Blogging with Tumblr is the next big thing – not only is it free, but it’s fun, customisable and intuitive to use.
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They say that everyone has a good book in them, and while that may or may not be true, it’s certainly the case that anyone can put it to the test. Basically, you upload a manuscript to a site like Lulu, and books are only printed off in the quantities ordered – leaving you with just royalties from every sale.
Submitting a manuscript using Office Word 2007 is easy. The set-up tools make sure that you’re working to the right page size, while the Styles ensure consistency throughout the book.
1. Stylish
The Styles panel is your best friend while both typesetting and writing a document. It lets you mark up bits of text as headlines, quotes, paragraphs or anything else, and perform instant style changes across the whole document.
2. Black Type
First we need to colour the headlines black rather than the default blue. We must also centre the text and, on the Format button, reduce the distance between lines so that Heading 2 can be the chapter heading and name.
3. Page Plan
Before we worry about how the text looks on the page, we have to find out what that page is. From www.lulu.com you can download templates of the different books it can print in .doc format, and copy your text across.
4. New look
The result isn’t pretty: chapter heads are all over the place and the Garamond text is uncomfortable. Luckily, with Styles, we can make instant changes, so Word 2007 can improve on the template and what you see is what you get.
5. Finish Line
One of the most obvious problems is that the text doesn’t always reach the same point on a page. Go into the main body text’s Style and into the Paragraph options. Switch off Widows/ Orphan control and see the result.
6. Vice Verso
Take great care reading the template. Here, each chapter begins on a left (verso) page, even if it means the previous right (recto) one was empty. But because of how the template is structured, they look the other way around.
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Back in the early days of the Internet, online diaries were confined to the web sites of those who hand crafted their web sites through line after line of code. Consequently, they were very technical and weren’t really that interesting.
That all changed when blogging services started cropping up on the web, making it far easier to keep an online diary and not worry about how it all worked. In fact, it has become so popular that now there’s hundreds of blog services, and all claim to be the best one out there. Fear not, though. Instead of picking the wrong one and being confined to blogging in the dark basement office of the Internet, follow our advice as we highlight the best ones for you.
Windows Live Spaces aims to rival the dominance of MySpace in the social online networking world. It offers a drag-and-drop interface that can add everything from your favourite web sites to a photo slideshow, and it looks great. It is a little overwhelming if you just want to create a basic diary, though. You can tie it to your sign-in name, and your updates are available to everybody in your contact list.
Blogger offers users a dedicated service and an excellent host of options to make your blog look slick. You can choose from lots of backgrounds and styles, with a variety of colours. Pictures can be uploaded from your desktop, and you have full control over their position on the page. Compared to MySpace, people are less likely to find your blog by accident, so you will be relying more on people linking to you.
Registering with Facebook can be a disturbing experience. Within seconds of logging into the site, it knows more about you than your mother does, and wants every piece of information you hold dear. Beneath the M15 overtones, though, it’s a nifty way to stay in touch with people: a neat combination of Friends Reunited and MySpace. However, the profusion of different options means that the site is confusing to use and the actual blogs take the form of short messages nobody can find. You can import an existing blog, but nobody will be able to find that either.
This site works on a similar basis to Blogger.com, but offers more control over your blog. There are more appearances and designs to choose from, and videos can be embedded from YouTube or other sources. However, the site has little community feel, and the controls are very fiddly for inexperienced bloggers.
MySpace has become so popular over the last few years that it’s almost shorthand for social networking web sites in general. The benefit of blogging through MySpace is its vast interconnected user network – your musings will be read by your friends, their friends, and weird Uncle Geoffrey. It suffers from a lack of options, though, and this means that your blogs can become bland and one-dimensional, because you have little control over their appearance.
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