Talia Carbis

What to know when starting a blog

My most beautiful, talented, and adventurous friend Katie has started a blog!! I am excited that this is now another friend to add to my RLF (thanks Kelley) who blogs! I would really appreciate you having a look to give her some support!!

Okay, so I decided to write a post that covered the basics.

Whenever you have a blog that is hosted somewhere free, things are never 100% the way you like it. But having had blogs on myspace, live journal, blogger and wordpress.com, I feel like I have a bit of a favourite out of them all. Wordpress.com.

The main thing I like about it is the blog stats, but I wrote a full post about why I would choose wordpress over blogger. Wordpress also has multiple pages, which is really handy.

As you can see in this blog, I have linked to a lot of different things. Different posts that relate, and different people.  To do this, you can either press the little link icon that looks like a chain, or type in <a href=”http://whateveryourlinkis.com”>the words that I want to link </a>

And that will link it up for you. I always make sure I link to people when I write about them, and if I am using wordpress (.org or .com) then it will tell me when someone has linked to me!!

If you want to put a picture in your post, then you can either use the code, which is:

<img src=”http://whereitshosted.jpg”> (this might be a .gif, .png… any picture file, but it has to end in something like that).  OR alternatively I can click the little picture button up on the toolbar, and usually I can either upload a new photo straight from my computer, or I can just put in the URL, which I can get by either right clicking on the photo where I see it and choosing “copy image location”.

Get involved. Blogging is TOTALLY about community, and there is no point in blogging if you’re not in it record your life, and for other people to read it!! The thing I really like about blogging is that I have learnt lots of new things, and made lots of new friends, and a great deal of them have been found here. This is a really good site for learning new things, and for getting support and making friends.

Blogrolls are the last thing I’m going to talk about. Blogrolls are a list of other people’s blogs that you read. It usually appears in the column, but you will need to select it. This is called a sidebar widget on wordpress, and a page element on blogger (Settings-> template ->links).

Finally I would like to TAG Luke and Carmen to tell you some things that they have recently learnt about/ or like doing on their blogs.

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How To Make Your Own Pasta

This is for Carmen, who is beautiful and loving and fun.

I made fresh pasta last night. I am not much of a measurements girl,  but I’ll give it a go telling you all how I made it.

About 1 cup of flour.

4 egg yolks.

So you can either put the flour is a mound on the table, make a well in the center, put the yolks into it, and then slowly beat it in with a fork. OR you can put it in a food processor and ‘buzz’ it. OR you can put it in a bowl and mix it together with a fork.

If the mixture isn’t moist enough then add a little oil, and then add egg white as you need to,  but it should still be a little crumby. After a while if you start to ‘rub’ the ingredients together you see that it’s not as dry as you thought.

Alternatively, if you think it’s too wet, then just add a little more flour. Keep doing this until your’re satisfied.

Now, you really don’t want to make this without a pasta maker, but you can if you wish. Put it on the highest setting and push the pasta through. Then fold it into thirds, and repeat. Do this about 4 or 5 times. This helps to kneed the dough further, and to get it really silky and smooth.

Then push it through at each level indicated on the side. I never really do this- I can’t be bothered to put it through 7 times!! I usually just do settings 7, 5, 3 then 1.  Sometimes I just leave it on 2 or 3, and that leaves me with a slightly thicker, easier to use pasta. Particularly good if you like pasta, and make lasagna with it.

When I’m on about setting 5, I usually cut my really long sheet in half. I’ve found that doing that really makes my pasta better, because it doesn’t curl up at the bottom. And covering the pasta generously on both sides with flour after that setting 5 roll will help a lot as well.

Cover it again with flour on both sides when you’re finished. This means it won’t stick together. You can either slice up the pasta yourself now for fettuccine, or spaghetti, or you can leave it flat for lasagna or cannelloni, or tortellini or ravioli. Or you can use the cutters that already come with it (most of the time), and make the pasta with that (like in the picture)!

How to save space in the kitchen

A bookself.

I know it sounds a little strange, but a book shelf is a really great way of saving space in your kitchen.

We put the bookself up on the bench, against the wall, and as you can see it’s really handy for storing electrical appliances!

Pantry Tips

Tip One:

When you put dry ingredients into containers (this is the best way to store them so that they stay air tight, which keeps them fresh, and lasting longer) cut out the title on the packet and attach it with sticky tape onto the front. My mum has the name written in nikko on the front, but because I’m only just newly setting up I’m not 100% if where I’ve put something is where it will stay. If it’s stuck on the front I can always take it of when I want to wash it, or when I want to put something different in it.

If you have already thrown out the packets, or the packets just aren’t working for you, then you can always make your own signs…

Tip Two:

In a kitchen with limited space like mine, it’s hard to know where to put your spice bottles. We have our microwave on top of the fridge, and so there’s a space next to it. On one side is some ornaments, and on the other are the spices! They’re facing in to the kitchen, so they’re handy to get, and because they’re a little out of the way they have zero chance of being knocked over.

My only suggestion would be to make sure they’re not touching the microwave, otherwise they make a terrible rattling noise.

Tip Three:

If you have separate oven mits (not one of those long joined ones) then sticking a hook somewhere central, and at eye level is a good idea. We just used hooks iwth sticky backs that are easy to remove- because we’re renting.

Tip Four:

We bought a stack of plastics drawers from Crazies (crazy clarks) for only $20, and it’s served us well.  It works great because we put lids in one, tupperwards containers in the other, plastic bags in another, and the magic bullet in the one that’s left!

The thing I really like about it though is that it gives me more storage space on top as well!

Tip Five:

Because we were limited on space we use our wine and cocktail glasses as a decorative thing. They’re still easy to use, but also look really cool. And they’re not taking up valuable kitchen space.

This shelf is from IKEA, but there’s lots of great things available.

Converting a PDF to a WORD document

After downloading God knows how many programs, installing them and finding out that they just don’t do what I want, I found out how to convert a PDF to a WORD doc just using what I had.

First I had to scan the PDF (after it had been printed) as a tif. If I didn’t want to do this I could just find a wat to convert it on the computer.

Next I opened Microsoft Office Document Imaging (Start -> All Programs -> Microsoft Office Tools -> Microsoft Office Document Imaging). And in there I opened the tif.

Next I went to tools -> recognise text using OCR. Then made sure it read all the pages and let it do its thing.

Then I went to tools -> Send text to word. Made sure that all the pages were selected again and then wolah! Word had opened and my information was there!

I did have to reformat it a bit, and some of it didn’t work out towards the end, but it was a lot better then having to write the whole thing out!