Hobby Stash

There are times it is helpful to know the IDs assigned by Wordpress for categories, posts, pages, etc. Reveal IDs for WP Admin does the job nicely. Once the plug-in is installed, you can see the id assigned on each major admin page (posts, categories, media, etc.). I use it to exclude specific categories from my navigation menu.

I’m currently trying out IntenseDebate to see what the hoopla is all about. It integrates with WordPress and syncs between the two. Comments are saved on both systems so that if you change your mind, you still  have your blog comments.

Here is a great little tutorial put out by Jay Hilgert at Bittbox.com. Photoshop is so packed full of features, it’s easy to overlook the simple ones.

The Twitter Tools plug-in integrates Twitter with your WordPress blog. You can set it up to Tweet each time you add a post to your blog or add one daily tweet digest. You can also go the other way: add posts to your blog from your tweets. It has a sidebar widget for displaying your twitter account activity. You can even tweet from your admin panel.

Although WordPress Codex offers the most complete descriptions of tags in WordPress, cruising the terms is a cumbersome process. I ran across two nifty cheat sheets for the more common tags:

I recently upgraded ProShow to version 4. I haven’t had much chance to play with it yet but I did experiment with the new YouTube HD feature. It’s pretty cool. I’ve uploaded an updated version of my quilting video onto YouTube. 

Smart YouTube allows you to embed videos into your posts, comments, and RSS feeds. And it supports YouTube’s new High Quality feature. Nice.

I found this website in a Smashing Magazine interview and was so overwhelmed by its creativity, I had to share it. Be sure to click on the sound button in the lower left hand corner. Totally awesome!

This suspense thriller was written by 15 different authors with each author taking a different chapter.  Deaver introduced the characters in the first chapter and then passed it on to the next. Deaver brought it all back home in the last chapter.

I bought this book shortly after I first started quilting and fell in love with it. Anita Shackelford does an excellent job of illustrating the step-by-step process of creating your own feather designs, describes the different methods to use for transferring the designs to your quilt,  and provides some excellent illustrations of the result. The book comes with a template to get you started and the last half of the book provides patterns you can copy.

My Rating:  

A very charming story about Sara McClure’s introduction to quilting. She strikes a bargain with an award-winning, if somewhat crochety quilter, Sylvia Compson, to learn how-to-quilt while she assists Sylvia in preparing her estate for sale. The storyline is somewhat smalzy (even for me) but I so enjoyed the quilting descriptions, I plan to try out the second in this series.

My Rating:  

I ordered this book as soon as I’d watched Eleanor Burn’s first video on this series.  It arrived yesterday and I spent the evening drooling over the illustrations and instructions. I’m anxious to get started and am debating on which square to start first. I think I might just make the squares in the same order as Eleanor’s videos.

The book itself is absolutely awesome. She provides extensive detail on compiling each block and quilt with excellent illustrations. You definitely don’t need to watch the videos if you have the book. But I enjoy watching her and still highly recommend the videos.

My Rating:  

I debated picking up Nothing to Lose after reading Bad Luck and Trouble. But I decided to give this series one more shot. I’m sorry I did.

The plot of  is so ridiculously unrealistic and Jack Reacher has become so unlikeable, this is it (after purchasing all 12 hardback versions of this series)!

My Rating: