Funny that the names of God would almost cause me to lose my salvation; that is, if it was actually losable.
For her posting yesterday at Inspired Bliss, Lisa (Put It On The List) needed a graphic to go along with her text; I thought the perfect thing would be a Wordle, so I created one using many of the different names for God found in scripture.
If you aren't familiar with Wordle, you must click this link and have a look--it's a nifty little gizmo that creates word clouds from a submitted word bank or even by scanning a URL to extract words. Color, font and style are at your discretion, and if you've got time to kill, you can murder the better part of an hour or two or three.
Here's the one I created:
My "issues" started when I realized I couldn't simply right-click the image and save to disk. Straight from the Wordle FAQs page, "Wordle is a Java applet, and Java applets are not permitted
to write anything to your disk. So, while the applet could
generate a jpeg, it wouldn't be able to give it to you!"
If I'm not mistaken, I just heard the Soup Nazi bellow "NO SOUP FOR YOU!".
It went on to explain you were welcome to take a screen shot, so I did. FYI, Wordle does provide html to embed a thumbnail of your creation, but a hundred words on a postage stamp are pretty difficult to read.
This is about the time my frustration began simmering. A screen shot does you no good if you don't have the companion software to crop it! I did my darndest to jam Cinderella's step-sister's foot into the glass slipper, because I am certain (as was she) that I could make it work.
- I tried Paint, but I could never find the cropping tool.
- I tried uploading the screen shot to Word, and it just laughed at me.
- I even tried to import it to my
joke of a photo editor, but since it wasn't a photo, it slammed the door in my face and laughed at me.
I offered a $1,000 bounty for anyone who could explain it to me, I also:
- searched blogs with the keywords "embed Wordles"
- culled Blogging Basics' archives
- downloaded Skitch only to realize it was for Mac users only (infidels!)
- tweeted a pathetic cry for help
...but when all was said and done, while I HAD figured out what to do, without the proper tools, it didn't matter.
Several kind people commented help on the bounty post, mostly telling me what I already knew (save Melissa, who offered quite the creative--albeit convoluted--solution, and given the time I devoted to this, I'm surprised it's not something I tried).
At the eleventh hour (not quite literally but mind-numbingly close), Daisy the Blissfully Domestic designer swooped in and saved my day; capturing the screen herself and photoshopping it for me. She's my new hero.
In summary, to embed a Wordle:
- Capture a screen shot ("PrtSc" key, which on my pc is the "Fn" key with the "Ins" key).
- Paste it into your editor (Control "v").
- Crop it, save it, and voila! You've got yourself a jpeg.
If you're like me though and don't have no stinkin' software to do the job for you, read Edublogger's VERY THOROUGH and much more professional post about embedding Wordles (includes links to online screen capture tools).
Just goes to show you, while you can "build a house" without a "hammer", it's much easier with one...!
(p.s. If you create a Wordle be sure to leave your link in comments, k?)