Adorable Baby Websites in Minutes - Simple to use and fun!

The new Valentine’s Day design is now live!  Cupids, hearts and lots of love are the ticket.  We tried to work in a free chocolate dispenser too, but alas, technology isn’t that advanced yet.  We hope you enjoy our latest holiday design!

Your requests keep coming in, and we’re already seeing green.  A new St. Patty’s Day theme is already in the works.  Thanks again for your continuing input.  Keep those ideas coming.

Max

The new autosave feature is complete and in place for the Journal section of your TotSite.

How it works:

When you go to the journal page and start writing – a copy of your work will be automatically saved in the first 3-4 minutes. Once the initial draft has been saved, a new copy will be saved every couple minutes. A status message will appear above the “Publish my Journal Entry” button with showing when the last draft was saved.

Drafts will not be published on your public TotSite until you click the “Publish my Journal Entry” button. This way you can continue to write your Journal entry without worrying about it showing up prematurely on your site.

The same process will take place if you edit an existing journal entry. Once the first autosave draft is saved, the entry you are editing will be changed to a draft until you “publish” the updated entry.

The Journal autosave feature will hopefully eliminate the chance of losing your work in the event that something happens to your Internet connection, computer, or if you were somehow logged out of TotSites.

We would like to thank those of you who have been patient dealing with the previous lost Journal issues and to Gmail for the inspiration for the autosave feature! We are always looking for fun and innovative ways to help you build, share and enjoy your Baby Website!

I hope everyone is enjoying the two new pirate designs.  Hopefully they provide enough variety for every type of swashbuckler out there!So, what’s next?  Don’t worry, I’ve put the eyepatches and buried treasure aside for a while.  We’ve actually received a ton of requests for a Valentine’s Day theme, so I have already begun fleshing out a new design in response to the demand.  Stay tuned!

Max

We received numerous positive comments on the first pirate design, so we went ahead and put together a second version! Pirates 2 showcases a different style for those adventure seeking Pirate types! Does “X” mark the spot?

Stay tuned for new Holiday themes in the upcoming weeks!

Some of you may have had the unfortunate experience of writing a journal entry and saving it to only find that you were logged out and lost your hard work. We know how frustrating this can be, especially if you just spent the last 30 minutes writing the entry in-between keeping your toddler entertained.

We are working on a new feature that will auto save your journal entry every couple minutes. This way if anything were to happen a copy will be saved to your TotSites account. It would work in the background without any effort on your part while adding the piece of mind knowing your journal entry is saved!

In the interim, here are some recommendations you can take to prevent this from happening:

• Write your Journal Entry in another program such as MS Word, MS Works or even Notepad. Once you have completed your journal entry, copy and paste your text into the TotSites journal section. After you have your journal entry copied you can add formatting such as bold, italic etc…
• If you are writing the entry directly with TotSites, make a copy of your journal entry just *before* you hit save. This way if something happens, you have a backup copy to work from.

We apologize for those of you who have recently lost a journal entry. The good news is the new upgrade should be available soon.

Thank you for those of you who continue to send us your feedback.

Brian

 

Why do we have to “optimize” photos anyway?

Everyone loves to see your new adorable photos, but no one likes a website that take forever to load. TotSites automatically resizes and optimizes your photos for the web, but there are a few things you can do to give your photos that extra “zing”. If this sounds complicated or too time consuming, you can simply upload your photos “as is” and TotSites will take care of everything for you!

Optimizing Digital Camera Photos or Scanned Photos

Most digital cameras use the JPEG format, but the resulting photos come in a wide variety of sizes. To obtain the best quality photograph on your TotSite, it usually makes sense to crop and resize the photo before uploading.

Here are some recommended steps to optimize your photos:

1. In most cases digital cameras and scanners come with photo editing software that can be used to edit the photos. If not, you might try using a photo service such as Picasa or use your favorite search engine to look for “free photo editing software”. 
2. Be sure to create a copy of your photograph or use the “save as” option to ensure you do not overwrite your original photo! If anything goes wrong, you will have your original version as a backup.
3. Crop the photo to remove any unnecessary sections of the picture. This step also allows you to pinpoint the focus on your favorite part of the picture, such as that great big smile!
4. Most TotSites designs require your photo to be under 500 pixels wide.  Look for a command called “Image Size,” “Resize,” or “Resample.” when editing your photo. When you use this command you will be presented with a dialog box for entering the exact pixels you wish to use. We recommend setting your photos to 500 pixels for the main photo galleries and 300 pixels for photos to be used on the TotSite homepage. 
5. If the picture is too light/dark, adjust the contrast and color balance. You can make some of those dark photos stand out with a small tweak.
6. If you wanted to add creative effects or text to your photo, this is the best time in the optimization process to make those additions. Many parents enjoy adding borders or text to their photos before uploading to their account.
7. When you are done, save the photo in JPEG format. Remember to use “Save As” to ensure you do not overwrite your original photo.

This may sound like a time consuming process, especially if you have a lot of photos to share, but fortunately most of today’s software has made it easy to resize a *batch* of photos quickly. Look for features or commands such as “email photos” that will resize and compress many images for you. Even though “email photos” is not necessary meant to be used to batch process photos to be uploaded to your website – it works well! Remember with TotSites, you do not need to send out HUGE emails that clog up friends and family’s inbox’s. Simply upload the photo in one place to share with friends and family while creating a wonderful keepsake.

You do not need to take the time to optimize every photo, but you may want to make that one photo stand out above the rest, highlight that perfect smile or just remove the unwanted areas in the background.

Once you get the hang of optimizing your photos I think you will find it does not take too much time. If fact it might save you time compared to uploading multiple three megabyte files!

If you have any questions or comments – let us know! We are happy to help.

Brian