A Deck of Slides in Review

Posted on November 1, 2011 by The Giddy Tigress

Have you ever encountered a situation where you discover that you have too many photos to use on your blog posts or website?  And to add to your dilemma, all of the photos are good ones.  That’s a good thing to a certain extent, but if you were to inundate your site or blog post with too many photos, it might take too slow to load and it will most certainly drive readers away.

I, for one, do have a tendency of ending up with too many photos, and I’m happy to say that I have finally found a great solution to displaying all of those photos in a neat and professional manner.

It’s called SlideDeck and I’m glad to have stumbled upon it, and here, I’m gonna let you know how I think SlideDeck is a excellent companion to have on any blog.

I downloaded the Lite version a few days ago (which is free) and have been playing around with it.  Slide Deck works as a WordPress plugin so installing it was a breeze, straight from the Plugins menu on the WordPress sidebar.  It is a jquery slider plugin, which enables between 3 to 10 embedded slides to be displayed in a “sliding” manner, for want of putting it in layman’s terms.  The slides can consist of anything at all: images, text, PDF files; think of it as having your very own slideshow on your website.

Here’s what you can do with this plugin:

  • Create a Recent Posts slidedeck to display posts that were recently published.
  • Create a Featured Posts slidedeck to display featured posts.  Once the plugin is installed, there is a little box beside each post which allows you to mark the post as a Featured one, should you choose to do so.

Both Recent Posts and Featured Posts slidedecks can be created using the Smart SlideDeck option.  Here’s a slidedeck I created for some Featured Posts from my blog:

[SlideDeck id=’3201′ width=’100%’ height=’390px’]

Not too bad, eh?

Other things which I think SlideDeck would prove useful for:

  • Headers in Websites or Blogs
  • Photo Montages
  • Pictorial step-by-step for recipes or tutorials
  • Cartoons
  • Online Presentations

The created slidedeck can be placed anywhere on the blog/site, or even inserted directly into the template files.  It is definitely a unique and professional way of sprucing up your website.

I wished the fonts and font sizes on the slidedecks were customizable though, because I find that sometimes they seem too big.  Well, perhaps they are…in SlideDeck Pro. Heh…

Have you heard of SlideDeck or are you currently using it?

Posted in Blogging, Rainmakers | Tagged | 1 Comment

Food Waste Friday: Neglected Food

Posted on October 28, 2011 by The Giddy Tigress

Today (and hopefully every Friday), I’m joining The Frugal Girl and other bloggers out there in posting my food waste photos within the past week, calling it Food Waste Friday.  It is hoped that by sharing pictures of the food I have wasted, it would motivate me to reduce wastage as much as possible.  I will try my very best to participate each week, and hopefully there will be weeks where I will be able to happily report that there was 0% wastage! 🙂

fwf-Oct28-2011

I threw out about half a cup of milk this week (see the level in the bottle above) and a carrot that should have stayed good, but gone all soft and mushy in the fridge.  The problem with this fresh milk that I buy is that it has to be consumed within 4 days from the date it is opened.  And sometimes I forget.

Well, hopefully the coming week will be a better one 🙂

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A Year Wiser…and A Tad Sleeker :)

Posted on October 24, 2011 by The Giddy Tigress

Thank you all for your wonderful birthday wishes.  They really made my day! (and I am still wading through the Facebook wall postings… I’ll get to them all soon, I promise!)

If you’re wondering if I am still busy celebrating my birthday (which was 3 days ago), well yes and no.  I’ve been kinda AWOL here because I just have so many other to-dos, I’m finding it hard to keep up.  To add to that, I have 2 articles with urgent deadlines to fulfill and I’m once again wishing I had more than 24 hours in a day.  But then again, don’t we all? 😀

That, … or that I could stay alert without feeling sleepy and tired all the time.

But anyway, my birthday was a good one.  It comes with “growing old gracefully”, I suppose… heh.

mybirthday2

My son chose 3 different cake slices from Secret Recipe, and placed a couple of candles on them for effect.  Then we sang the Birthday Song and I blew the candles (but not before making a wish!)

It was very late at night at that time, and it was difficult to get them both to pose nicely for the camera…this was the best shot I could find:

mybirthday1

Oh yeah, and did I forget to tell you?  This is what my man gave me for my birthday this year:

Continue reading →

Posted in Close to Heart & Home, Relax & Celebrate, Thoughts & Scribblings | Tagged , , | 8 Comments

A Welcome Helping Hand

Posted on October 20, 2011 by The Giddy Tigress

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Image: scottchan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

There are a few reasons why we have never liked the idea of a live-in maid, but the major one would be that our privacy would be severely compromised.  With the initial trust issue to deal with, coupled with the fact that there would literally be a stranger in our midst at all times, we felt that the price we had to pay for someone to “take care of the house” just wasn’t worth the while.

At one time, for the sake of having a clean house, I considered hiring the hourly maid-cleaning services.  I even made a few phone calls, but somehow I never got around to doing it.  The thought of having to be there to supervise each and every thing that is done for 4 hours straight overwhelmed me.

So I did what little cleaning and scrubbing I could, making sure the important things like the floor and bathrooms were relatively clean.  But there was only so much I could do, especially now with two kids to handle too.  Plus, I sometimes had to take a self-declared rest because my hand eczema sometimes acted up, resulting in my inability to do much.  It was lately that I began to feel that so many other *important* places in our home were being neglected; the kitchen, the balconies, some nooks and other crannies…

I finally decided to engage some hired help in the form of a freelance hourly maid, who provides house-cleaning services for a very reasonable fee.  More importantly though, she was recommended by a friend of mine, so she’s more or less “tried and tested”.

But having had absolutely NO experience whatsoever with maid cleaning services, I had the urge to clean and tidy up a few things around the house the day before the cleaner arrived, just so it didn’t look too messy.  My husband thinks I’m crazy, as if I was getting the house ready for a guest…but that’s how I was.  Haha…you don’t expect me to dirty the house on purpose, right?

And yesterday, was trial run day.  She arrived at about 8:45a.m. and I asked her to tackle the kitchen stove first.  She didn’t just do that…she also wiped the cabinets and countertops clean, wiped the windows and walls of the kitchen and then proceeded to clean the balconies.  She was independently efficient and worked quickly, plus the results were nothing short of marvelous!

I was impressed.

I definitely could not clean so many things in the same 4 hours all by myself.  I had no regrets and I am very pleased indeed.

My kids were also visibly impressed by how nice everything smelled (although I don’t understand how different it is when I cleaned up, since I used the same detergents :P), and hubby was also very glad.  The best part was that I didn’t need to deal with itchy hands which I sometimes get when working with detergents.  (I’m allergic to rubber gloves by the way, so I can’t wear them while I work)

Looks like we might be making this a regular fixture…

Posted in Thoughts & Scribblings | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments

I Made Cake Pops…well, almost.

Posted on October 19, 2011 by The Giddy Tigress

cakepops1

You know that birthday cake I baked for Pete?  Well, we all enjoyed looking at it, and singing a Happy Birthday song, and then we had some cake.

But you know, there’s only so much 2 adults and 2 kids can eat.  And the 2 adults don’t really crave cake all that much either.  I didn’t want the kids to load up on sugar the whole day long too.

So I kept the cake in the fridge for a few days, and after that, I decided that instead of throwing it out, I would give cake pops a go. 🙂

I had read so much about cake pops and I was itching to try my hand out at it.

Well, turns out making cake pops was much harder that I’d thought.

I had used the remainder of  my chocolate ganache instead of frosting and at the point of rolling out the balls of cake pops, it still looked good.  But once I put the melted chocolate and decorations on and placed them on the sticks to dry, disaster happened.

To my horror, the cake balls started sliding down the sticks!  And the chocolate didn’t really dry up and set as I’d expected them to.  In the end, all of my cake pops were transformed into cake balls.  I like to call them pretty chocolate truffles.  Thank goodness for mini cupcake liners! 😀

cakepops2

However, I was still unsatisfied on the outcome and tried to rescue them by placing the cake balls in the fridge to set for a bit.  Then I plunged the sticks onto them and served them immediately.  Happy faces greeted them and I was a happy momma too!

cakepops3

Here’s a post-mortem of why I think my cake pops failed at first and how to overcome them in future:

  1. After the cake balls have been chilled in the freezer for about 20 minutes, I should NOT have taken all of them out at the same time.  The heat in Malaysia is horrendous, and could have caused early melting of the cake pops.
  2. After decorating, cake pops should be chilled in the refrigerator to ensure the cake pops stay in place.
  3. Cake pops should be served cold and should not and can not be left out in the open for too long.  This might seem a problem if I’m gonna serve this at a party in Malaysia.  See point no. 1 above.
  4. Using melted chocolate chips was probably not the best idea.  I should have used candy melts instead, except I don’t know where to find them here.  Melted chocolate does not set very fast, and hence causes the melting.
  5. Could using popsicle sticks have been better than satay sticks?  I had used the latter, simply because I only had those at hand.

Anything else I could have done better?  Well maybe there is a reason why cupcakes fare better here in Malaysia compared to cake pops.  In any case, after watching my antics in the kitchen that day, my daughter has taken to creating imaginary cake pops from Legos and other toys, complete with flavors and toppings. 🙂

Posted in Drooling & Cooking, Thoughts & Scribblings | Tagged , , , | 4 Comments