BlogMunch

Be your own boss today with Ashop Shopping Cart

Everyone is doing online business nowadays. No matter if you are sell t-shirts, mugs, buttons or stickers, you will need an online storefront to showcase your product. A good shopping cart software you might want to try can be the AShop shopping cart.

Unlike other shopping cart software, you do not need to have an existing website to install. You can open your very own online store immediately with its easy to use web-based software. With the software you can:

• Feature your products on the homepage so that the product will get special attention,
• Show similar or related products so that you customers can have a wider choice,
• Sell digital products like eBooks or your shareware. The software can handle product key and password delivery,
• Integrate search function right into your ecommerce store.
• Generate products feeds for major search engine like Froggle and Shopzilla.

For the full range of features, you can go to Shopping cart software features.

If you are unsure whether this ecommerce software is right for you, you have two options.

1. Play with the live demo, or
2. Just set up a trial account (10 days, no credit card needed).

Just a tip.Use IE browser to access the Admin demo, even though the page says it support both Firefox and IE, I have been able to get in only with my IE browser. I think they should solve this issue as soon as possible. Most of the tech savvy guys use Firefox.

So start your own online business now with Ashop shopping cart. Everyone is doing it, why not you?

rambling All about Twitter

(credit: Art and vandalism)

I am now on twitter for a month now. I seriously don’t find it as good as how Marshall is describing it. For me, it’s the same as looking for good blog feeds to read. You have to FIND the good ones. There are definitely to much noise-to-information ratio within the twitter system. Anyway, here are some of my dislikes for twitter at the moment.

• Those that only tweets about the blog updates. (I am guilty of that too)
• Those that tweets so formally that I though I am following a newscast.
• The tiny urls (and all variations of it). How am I supposed to know if it is worthwhile to click through.
• The 20 tweets limit. You mean I if I went to bed, wake up and see I have 97 tweets, I can only see the current 20 tweets?
• No easy way to look for specific information on twitter. I am not even sure twittersearch is working or not. I can see a tweet right there on my twitter, but when I search for it, it doesn’t comes out at all.
• Too frequent updates. Okay, that my fault for following too many people.

That’s all I can think of at the moment. I will give twitter maybe another month to see how useful it can be to me. (note: I am sure most of my above dislikes can be attributed to my less than skillful use of Twitter. But if that’s that case, then Twitter is too technical for me.)

Some articles about twitter recently:

• Why I Stopped Using IM and Won’t Use Twitter
• Why I Stopped Using Twitter
• Why is Twitter Exploding? Because it’s A Conversation Ecosystem.
• Some Conversations have shifted to Twitter
• If you want to take your advanced degree in twitter, read this - The Big Juicy Twitter Guide

Follow my BlogMunch tweets or even better subscribe to the BlogMunch Feed.

A story of Life - Animal Crossing

I have played Animal Crossing on my DS but have outgrow it in about a week. But it’s fun while it last. There are people who played the game religiously and try to collect every fossil, fish and insect found in Animal Crossing. Here is a sad, but true story of a dying mom playing Animal Crossing. (Knew about this from Donationcoder.com).

For those who want to know more:

The soundtrack for this video is “To Zanarkand” from Final Fantasy X.

This is originally from a Korean comic strip #18:Forest of animal.

The full english translation can be found here : Animal Crossing Tragedy

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BlogMunch products now at CafePress

I chanced upon CafePress while searching for a way to convert my white background logo to transparent. They have a tutorial there that is quite helpful.

• Images for Black Garments - Creating transparency

Digging more into the site, I discovered you can actually upload your image and have them on apparels like T-shirts, tracksuits, maternity tees and even thongs. Based on the number of items on CafePress, I think I am the last person to know about this.

Well, better to know late than never knowing at all.

So after fiddling with the registration and uploading the BlogMunch Logo,

Welcome to the BlogMunch Store

 

Oh by the way, how do you like the BlogMunch Logo Dark evil twin? Looks nice on the black T-shirt, right?

Setup of the BlogMunch Store

The setup of the store at CafePress is really easy. Once you upload the image, they will give you the option of putting your image on a selection of items. For me, being the vain guy, click on “select all”, as I want to see the BlogMunch Logo on every items.

The only hassle I encounter is the default size on each items. They are way too small. To enlarge them, I have to click on every single one to do it myself. Not sure if it is the size or resolution of my image that it the problem. It could even be the default size is fixed on their site.

Any CafePress pros around who can enlighten me on this issue?

As it is, I have only change about 1/3 of my products. Hope to finish this soon.

So come over and browse my store. If you like, I can even customised the logo size for you. Treat it like a Grand Opening Offer for you.

(Update: If you don’t like CafePress, you can also order BlogMunch products at Printfection.com. Good reviews for this site.) 

Technorati Tags: Blogmunch, tshirt store, logo, caterpillar

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How I design the new BlogMunch Logo? Part 2

In part one of this two part series, I show you how I come up with the typeface and accompanied image. Now, will be the rest of the journey till the final header you see now on BlogMunch.

Vector Magic

Using Vector Magic is simple enough. Choose a few options, and voila, vector image of the BlogMunch is out. The only problem I got is the Japanese character’s thin stroke, so processing on anything below "High" will lose details.

I love the result coming out of VectorMagic. On the original image, the caterpillar is too detailed. Now there is a "painting" quality to the caterpillar which I feels fits the logo better.

There are three options to export your vector image as. There are the Encapsulated Postscript (EPS), Scalable Vector Image (SVG) and Portable Network Graphics (PNG). Note both EPS and SVG are Vector image format and PNG is Bitmap format.

No knowing the difference then, I download all three formats. PNG being the bitmap format is ready to use immediately, provided you don’t need to scale the image.

EPS can be opened by Photoshop, but it act as like a bitmap, meaning no scaling up your image. SVG cannot be opened by Photoshop. So I have to find a Vector image editor.

Inkscape

Inkscape is a open source vector image editor that is comparable to its commercial counterparts, like Adobe Illustrator. I have not use a vector editor before Inkscape, so what I did below are from my own experiments. There WILL be better ways to edit a vector image with Inkscape.

This is not a full review of Inkscape, I am just gonna show you how I scale up my logo.

The main thing is the selection. There are two tools that can make a selection. There are the Select tool and the Path tool. Now, you will say, "Hi idiot, just use the select tool!" And you are right. But it is not that simple. When I was dragging to make a selection, it keeps moving the image.  And if you drag your selection square from outside the border, it just select the whole image without selecting the path.

Its so frustrating that I almost give up using Inkscape. But finally I got it.

You have got to double click on the image to select the image, THEN drag a selection from outside to select the path. See screenshot above. Now, you can upscale your image.

If this is the first time you see a vector image scale up, you’ll be very impress. Well, I’m VERY impressed.

(SVG scale up 600x)                                                  (PNG scale up 600x)

The contrast is not that great with this small screen shot. Click on each picture to get the full screenshot.

After I scale to my needed size, I will export to png for use in Photoshop.

The final product

For the background image for the header, I went to the free stock photo site Stock.XCHNG to search for suitable image. I use this:

I flip it vertical and horizontal. Then I cropped it to the final size of the header. Finally, I incorporate the BlogMunch Logo onto the background.

Now comes another difficulty that I have to overcome. How to take out the white background and make it transparent, so that it could fit into any background.

The most common way to do this would be to use the magic wand to select the background and then delete it. This will create a white halo around your logo when you put onto any non-white background.

I Google for more information. Some of the advanced methods requires masking which I am not familiar with.

Here’s what I do.

1. Magic wand the white background.
2. Color pick the correct yellow from the above image.
3. Fill the selected white portions with yellow.
4. Magic wand the yellow background with a slightly higher tolerance.
5. Invert selection and move the logo to header background.

If you look closely, you can still see a slight halo around the logo. But this is better than moving from the white background.

I would appreciate it if anyone who have a better and simpler method to have a transparent background without the halo, comment or email me to tell me. Thanks a lot.

Well, here is the final image. Please give your comments or critique my header, so that I can improve next time.

 

Will design another one when I have the time. Subscribe to the BlogMunch Feed to be the first to see it.