My friend Monika from Argentina awarded me with this special prize. It is very comforting to know that people remember you in spite of blogging in other language. Few months ago I wrote two versions of Binary Ant, Spanish and English, but finally I opted for stopping the Spanish (temporarily?) and carry on only with the English. Through the Spanish blog I meet some very interesting bloggers but I have to admit that since I stopped it I lost contact a bit… … But if people still remember you is a good signal

If you speak Spanish I recommend you to take and eye at Monika’s blog. She writes about music, ramblings and very interesting things

Thanks for the award Monika!

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Hi friends, at this moment I’m on a flight over any point between Spain and UK. I hope to have good weather and do lots of interesting things. London is in a different time zone with an hour of difference and thanks to this I’ll recover this hour when I get there, I take off at 3pm Spanish time and I land in London at 3:50pm UK time.

I have programmed a couple of posts, but I think I should have wrote a few more…Ok friends, don’t forget to enter in my little contest, you can win one of the six ad spaces in my sidebar, it is easy so don’t miss the opportunity.

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Surely you usually get stressed due to the many long hours you spend in front of your computer… Don’t worry anymore! Well, at least if you live in UK, not my case.

Through BlogStorm I found this special offer. Berocca is giving for free an Blogger Relief pack. It includes the following items:

• Stress ball.
• USB stress button, I can’t imagine what is it for, perhaps someone appears and you have a free massage.
• Bubble wrap keyring.
• “Dead Fred” pen holder, this is funny but I prefer “Dead boss”.

Here you have a picture with these amazing free items:

As I said at the beginning this offer is only for UK bloggers so most of us have to look for alternative ways to relief our stress…

I hope you UK bloggers enjoy this toys, there is nothing better than free stuff.

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Summer has come and these days we have a very great and sunny weather. This is the reason of yesterday and the day before procrastination. I know that it’s recommended to write content daily but I had too much energy to waste and finally I spend the weekend out of home. Here I left you a couple of pictures of Salinas Beach, a place frequented by surfers:

And this is me, in-line skating at the promenade of another beautiful city of my region, Gijón:

This last picture was taken with my new Nokia N81 mobile phone, don’t you think it is quite good to be taken with a mobile phone?

I feel a bit guilty because I have lots of things to do (one or two new websites) but… who can resist a summer day?

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Two weeks ago I show you some basics steps to design a logo for your blog, this was an article of a series about how to promote your blog:

• Marketing Your Blog, #1. Comment On Blogs
• Marketing Your Blog, #2. Get Your Own Domain
• Marketing Your Blog, #3. Design Your Own Logo
• Marketing Your Blog, #4. Must Have A Favicon

I’m working on more articles for this series so keep an eye here.

After writing the #3 I didn’t feel pleased at all with it because I had Gimp in Spanish so I didn’t put many screen captures and I was not sure with the name of the tools. Now I found the way to set Gimp in English so I’m going to write another article to help you to strengthen the knowledge you got in that article. Let’s design text with crystal effect!!

Open Gimp and a click on File > New. Set size to 400×100 pixels. In order to follow this short guide you must to have visible three windows:

• Gimp window

• Image window

• Layers window

Delete the layer ( Image window>Layer>Delete Layer ) and then create an empty one ( Image window>Layer>New Layer ) but you have to set Layer Fill Type to Transparency. Now write the text you want with the Text Tool in the Gimp window, something like this:

To give the text a depth sensation we can use the Blend Tool in the Gimp window but before it go to the Layers window and make right click on the text layer to choose the option Alpha to Selection. Now you can apply the Blend Tool, do it from a darker color to transparent and only in the low part of the text:

Now we are going to create the crystal effect. Make Alpha to Selection again on the text layer and now with the Rectangle Select Tool in the Gimp window and with the Ctrl key pressed select the part of the text you DON’T want with the crystal effect. This way automatically you’ll have selected the other part. You will have something similar to this:

Click on New Layer in Image window and now fill this selection with the Bucket Fill Tool in the Gimp window and with a lighter color:

Finally let’s put an outline. Alpha to Selection on the layer with the initial text and create a New Layer ( Layer>New Layer in the Image window ). Now click on Select>Grow in the Image window and put 2 pixels. Now fill this selection with a dark colour or black if you want. This black filled selection must be on bottom of all the layers so in the Layers window you have to pull down it to the bottom. You must have an image similar to this one:

And the result image is this:

But you should save it as a png image. When you export it to png select the following options:

At the beginning we removed the initial layer and put a transparent one. This way you can place your image over any background color.

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