A Post To Thank the Most...

Well this is the obligatory thank you post to all the web pages and people that helped get this page up and going thus far.

On the design end the original template used was "Rounders 4" by Douglas Bowman www.stopdesign.com. This seems to be a very popular template so I had and probably still have quite a bit of work to do keep it unique and memorable. Most of that work will be done with GIMP. Or if you prefer Photoshop you call always try GIMPShop a project trying to make the GIMP play like Photoshop. I'm all about the free.

This article on Photoshop Support.com was instrumental in inspiring me to attempt messing around with graphics (something I'm not necessarily skilled in) and was chocked full of resources. I found it through the ProBlogger 31 Days... page.

The pre-GIMP photo used for the header came from stock.xchng. They had the best selection of free tea photos I could find, if you've found other great places please post them in the comments for all to see. They had many other wonderful photos as well but who cares? The original was called "Fresh Tea" by Sandy Ardiansyah. I don't know anything about her but the few photos she has up on stock.xchng were all nice.

I've been using tinypic.com to host the template images without any trouble (or registration) and blogger is hosting the rest via "hello". For a helpful list of free hosting services check out: Blogger Template. Give it a look around as they have some other nice things for someone starting out as well.

Probably the biggest boost came from Anitbland at dustyroaddesigns.com who allowed me to get back to writing with his great post on fixing the Google AdSense flicker. I use Firefox always and the Adsense ads are annoying on most pages and probably dangerous to your epileptic readers. I've seen sites that don't have it and was having a hard time figuring out how to fix it. He came to the rescue. He also has the distinction of being the first person to compliment this page, and it was the most important one since it didn't come from a friend at my request for feedback. It came on a rather experimental post that I wasn't too sure would come across as intended. Without the encouragement at the time it came I probably wouldn't have had the confidence to do some of the strange posts I'm working on now. A thanks also goes out to all the other people that did the same for me on that post who's pages can be reached by following their profiles on that same post.

Super big ups to Tea Posur for being the first place to link to my page unprompted and before I knew of her page. Thanks!

Most of the traffic I've had so far has come from Blog Explosion and from BlogClicker. Most of you I should say came from one of the two but both are working quite nicely. If you're just getting a blog started click on these links to get some people seeing you. It's all free and didn't require installing anything on my page. P.S. I get bonus points if you sign up via these links rather than saving them to your favorites for later use. ;)

I should also thank Jeff who mentioned in the same comments putting slices of onion on my head to help with the baldness. Unfortunately I live in an onion free house and my girlfriend would likely shave my head in my sleep if I tried to pull a stunt like that.

The (probably funny only to me) question in the corner that I'm linking to here because it will be disappearing shortly uses SFESurvey
but I don't have a server I can upload it to so I've just been using the test one I made on their page. :( Sorry. I'm going to be replacing it with a poll question I'm working on from The International Voting Center.

I'm using w.bloggar to write these posts since the Blogger page always crashes when I try to do a spell check. Nice program, worth a try.

I'm going to thank myself for making the cute little cup icons 'cause I love them so much. If you have a tea web page and want to use them go ahead! If you mention me even better, but I'm not going to require it.

Thanks to my uncle Greg Phelps for suggesting a few months ago that I start a blog about tea. And a special shout out to my girlfriend and a wonderfully orange towel that I think will be making many future appearances.

Whew, you'd think I was accepting an Emmy. Thanks again gang! I do my best to make it worth a visit back here to see who it was that linked to you.

Now go have a cup.