Please be gentle, it is my first freebie. Special thanks to Rin (from which the butterfly cut-out was made from the freebie download paper butterflies as allowed by TOS), bittbox.com (“teardrop” foilage brush/cut-out, used as allowed by TOS) and Letti who named it!!

How to use this template? Here’s just a very quick tutorial for my friends who’ve been asking me since I started with the digital scrapbooking.

Of course, you need some sort of image editing software. I use Photoshop Elements 6, it’s completely affordable and in my opinion, just as good as the more expensive “full” versions. Of course, there are lots of other programs out there and you should be able to find something to your liking, probably even for free.

So, it’s really all very simple. Open up the template and save a copy (you wouldn’t want to over-write the original). This particular template is sized at 12″x12″ (though I personally print at 8″x8″ myself). Now open your photo(s) and the supplies (digital papers, flowers, etc.) you’d like to use. Now, just drag those supplies and photo(s) onto the template and put them where you want them to go. To make them match a particular piece of the template, make sure you’ve got your paper as the first layer above said template piece and press Ctrl+G, it will snap to match the shape.

Now do the same for your papers and whatnot. You may not want to use the butterfly, that’s okay — delete that layer and drag an element there, or whatever you want. Or notice the ribbon layer, there you could snap a paper in or delete that layer and add an actual ribbon element. When you’ve got all your stuff on, I’ve found that, at least for my stuff, it looks better to add a small drop shadow to the items that would have a bit of “fluff” to them if used in an “actual” scrapbook. In Photoshop Elements, there should be an Effects tab above the Layers palette that may or may not be expanded. Pick a shadow and click apply, you can then click on the blue font-like icon on the layer to adjust the shadow.

Is this all making sense? :)

So, here’s my layout:

I used the kit For Keeps Sake from scrapmatters.com which can be found here.

But! There is also lots and lots and lots of free stuff out there! (Seriously, my “supplies” folder is 22.3 GB in size right now!) Keep surfing around the scrapmatters shop and you’ll find some, and here are some more of my favorite sites to get and find freebies at:

– Shabby Princess*
– Designer Digitals*
– Digital Candy
– Digitreats
– Ikea Goddess (she links to freebies almost every day)
– Faith Sisters
– digitalfreebies.com
– Peppermint Creative

There are so many more good sites! I try to remember to add them to my ma.gnolia, so check that out, too.

(* means I’ve also made a purchase at those sites; there was one other but it has since changed directions so I’ve chosen not to link to it at this time. Also check out Songbird Avenue where each kit is $8 and the money goes to charity.)

So, anyway, if you download the template, I’d love it if you’d leave me a comment telling me what you think. Hopefully in the future I’ll get better with actually creating stuff like this!

Background

Several of my sites are pretty successful, some enough to get some money back using Text Link Ads (TLA). One of these sites has caused me a bit of a headache here recently. Many moons ago, this site was running WordPress and since TLA offers a WordPress plugin, this was a breeze. However, earlier this year, it became a necessity for me to change to something else, to a “full-fledged” shopping cart program. I ended up going with Sunshop. Once I figured out how to edit the templates, I figured I was okay. I kept running into one problem though, how to incorporate my TLA into my new Sunshop sidebar? Everything I tried either gave me crazy PHP errors, or just plain did nothing. After a couple weeks of working on this and other aspects of the site, I finally gave in and emailed TLA from their contact page. I waited for a response, and waited, and waited. Finally I gave up and put the text ads in an iframe, as I didn’t know what else to do at this point, and put my new site into production. That worked and the average visitor couldn’t tell there was an iframe, so I forgot about it.

Fast forward three and a half months. Yesterday evening (Monday), I logged into my ISP’s webmail to check the bulk mail folder and empty it out. I had two emails from TLA that were sent respectively Sunday evening and early Monday. The first told me that my site had been put “on hold” because they had checked and it appeared the link script was not working. I responded to that with a “yu-huh,” a screenshot, information about how I’d asked about this before, and a line about how horrible their customer service is before I saw the second email which read:

Valerie,

As we mentioned yesterday, we have sold ads for your site ([site]), but it looks like the script is not working properly. We could not find the following links:

– [links...]

Please log back into your account and reinstall the code and make sure you follow all of the instructions. This site’s package is still on HOLD for the time being. Your site will be rechecked once more. If the links are found, your site will be automatically enabled again.

Please note the following:

1) It’s possible that these links went undetected due to network issues encountered in reaching your site. If that is the case, they will be found tomorrow when we check your site.

2) If you’ve placed your links using Javascript or iframes, they have been flagged because we do not accept those technologies. The links must be changed to organic links on the actual URL.

3) You may be receiving this email because you have placed the links at a URL other than the one you registered. The links MUST appear at the exact URL: [url]. Other URL’s or redirects are not allowed. If you have changed your URL, please contact us.

Thanks,

Of course, I immediately knew #2 was the issue. So I responded again explaining the situation and how I did the iframes only because no one cared to give me the courtesy of a reply to help me out on this when I emailed about it months ago.

Then Jamie happened to message me online and I told her what was going on. She ended up spending two hours with me, trying to get this to work properly. Thank you, Jamie!

The Fix

So here’s what had to be done to get it working.

When you generate your TLA code, you’re going to tell it PHP, of course. Put that code in a file in the same directory as your Sunshop, or wherever, really, and create the XML file and whatever else TLA tells you to do for that.

In global.php, which is in the main directory of Sunshop, you need to tell it where to find the TLA file. Find a spot to put it above where a template is evaluated. I started mine around line 2592, above this line:

eval("\$main = \"".$templates[main_area]."\";");

Put this there:

ob_start();
if ($success = @include("yourfile.php")) {
$include_ads = ob_get_contents();
} else {
$include_ads= "Could not open file.";
}
ob_end_clean();

Of course, you’ll change “yourfile.php” to be the absolute path to your TLA PHP file. You can also change include_ads to be whatever you want it to be. Make sure it’s the same in both places.

Now, make note of where I put my code in global.php. I put it above the call for the main_area template to be evaluated. Apparently that means that I can only call this new tag inside the main_area template.

So now, in my templates file, in the proper place, I simply put $include_ads and they display! From there on out, it’s CSS and any HTML required to change the look of the links. Since Sunshop 3.5.1 is so table-based (I don’t know how 4 is going to be), I had to add code to my TLA file before and after the link codes to make sure the area displayed just like the rest of the site.

After doing some more looking around and reading, I think there’s another way to do this, but this method seems MUCH easier, and it works!

Update

I just got an email from TLA that my site has been removed from hold. Still no response whatsoever concerning Sunshop or how to incorporate ads or anything. Sheesh, I love TLA, they make me money, but this is ridiculous!

First you, of course, should be able to use PHP on your site. You should also know a little bit about CSS. Those are the two things this technique will use. There are numerous ways this can be accomplished but this is the way I am currently using it on this site.

First, I have the area where I want the images to be randomized. This is my header image. I have a div for that and it has both an ID and a Class. This is what it looks like before I randomize it:

<div id=”random” class=”random”> </div>

I use the ID to define all the basics and styles other than the image to get that out of the way and free the Class up for the random background image.

Next, add in your random PHP snippet that will essentially change the Class with each page load:

<?php echo(rand(1,X)); ?>

So now the whole thing looks like this:

<div id=”random” class=”random<?php echo(rand(1,X)); ?>”> </div>

Just change that “X” to however many images you plan to have be it 5 or 20, it is your maximum value that you want outputted. When you load the page, that random PHP snippet will pick a number between 1 and that number, so you will end up with class=”random2″ or class=”random5″ and so on. Of course, if you want to get technical, you can also change that “1″ to something, so as to randomize between, say, 3 and 7, etc.

Now you need to tell it what to do with those classes. In your CSS, define what each and every one of those classes will do. If you’ve got three images you want to rotate between, you might do something like this:

.random1 {background: url(images/image1.jpg);}
.random2 {background: url(images/image2.jpg);}
.random3 {background: url(images/image3.jpg);}

See? Easy!

That’s just the bare minimum, you could even use the CSS to randomize anything: different colored text, different margins, padding, borders, etc. If you really wanted to waste a lot of time, you could use that PHP snippet in your call for a stylesheet and load a completely different stylesheet each time. Of course, that might make your visitors want to pluck out their eyes, but you get the idea.

As for me, I am currently using 12 random header images on this site (and, yes, every one of them is using a photo that I took, just fyi), which do you like best? ;-)