Facebook Profile Pictures

Lately, as I have been browsing around some facebook pages I have noticed that a lot of people have some profile pictures that are not correctly sized and all messed up.  This really isn’t a hard fix but if you don’t know what how facebook plays with your image, it could be frustrating to say the least.

When uploading your profile picture, Facebook tells you the image must be at least 180 px X 180 px.  But the profile image is square and displayed in a 200 px X 200 px area.  If you image is smaller than the 200 px X 200 px size, it will be stretched to fit.  If your image is not square or larger than 200 px X 200 px, it will need to be cropped into a square shape.  Below I have an image of my logo that I tried to upload to Facebook but it didn’t come out as I wanted.  It is not square but rectangle and I was forced to crop it into only a small square.

As you can see my profile picture is not as my logo is but cropped into a small square with the same height and width as the height of my original logo.  So, off to Gimp(is a free mac version of photoshop that I use) I went, to create a new sized logo for my Facebook Fan Page.  Start off with a 200 px X 200 px square.  Then Facebook actually doesn’t display a 12 px border inside your image.  So, if you image goes all the way to the edge of the 200×200 px square, some of your image will be cropped off.  To avoid this I shrink down the edge of my image and create a border image with a 176×176 px area to put my logo in.  Below is a visual example of what I am talking about.

Now that you have your area set up you can insert you image into the white area.  Here is how mine came out.  Below that is a screen shot of how it looks as my Facebook fan page profile picture.  I hope you like it.

I hope that this was helpful to all of you and please send us a link of your new profile pics looking pretty.  Thanks for reading.

SMJ Online Studios Sneak Peak

I know I haven’t posted anything in a while but I have been busy with the new baby and also working on creating my very own new WordPress theme.  Below is a sneak peak of the site.  I took a screen shot and then just cropped out a section so you could have a look at what I have been spending my time on.  Don’t want you to think that I have been just doing nothing.

SMJOnlineStudios.com

Since right now I am using a wordpress.com site, I am unable to upload my own theme.  So, I have been looking around and I think that I am going to go with iPage for my hosting.  Looks simple to use, has very nice sign up and referral bonus, and pretty cheap hosting at $4 and change a month.  Hope you like the look of the new site and thanks for reading.

Elance

    Yesterday, I signed up for the free version of Elance.com.  Elance is a web site for user to post jobs that they need done with a brief description of the work they need, and the price range they think it is worth or they can spend.  Freelancers, like myself, then bid on the job, telling the poster a little about yourself and what you think that you would be able to do the for.  The poster then has a list of freelance web designers, in my case, to choose from.  In the free version that I signed up for Elance.com gives you a select number of “tokens” that you can use to bid for jobs.  This way one person can go submit a bid to every posting on the site.

After signing in, I browsed through some postings, searching for postings mentioning WordPress.  I then made a bid on 3 different projects.  I did also mention to each of these posters that I was just starting and that I am by no means a professional, yet.  The jobs that I made bids on were for small things like changing some fonts, changing a little css, and a few other minor changes that I think that I should have no problem with.  I also think that I will be making a few bids a day until I get a job conformation.  Keep your fingers crossed.  It would be really cool to see some money flowing in to help get this project jump started a little.