Woohoo! Another Day Off
Yep…I’ve got today off too. Yesterday we busted our butts and got the house clean and went and worked in my classroom. Today we will go shopping, mostly grocery, but also need to pick up some misc things like storage tubs, use a coupon I got for Spenco and want to see if I can locate them. And also hoping to go to visit family this evening. AND I CAN enter and post some contests!! I’ve noticed some great looking ones in my feeder, but not had time to click through and read and enter (and of course that means not share with you)…Look for contest posts tonight! If you have one and want me to post about it, let me know…
I’ve actually got some going on my other site, Southern Girl Reviews, and I have read 5 books this week that I need to review at A Novel Mind…going to be a computer day.
Summer Storms
I’ve so happy to report that it is rainy here. Why? Because I’m bailing hay with my dad this summer and it’s HOT! The money is nice to have, but when I went to college for 4 years, I didn’t expect to end up driving a tractor 8 hours a day in the Texas heat. lol I’m almost ready for school to start back so I can be back in the classroom teaching. 
I’ve been reading cell phone reviews because I think I might spend what’s left of my money (after paying to wire my kitchen for an electric stove and the stove) on a new cell phone. My phone has been going crazy lately. The last 2 days even though the ringer is on, it doesn’t ring half the time. A few different letters are also not working well on the keyboard anymore. I have to pay real close attention when texting. My only problem is I am not sure what kind of cell phone to replace it with. After reading the reviews, I’ve really not found one yet that I like better than mine. It will be weird to just go on ebay and buy another of the same type of phone I think.
Wordless Wednesday: First Drive
Cameron’s first time to drive a riding lawn mower – not mowing…just moving it! 
How To Change the Color of Links in WordPress Posts
As I have redesigned/tweaked each site this summer, I’ve tried to make notes of things I’ve done that were behind the scenes in case some of you would like to do it, but don’t know how. One thing I seem to do to almost all of my sites is adjust the colors of links. See with entering contests and such, I frequently create posts with lots of links, but I don’t want them all showing up in these pretty colors. So I always go edit my theme so that links just show up as normal black font and then I manually color the ones that I want to be different. So how do I do this?
Note: Instructions are for WordPress 3.0 and while I don’t think the process will change, please note an instruction or two might be different in future versions.
The first thing you’ll need to do is login to WordPress and go to “Editor” under Appearance.
This will normally open you right up to the correct sheet, but you need to make sure that you are editing your Stylesheet (typically called style.css). Your list of files are on the right side of your screen.
The next step is VERY important. Please copy and paste this entire file into Notepad before you begin editing. This is so that if anything goes wrong, you can always restore the file back to its original form.
After you have a copy of the original file, you can start editing. You are going to look for the following code inside your Stylesheet:
a { Instead of just a{, you may have “a:link{“
text-decoration: none;
color: #FF33FF;
}
The code under a { might be slightly different but the key is that you are looking for “color:” This is the color of hyperlinks in your posts. Mine is currently set at a Pink color, but I want it to be black and just blend in with the rest of my posts right? You can change yours to any color, not just black. Maybe you still want yours to stand out, but just not be the color it is? That’s fine too.
But wait? How does FF33FF mean pink? Ahh…good question. This is called the Hexadecimal code for pink. So how do you find the code for the color you want? Well if you want standard black, I’ll give you that code. It’s 000000. Yep, just 6 zeroes. But if you are wanting another color, then just google “HTML Color Codes” and you’ll find plenty of sites that will give you lots of choices. So my new code is going to look like this:
a {
text-decoration: none;
color: #000000;
}
If that is all you wanted to do, stop here. I’m going to include a few other little tidbits in case you want some other tidbits of knowledge.
What does text-decoration mean? That simply means do you want links to be underlined? My current setting is that I don’t want links to look any different than any other word in my post (My links will have no “decoration” and they will be black), but if you want yours to be underlined, you would just change none; to underline; As a side note, you can assign links to have a line through them or over them (overline; line-through;).
How about those other sets of code that start with a like a:hover{, and a:visited{? (Actually there are even more in some themes, but these are the most common.) A: hover refers to how the link will behave when someone holds their mouse over the link (but doesn’t click). A:visited refers to what color the link will be if someone has already visited that link.
Hope this helps you, and if you have any requests for future WordPress tutorials, just give me a shout. If they are generic (not theme specific) and I can figure it out, I’d be super glad to write directions.
Look for my other tutorials and How to Insert a “Grab My Button” box or How to Create a Scrolling Text Box.
Hope You Enjoyed The Contests
So I started going through emails tonight and have been trying to read my blog feeds and share with you the contests. I decided to try a different approach tonight and highlight each giveaway/review site individually. Have fun entering. I’ll try to get some more posted tomorrow. I bailed hay for 5 straight days last week and just didn’t have the energy to do anything at the end of each day. I’m not sure what this week’s schedule will look like, but I’ll post as often as I can.
