Smallworlds Fashion - Posting on the Forum

Hello and welcome to my new blog, Journalier. If you do not know me already, I am Bianca Montgomery and I have just entered the fashionista world. I have a thread on the Smallworlds forum and today I'm going to be giving you my tips and tricks to running a fashion forum thread!

So firstly, you will need a few things. A screenshotting tool, an editing tool (optional), an isolated space and inspiration (I will get to that soon).

First we need an isolated space. Just use one of the new avatar spaces, customise the background to how you like it, set it as members only and you're all set! Well, nearly. You need the outfit of course! You can look for inspiration, using Tumblr, Pinterest, WeHeartIt or Google but remember to stay original! Don't take another fashionista's outfit.

Now onto getting the photo! For a screenshotting tool, if you are using a Windows computer you should already have Snipping Tool preinstalled on your computer. If not, there are substitutes. One of them, my favorite is online, it's called Lightshot. If you have Google Chrome or a Chromebook I suggest you add this extension to your browser. I'm pretty sure it's a Firefox extension too. It's pretty easy, you click the extension button (the purple feather) and it opens a new tab, it will put a shadow over your last opened tab and give you the option to select the area, as shown below. All you need to do, is drag your cursor over the area you wish to get a screenshot of, and it gives you the option to save, and share in many other ways.

If you want to screenshot on a Mac you need to press Control+Shift+4, drag your cursor over the desired area, and you will find it saved as a .png on your desktop.

Now that we have our image, we may decide to edit it! This is totally optional but if you do choose editing, you don't need anything fancy. Majority of the time I use this free online software, www.picmonkey.com. It's very easy to use and there are many features, such as filters, overlays, frames, etc. I also use this for YouTube video thumbnails and book covers. The results are always clean and professional. The only editing I do on my images is I remove the background. I use this website called; www.online-image-editor.com. When you first get to the page, it looks very cheesy, but it actually does the job very well, and it's much easier than most websites to remove backgrounds. This website can also do many more things, so feel free to have a poke around and see what else you can do.

First I put in the picture I am going to use. You can only import images that are saved locally, no links.

Then you will go to the 'Wizard' tab and select 'Transparency' then you select the area of the photo you wish to remove, and it should do the job. Sometimes I have to click multiple times and

go over some areas with the pen to remove some pesky lines, but it works really well.

Then to finish it up, I usually have 2 photos per outfit, from 2 different angles, so I add them together using Picmonkey and save my final image.

But you must be wondering. HOLLUP, how do I even get these on the forum thread? Another handy website, www.tinypic.com has got your back! All you do is import the photo, and it gives you links. Copy the 2nd one down, that has [img] at the beginning of it and paste it into your thread. It's as easy as that, just preview the post to make sure it's looking good and publish it!

How do you get attention you ask? Well there's really not much you can do to make your thread popular, but here are the 3 things I do.

1. Make sure your outfits are different and individual, people won't tend to come back or appreciate your outfits if they're copied straight from someone else's thread, or worn constantly in world. Ensure your outfits are interesting too, not just a pair of shoes, a shirt and skirt, add accessories! Belts, bracelets, necklaces and hats are your best options but if you're finicky like me and pay attention to detail, you may want to add rings.

2. Bumping your thread. This is probably the handiest tip I'm ever going to give you. Bump your thread! All you do is post a comment and it pushes your thread back up to the top of the category it's under, as Smallworlds lists the threads in time order. People tend to click the first one there, so you will definitely get a couple of comments. But there's a catch. You can't excessively bump your thread, you must wait 3 hours or Smallworlds will lock your thread to make it fair for others.

3. Stay active! It doesn't matter if you miss a couple of days of posts, the readers will probably understand as we can all get very busy in real life and of course, real life is our priority but you can't forget to bump! Doesn't have to be every 3 hours, just every now and then if you forget or else you'll loose attention.

That's all the advice I can give you on making a forum thread, I hope this helped you and inspired you to use the forum! in many ways it can add more entertainment to your Smallworlds experience and prevent you from getting bored. A guilty pleasure of mine is roleplaying on there when the game is being updated, or I have nothing better to do. Do you do that too? Comment below. (:

I post every Tuesday and Friday (Wednesday and Saturday for me but I changed it to suit y'all in the Northern Hemisphere) so check back then for more! I will also put my daily outfits on here too!

Bookmark this page if you're keen and I'll be back in 3 days!

~ Bianca x