ready!

Then we were talking about people coming over from Ellie’s Treasures, so I added it to our blogroll.  I was looking around at what she has there - it’s amazing!!!  Let me give you a quick tour:

Scrapbooking tutorials, blogs, sites with freebies,  forums

Paint Shop Pro tutorials 

PSP Tubes & Masks 

PSP Foreign Tutorials - Dutch, English, French, German

Photo Impact - English & foreign languages

Photoshop/Elements Tutorials - English, Spanish, Danish, Dutch, German, French, Italian

 Groups/Forums

And if you’re wondering why I listed the languages, it’s because Google Analytics tells me that we have people visiting our site from 46 countries!  And ACDSee products are offered in English, French, German, and Dutch.

And, sadly I had to remove the link to the Iron Orchid Designs blog.  :(  I miss the spirited chats with those girls!  But the blog hadn’t been updated since December.  They are designing for a paper company & are involved with DST’s newsletter, so you can catch them there.  But I always loved their photo - so I’m posting it here.  Isn’t it just the best?  (*hint, hint Heidi!* can you guys help me convince my sister that we need a photo of us together?)

IOD Sisters

Are you a Mac user & looking for image organizing software?

GraphicConverter was recommended by Mac users.

I’ve never used it, but in reading about the features it sounds like it has many similarities to the functionalities that we love about ACDSee Photo Manager. I see that it imports RAW pictures.

Please let us know if you are familiar with it, or how it works if you try it.

After almost 100 posts, it was time to make sure that our categories were easy for our readers to find previous posts. So I spent some time reorganizing.

I’m sharing how I did it for two reasons:

1) maybe it will be helpful to others needing to do the same

2) to help our regular blog readers find older blog posts (A well organized list of categories is very helpful to a regular reader looking for information & also to newcomers who want to browse the blog to see if there is information of value to them.)

To do it, I went into WordPress’ presenation tab & edited the categories. Then I went thru each post & assigned the ones that fit my categories. For some categories, I simply renamed them (then the posts were just reassigned to that new category). My plan going forward is to try to review the posts after every 10 new ones or so. Then it will be easy to keep up.

The revised categories can be seen on the right column as a tag cloud. Digiscrapping is the largest in size because there are the most posts filed under that category.  I added ‘Marketing Blogs’ & ‘Marketing Websites’ as well as Computer Maintenance.  I hope these are helpful to our readers!

If you click on a category, all of the blog posts assigned to that will be brought up. So, if you clicked on ‘Marketing Blogs’ you would get this post as well as my blog series.

The tag cloud can also be displayed as a list. Heidi & I are having a debate which is better? Do you like the tag cloud? Do you use it? Or would a list be easier to find things in?

Let us know, we’d love to hear your ideas!

Do you have a long blog roll? Have you checked the links recently? Do you have web page with many scrapbooking links? Have you checked those links recently? Web users really don’t clicking on a link and it is broken or not working. It happens but if you take a few minutes, you can reduce or eliminate the bad links on your blog or website.

It takes a long time to click on each one and see if they are valid. That is a waste of time. There are tools out there to check for bad links. There are free tools and tools you can buy. I am going to mention the free online web tools that I found and like.

The link checkers are easy to use and quick. Since they are free, they do have their quirks/issues.

W3CLink Checker

The first one I like is W3C Link Checker

1. Enter in your url of your blog or webpage.
2. Click Check
3. Wait Patiently. This can take anywhere for 1 - 10 minutes depending on how many you links you have on that page or blog.
4. Click on the results or just scroll to the bottom for the results. It will tell you which links you should check:

Some notes on using W3C Link checker:

Robot Exclusions: If the error comes back that the link is not checked because of robot exclusion roles, it means that site isn’t allowing computer generated checks. Those links are probably fine. In my example, I got this rule for my google stats and I know it is valid. If you don’t know, check them by hand (copy and paste url into browser to see where you go.)

Redirects: You can either leave them as is or change your web page to reflect the new place. The web owner was nice enough to say, this page no longer exists and has been moved to here.

Lastly, sometimes this tool doesn’t give results and just appears to hang. (Hey, its free you can’t complain much.) Scroll to the bottom of the page and look at the last link it was checking. The tool seems to hang periodically when it can’t find certain types of pages on a valid host and the host doesn’t return an error or takes a long time to return an error. Check the last link by hand and it probably isn’t valid, update or delete the link on your blog/webpage and rerun the tool.

Link Valet

Link Valet is a tool that runs too quickly and gives a few false errors. What I liked about this tool it would check multiple pages, results are easy to scroll through and doesn’t hang.

1. Enter in your url of your blog or webpage.
2. For recursion depth, check 0 if you only want it to do that page, check 1 and it will check that page and links on the pages that it links to. Checking 2 will probably take a long time.
3. Click OK
4. Wait Patiently. This can take anywhere for 1 - 10 minutes depending on how many you links you have on that page or blog.

Once you get results, scroll through looking for Red squares. Those are the ones that you need to check. Also, you will notice that some have timeouts. This will happen for slower sites. It’s those false errors and you can check those links by hand.

AnyBrowser Link Checker

The last one is quick tool that is incredibly easy to run. AnyBrowser Link checker What I didn’t like about it, is I have to scroll through the results and find the bad ones by hand (no colors to highlight the bad ones.) It also only tells me OK or BAD and no reason.

1. Enter in your url of your blog or webpage.
2. Click Check Page

Search through the list for BAD and check those links.

See how easy that was to check for dead/bad links? Once you know that these tools exist, where they are, how to run them, and what the results mean it doesn’t take long to check your blog/webpages periodically. The web is always changing and those links change too.

I listed three tools because everyone has their preferences. I like W3C link checker because it gives a lot of information. Link Valet is quick, with nice results, but some false timeouts. And my least favorite, AnyBrowser Link Check, because it only says OK or BAD and you have to look through the results. Try out one or all of these tools to clean up your blog roll or web pages.

This series on blogging has gotten extensive! Here is a related info. by Heidi.

How can I setup my own blog?

Today I’m going to share one of the simplest, most effective ways for us to know what’s going online in regards to our site & people needing ACDSee help.

Has anyone noticed how I pop in within 24 hours & comment on blogs that mention our website or ACDSee products? My email inbox tells me what’s being said because I have Google continually searching for me! That saves me from reading a ton of blogs. And I love meeting all of the new people out there!

How do I have Google continually searching for me, you ask? Well, some call it them ‘ego searches’ or ‘vanity searches’. Google Alerts is a little feature that allows you to give them search terms & have the results emailed daily or on an ongoing basis. They’re easy to set up & can be turned off if you don’t find it useful.

So what should you search for? I have Google Alerts set up for the following searches:

digiscrapinfo, digital scrapbooking, digiscrapping, acdsee

This allows me to be updated immediately when someone mentions our website, blog, an acdsee product (in case someone needs help), and the general digiscrapping ones are for keeping up with trends. If you were a designer, you could use your store name & when Google alerts finds blog posts where people are giving you credit, you could comment on their layouts. There are a number of things you can do with these, just get creative & think about how you could use this tool.

If you try it, let us know how it works for you!

And sign up to receive our blog by email as we will keep sharing our tips.

A while back I had collected the information on online places to print your layouts (either in individual prints or books) into a pdf file. I have now converted all that information into an online digital printing resource:

Online Photo Printing Services

Online Photo Book Printing Services

For each service, I have listed the price, size and specifics for each print or book. In addition, I added a poll so you can rate your experience with that service.

example of a poll:

I am hoping that everyone will create a great resource for others. I know I always like to know what people think of a online company or product before I purchase from it. In addition, you can leave comments on each service if you want to share something about it (whether good or bad.)

So if you have had prints from any of these, please go and rate it. It takes 2 seconds & 2 clicks to vote.

• Costco
• MPix
• Photo Book Memories
• Polka Dot Potato
• SB To Share
• Scrapbook Pictures
• Scrapquick
• Smugmug
• WHCC

I know there are other online printing of individual prints but I am only providing info for the ones that print special digital scrapbooking sizes (8 x 8, 10 x 10, etc.) If you have add prints from any of these, please go and rate it.

If you have books printed from any of these, please go and rate it. It takes 2 seconds & 2 clicks to vote. If you have done a review or posted images of your photo book, please leave the url in the comments section. I will periodically go through and create clickable links for them.

• Archivers
• Blurb
• Clark ColorLab
• Creative Memories
• Dotphoto
• Fast Back Books
• Heritage Makers
• Kodak
• Lulu
• MyPublisher
• MyReflections
• Photo Book Memories
• PhotoWorks
• Picaboo
• Ritzpix
• SharedInk
• Shutterfly
• Snapfish
• Sony ImageStation
• Viovio
• Walmart
• Winkflash

If you are aware of more printing places that print digital scrapbooking sizes or other places that print photo books, please comment on the main pages and I will get them added when I have time. Or leave a comment on our blog. Or email us info@digiscrapinfo.com

It was so much fun to celebrate National Scrapbooking Day for a month with ACDSee and all of the talented designers.

We thank ACDSee for their generous donation of prizes! And a huge thanks to the following designers for joining us! Carla Gibson, Fhung Lie, Sweet Gen, Jeni Cantrill, Karah Fredriks, Maggie LaMarre, Melgen Designs, Melissa Rose, Nina, Ronee Parsons, SaraAmarie, Sue Cummings, & Vicki Stegall

And it is exciting to announce the lucky winners! Congratulations to them & thanks to everyone for joining us!

Have you met Ronee Parsons? or seen her work at Oscraps.com? If you’ve browsed our site you’ve seen her work. Ronee gave us permission to use her Roots kit for the graphics on our site. She also made our blinkie for us.

Ronee is one talented lady! She is a 2007 Memory Makers Master & has two blogs. On her personal one she offers a weekly free template for her readers & other goodies too!

This week she was in the Designer Spotlight at Oscraps.com. She has generously created a freebie to share with everyone.

From her Designer Spotlight interview:

She recommends Adobe Photoshop and ACDSee as two vital digital scrapbooking tools. “I’ve tried some other programs, but Photoshop is definitely my fave,” Ronee said, “I’m hoping to get to upgrade to CS3 soon.”

“I also couldn’t live without my ACDSee photo manager. It’s such a huge help in letting me browse my designs as I create them, or for the perfect paper or element. I have to admit, I don’t have it organized or set up properly (no key words or anything) but just using it for browsing, zipping, and unzipping, makes it totally wonderful. If I ever get the keyword thing done, I’ll probably be even more in love with it.”

Her blogs are here:

Ronee’s Memory Makers Masters Blog

Scrapbooking Inspiration

When I was googling for her 2nd blog, I see that she’s also teaching at a few scrapbooking events. Congratulations on all of your achievements Ronee! If you haven’t seen her digital kits, check them out here. She is very talented!

Today’s part on blogging is my favorite part! How do you know that your efforts toward Search Engine Optimization is working? Well there are some easy ways to see stat’s on your traffic & I love checking these.

Are you ready to take a tour behind stage on our blog? Come with me then … I spent some time making screenshots of all these to share with you.

For all of these you need to sign up & follow their instructions. Most of the time that includes putting some form of code into the blog (a marker so to speak). I’m not going to include that because Heidi set them up & each one has it’s own instructions. (ie – ask her if you have questions & she’ll be glad to help J ).

Here we go:

Technorati has two features that we’re using.

1. Claim your blog – Claiming your blog establishes that you are its owner, and allows you to use Technorati services to increase your blog’s visibility.

This is important because it allows you to add tags to help increase your visibility. When you log into your account you can see how many blogs link to you (remember how I mentioned the importance of blogs linking to you? Here you can see the rank which is based on the # of backlinks that you have)

2. Pingback – pings or notifies a number of services that keep track of weblogs and publish them. By pinging, you let the services know that your blog has been updated and hence, they crawl and index your site, publishing your blog contents, thus increasing your blog’s popularity.

If you insert this code from Technorati in your blog, then everytime you update your blog, it automatically pings for you. (Who could remember to do it each time? I have trouble with remembering to tag my post the way it is!)

I also signed up with Pingoat.com for that service to automatically ping when we update our blog. (why? Because it looked good. Does it make a difference? Well we do have a lot of spyders (search engines) crawling thru…)

Now these are in order of my favorites for reviewing the stat’s

3. Google Analytics is the biggy for stat’s! Heidi found this & set it up. I was used to looking at the stat’s and then they switched to a new version which I haven’t had time to learn. So here is an overview of the options – and I warn you it’s comprehensive!

But if you do nothing else, I suggest you get this one for sure. There are some very cool features that I like are seeing the following:

- where your visitors are from

- what sites your visitors are coming from

- what they searched for to get to your site (keywords are so important as you tag & write more posts)

- trends in numbers of visitors, how long they were there, how many pages they viewed

- and the list goes on to languages, browsers, etc

4. Next, you must have Feedburner!

The first screen shows me all the ‘subscribers’, but if you look at them many are spyders & search engines cruising thru. That is good news! There are tabs on the left so I can see where people are coming from & what they’re searching for to get there, etc. I do like this one though

5. Mybloglog – this doesn’t update until the next day, but I like it. On one screen it provides:

- Where people came from: links to their sites & google searches

- What people viewed

- What they clicked on

6. Feedblitz.com – we have this set up to allow people to subscribe to our blog. Heidi set that up. She can tell how many people are subscribed & how many have unsubscribed.

7. Finally, don’t forget about your website stat’s if you have connected your blog to your site.

I realize that I’ve given you a lot. And we have added these slowly over time. But once you have them all cooking, it’s a lot of fun to check them once in awhile!