A Tutorial for My Sister

Okay, so here is one thing that I love about my sister, Donna. She thinks I know things. That is why she drove four hours on Tuesday to have me teach her computer stuff. Everything that we did she could have discovered on her own but it was fun to work it out together.

Now, if you stumbled on this blog, and you are not interested in the technicality of what we did, you are dismissed. Thanks for stopping by. I totally, totally understand.

Here was my tutorial agenda especially designed for Donna.

• Shortcuts for copy, cut, and paste


• How keep several windows open at one time while in Internet Explorer


• Put several shortcuts on her desktop


• Find free blog backgrounds


• Install a new free background


• Choose a free picture to put in the blog header


• Learn how to follow and manage favorite blogs


• Sign up and navigate Google Analytics


• Sign up and begin exploring Facebook


• Install Donna’s Netscape address book on Gmail

The hardest thing that we did was find a picture for Donna’s blog header. We found several sites for free pictures but none that really worked well. Finally we gave up and decided to take a photo of our own. However, we wanted Donna’s pictures to reflect her so we put together a setting that would work and we photographed. That was complicated because it was midday and by a bright window. We tried various options with the flash and without and finally decided that we had to cover the window—no small task in the snow, with a ladder and duct tape but persistence paid off. When we finally had a picture that would work, we needed to further personalize the picture so in Photoshop, we put a view from Donna’s farm in a new blank canvas. That was easy enough. We just put Donna’s photo of her yard as the first layer and then put the “booknook” picture as the next layer and erased the background blanket from the window.

Discovering how to put a border around the picture and figuring out how to make the colors work with the background that we had installed was a challenge. For the correct colors, we did a “print screen” of her blog and put that in Photoshop and then used the “eyedropper tool” to get the brown and blue color from her background. Then we discarded the “print screen”.

I don’t know the correct way to add a border but this worked. We had to flatten the image and then change the canvas size, making it slightly larger. Then we could select the white around the edge and use the “paintbucket” to pour in the blue color.

(Click on the picture to go to Donna's blog.)

Both of our hubbys get concerned that we spend too much time on the computer. So on our evening phone conversations we were also able to give an honest report to that disconcerting question, “What did you do?” that I tend to interpet, "What did you do all day long while I worked hard to put bread on the table?" We ate our oatmeal breakfast, watched the birds, attended a Bible study, toured our new church, cooked assembled meals and ate at home, went to a car wash, watched a movie and of course, worked a little lot almost all of the time on our computers. What a happy visit from my sister, Donna.