You may not need to have such a creative design for your company or church, but you will want to avoid basic mistakes such as blocking important text with your profile photo, like the example I created below.

In order to ensure you save time and get it right on the first try, I’ve prepared a Photoshop template that you can download. It has the Profile Photo on a separate layer that allows you to visualise where it will appear once you put in the main image. It’s easy!

With that, you will be able to craft cover photos with perfect alignment like this.

If you’d like to know the Facebook Cover Photo specifications as at present moment (they change all the time!), here it is in graphical form.

The post Designing a Facebook Cover Photo appeared first on TheBackpackr.com.

A new breed of student is prevalent, largely due to the immense amounts of media that they are bombarded with on a daily basis, the games they play and the websites they surf. Contrast that with a regular classroom where you are given a THICK textbook with static photos and LOTS of text. How can we expect to engage our young, budding geniuses?

They are not stupid. Absolutely not. In fact, they are probably a lot smarter than many adults as they learn from so many sources, while not reading formal books.

Here is an inspirational video that shares an alternative way of learning in a classroom or church environment.

Can you adapt it to your environment?

The post Teaching via videos / podcasts appeared first on TheBackpackr.com.

While airlines benefit via code-sharing agreements (airlines sharing planes), cost savings on sales offices, maintenance and operational functions, they are then able to pass these on in part to travellers. Some of the benefits that travellers get are lower air fares, more options of departure times, shorter travel times (as a result of shorter transits), more airport lounges and unified mileage rewards (accumulate miles from all the alliance airlines).

The post Understanding the three main airline alliances appeared first on TheBackpackr.com.

You’re not a designer. You don’t care about code.

But, you need to create or edit some WordPress pages and you need to make some magic happen. Here’s a simple tutorial on basic HTML tags that you can learn and use immediately.

HTML tags always begin and end with an angle bracket. They often work in pairs, but sometimes standalone.

Let’s begin with explaining what HTML tags are. They are meant to make things happen – everything on a website happens because of tags. Images appear because a tag made it happen. A font is changed or made bold because of a pair of tags.

 
 
All the best, and I hope you can make some killer web pages with the simple tricks I’ve blogged about.

Do share what you’ve worked on in the comments.

The post Simple HTML tags for non-designers appeared first on TheBackpackr.com.

The good news is that the alternative platform, which is a combination of Skype and Messenger, is probably a good one. Microsoft plonked down USD8.5b in cash to buy Skype and is now ready to fire up the engines and make it work to its advantage.

Enough history, let’s find out how you can easily merge your two accounts.

STEP ONE. UPDATE YOUR VERSION OF SKYPE

Mac users, click on Skype in the menu, then “Check for Updates…”.

Windows users, click on Help, then do the same.

If Skype tells you there is a new version, install it.

STEP TWO. SIGN IN AND MERGE!

After updating your software, fire it up and you’ll see options to sign in with a Microsoft account. Click on that.

The sign in screen will now look different and you should log in with your MSN Messenger account credentials (not your Skype username and password!). It will be in the form of an email address and a password.

Now you have the opportunity to merge the accounts. (You can unmerge them later, if you need. I’ll cover that in another blog post).

Click on “I have a Skype account” to begin the process of merging an existing Skype account with the MSN Messenger account you just signed into. If you’d rather merge it with a new Skype account, click on “I’m new to Skype”.

Then, login with your Skype credentials.

Review what you are about to do, then click “Continue”. Do note that from now on, you should login with your MSN Messenger email address and password. This takes precedence over the existing Skype username and password that you had.

STEP THREE. YOU’RE DONE!

There isn’t really a Step 3, but here’s how your contacts will now look from within Skype. You’ll have a tab with Messenger, Skype and other options based on the status of a contact, or whether you put them in Favorites.

The post 3 steps to merge your Skype and MSN Messenger accounts appeared first on TheBackpackr.com.

However, it is quite a challenge to get volunteers on board to work together for specific design goals. More often than not, a project is farmed off to a volunteer who has design knowledge, they take the brief, go home and work on it… solo! When done, they email the file back, and it gets printed. I can imagine it’s not the most exciting of environments to work in.

Understanding how the younger generation works, and what makes them excited, I put forward a suggestion to organise a monthly evening for creativity to be unleashed. I want designers, photographers, videographers, brand experts, creative directors, flash animators, writers, etc… to come together and dream. Then, go and unleash their creativity.

The evening that I’ve now organised is called Available 4 Jesus, or A4J. It is a media mingle of sorts that will allow people to bounce off each others creativity and achieve greatness for Christ. Our objectives are:

ONE. Foster a creative environment that is fun.

TWO. Allow everyone to give suggestions on how DUMC can improve from a creative standpoint.

THREE. List several projects that people can volunteer for.

FOUR. Learn from one another.

FIVE. Work on those projects collaboratively during the 3-hour window. Anything not completed can be worked on another time.

At present, we have several projects to work on – monthly video announcements, video stories of beneficiaries from our yearly Anniversary Gift Weekend, managing social media for DUMC (Twitter & Facebook), a new concept for our print and online publications and lastly, standardisation of the DUMC brand identity.

To fire up the creativity, we need to provide good coffee, snacks, stationery, flipchart paper (hopefully some day, it’ll be a dedicated space with ideapaint!) and whiteboards. The A4J concept stems from an understanding of creative people who

1. Bounce ideas with likeminded individuals.

2. Need to have their work celebrated. Pats on the back are so, so important.

3. Like liberty (within reason) to express themselves.

4. Have an opportunity to see their work exhibited.

5. Draw ideas on napkins or love doodling in their idle time.

6. Crave good coffee and snacks.

The post Inspiring creativity in church appeared first on TheBackpackr.com.

I’ve been a Mac convert for several years now, but some things on Windows were just evidently better. Thankfully, there are some software developers who actively craft applications to help bring some of those features over to the Mac.

Here are a few things I intensely yearned for on the Mac OSX when I first switched over.

Cut-and-paste (like huh? Mac didn’t have it back then?)

Folders should be on top, always. Don’t mix them with the files below

See system files (yes, I like control… TOTAL CONTROL!)

Natively read AND write to Windows hard drives? (NTFS)

Standard application shortcuts – For Redo, it’s sometimes Cmd-Shift-Z and sometimes Cmd-Y.

Enter TotalFinder. It doesn’t fix all that I want, but it does three out of five of the items listed above.

Here’s a screenshot of TotalFinder running with two tabs and the folders above all my files. In addition, the greyed out .DS_Store file is a system file that is normally hidden.

Another pretty nifty feature of TotalFinder is the ability to toggle dual mode that allows you to see two folders side-by-side! That’s pretty cool for comparing the file contents of two folders. You save heaps of time as opposed to switching windows.

Overall, for USD18, I think it is a steal! The productivity that you gain is phenomenal.

Check it out here (I get no referral fees!)

The post A Mac Finder on Steroids appeared first on TheBackpackr.com.

If you’re like me, and usually buy a prepaid SIM card at the destination country, you may find it annoying to keep on having to update all your contacts with whom you normally send WhatsApp or text messages to let them know of your new number.

It may be a laborious and costly exercise to text everyone with your new number (of course you could post it on Facebook, but you know what happens with privacy etc…).

I normally buy a SIM that has data services bundled, so that I can easily send messages via WhatsApp, Skype, use Google Maps, look for restaurants, and a whole lot more.

When you swap your SIM card and start WhatsApp again, it will tell you, “Mobile network changed. Register with new phone number?”. Most people I know would very quickly click Yes, only to find that you cannot receive messages anymore on your home mobile  number.

It makes sense, as you just told WhatsApp you now have a new number on a new mobile network.

Here’s an explanation of what happens if you click Yes vs No.

Take note: in both scenarios, all phone calls and SMS text messages will be routed to the new roaming number.

The post Roaming with WhatsApp while traveling appeared first on TheBackpackr.com.

I am a firm believer of using intelligent forms to capture information. I particularly hate mailto: links that pop open your browser for a number of reasons – it is a quick-fix and not professional, many people use webmail and not an email client like Microsoft Outlook or Mac Mail, and it also exposes the destination email to spam harvesters.

I would strong advise that you invest $47 in this plugin that will give you much, much more in return.

Main Features I Like

Easy-to-setup forms – I have created simple forms in 5 minutes, no kidding. You drag and drop fields, give it a name and you’re done!

Intelligent forms can be created – fields can appear conditionally. If you have radio options / select box, it can determine whether other fields automatically appear below it. Here’s an example.

Form entries are stored in a database and can be exported easily into a CSV file that can be accessed in Excel easily.

Auto-responders can also be created so that templated emails are sent to the people who fill in the forms.

Flexibility of fields – we can have single line text boxes, paragraph text, radio buttons, check boxes and dropdown select boxes. There are also regular fields that have add-on validation – email address, date, time, password, number and rich text. It’s really quite cool.

Multi-page forms can be created, so that your forms aren’t sooo long. We have a fairly complex three-page form for Employment Application at Integricity, and it allows for document uploading as we would like to have photos and cover letters of applicants.

Lifetime updates are also very cool. They have some features on the way that I’m longing to use. Just knowing that I don’t have to pay again is great. What I’m waiting for is the ability to save a form, and come back later to resume or make corrections. Another feature that would be really cool is the ability to define a different set of email recipients based on a certain field entry (like department or subject). This feature has since been added in a later release.

Because of its flexibility, I have created registration forms for conference delegates and it is linked to a payment system. It does require quite a lot of planning and the use of PHP to auto-generate confirmation codes, much like the airlines, but it proves quite a lot can be done with this plugin.

Conclusion

All in all, it’s a great plugin and I would highly recommend it. I paid for the unlimited licence and it’s well worth it, considering I have a hand in quite a number of websites.

The post WordPress Plugin for Forms – Formidable Pro appeared first on TheBackpackr.com.

It was bizarre… one morning, I got up at 2.30am and started thinking about it… not because I was anxious, but just because… Perhaps it was my “Samuel, Samuel” experience. I responded to say, “Speak, for your servant is listening” by whipping out my iPhone in the dark and typing out the gist of a script to illustrate the website features.

The format of the video was to be kept simple, as I also wanted to trial out an idea that could set the pace for video announcements within the church later on. I just wanted to start with a friendly face (mine’s not too bad, hey!), go into images with a voice over, then wrap up with the same face again.

I really didn’t have very much time to work on it, but with the help of Grace, my wife, we set up the 5D Mark 2 + tripod and a Sennheiser mic set. Thankfully, it didn’t take long, and we were able to get the recording + voice over done relatively quickly.

The post DUMC.MY launch video appeared first on TheBackpackr.com.