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Jon Claremont

Jon is the Community Ambassador at Expressions. He generously gives of his time and highlights great photos from the community. You'll see him post regularly here on the news blog.

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A Little Holiday Cheer

Although growing up in South Africa meant the holiday season was always during summer, I always associate winter, snow, steaming cocoa and all the Northern Hemisphere holiday goodies with this time of year. I still recall the cans of fake snow we would use to cover all the windows in the house to give it the impression that it was snowing outside. This illusion was usually very short-lived since the windows and doors would have to remain open for any cool breeze that may alleviate the sweltering heat, not to mention the fake 'snow' often melted within the week. A few years spent in Boston has given me a true taste for the holiday seasons I always imagined as a child, and with those in mind, we have a few winter/holiday templates to share with you. It's fun to decorate things, so why not dress-up your photoblog a little for the holiday season.

The first two new templates are Holidays in Blue and Holidays in Red. Simple and fun with the emphasis on snowflakes so it doesn't matter what traditions you following during this season—perhaps you don't follow any traditions at all—and it's simply fitting for December. You'll notice on the new templates we've added a Feed icon where your ATOM link is. This is the standard icon used to represent a link to a feed, so we've adopted this standard, although we've tweaked the colours a tad to match the rest of the template (I am a designer after all and mis-matching colours bothers me).

The next two new templates are a bit of fun and something new from us here at Expressions. Photoblogs are all about the photos so we usually keep our templates very minimal and clean - nothing to detract from the photos you are sharing. With these two templates, Mr. Snowman and Winterscape, we had a little more fun and brought in some illustrations. The images are still the main focus, as they should be, but the illustrations add a little bit of holiday fun, and that's always a good thing.

As always, changing your template is easy, and can always be changed back with a couple of clicks. Simply go to 'Templates' > 'Import a Template'. From here you will see a list of all our current available templates. These four, Holidays in Red, Holidays in Blue, Mr. Snowman and Winterscape are all advanced templates. Locate the one you want to use and click on 'Add'. That template will now be in your Templates area for you to use at any time. To update your photoblog with the new template, simply go to your 'Pages' and click on 'Edit' next to the photoblog you want to edit. Within the drop down menu next to 'Templates', find the template you just imported, select it, and click on 'Update'. That's it. You are now all decked out for the holidays!

We hope you enjoy these and have fun adding a little holiday cheer to your photoblogs for a few weeks. We understand that not everyone celebrates this time of year in the same way—how boring would things be if we did—but we do hope you will all have a happy and peaceful season, and that you will find lots of time to get out with your cameras!

Posted by Lorissa in Expressions Community, Templates | Comment