..............
............
existing properties
............
............
background: #COLOR_CODE url(URL_OF_THE_ICON_WHERE_YOU_STORED_IT) no-repeat left;
padding-left: 25px;
}
Create Recent Comments Widget Using FeedBurner BuzzBoost and CSS
syndicated content boosted by feedcat.net
Current Feed Content from 9 Jan 09 22:20
DIVIDING TIMES
2008-10-31T07:19:00.000-07:00Its been a long time since I have posted my last article and I know two months is a big gap. Well, I jumped inot a bit of freelancing, designing websites and logos. The latest one I just completed is for Diamond Healthcare in Philadelphia, where it is just a static website.
However I enjoyed the work and the output is this www.diamondhealthcarestaffing.comBinish MathewIs The Current Economy Affecting New Tech Startups?
2008-10-11T05:14:00.000-07:00
Its clear that our economy is bad and is going really worse these days and we all are concerned about this. Large companies are pulling off existing projects, reluctant to start new ones, is this a good time to start a new technology start up? You might say NO!, but it is clear that even now new companies are being started in these days.
Recent TechCrucnh50 and DemoFall conferences have seen a lot of new start ups coming in and the interesting part is that they all are in a good shape. Thanks to the advanced technology, that helps these start ups to survive with less expenses. The fact is that they don't need much money for a tech start up.
With cloud computing gaining popularity, a majority of these tech start ups rely on this technology and can operate with much less amount of money and infrastructure cost. A good example is Amazon's EC2 [Elastic Compute Cloud], which lets small companies to make use of server and computer resources, which most of the web companies wish to have, and that too without paying much for that.
This along with new start up office complexes rowing through out the country, is helping new tech companies to survive and serve the global audience at a cost which is much less than the amount dot com start ups blow off earlier. This, actually is a great thing as these companies keeps the technology live and keeps the tech world evolving. Compare these large companies, who really are interested in acquiring these small start ups and making it big.
Even though there is a risk of relying on these infrastructure platforms, which like the cloud computing , still in its early childhood, this is a good sign to a lot of innovators with creative ideas to come front and start their own companies, thus providing lifeblood to the IT field.Binish Mathew2nd EntreCard Contest at Gosublogger.com
2008-09-30T07:34:00.000-07:00Gosu at GosuBlogger are starting his 2nd entrecard contest. It’s very easy to enter the contest, all you need to do is simply subscribe to his FEED by email.The Prizes:
- 2000 Entrecredits + Review on GosuBlogger + Domain name + Celebrity e-mail
- 1500Entrecredits + Link on GosuBlogger + Link on Template Footer + Celebrity e-mail
- 1000 Entrecredits + Link on Template Footer + Celebrity e-mail
How to Enter:
- Write a review about this contest.
- Subscribe to Gosu feedburner via E-mail.
Binish MathewHow to Use Icons and Web Buttons in Your Blog
2008-09-29T09:26:00.000-07:00Recently I published two articles which brought before you set of Icons and web buttons that you can use in your blogs and web sites. After reading the article, one of my friends and a reader of this blog sent me a mail asking how can we make use of these icons in our blogs.
Use Icons and Web Buttons in Your Blog
This post will tell you how to use Icons in your blogs to enhance the style and appearance of your blogs. Icons are used in blog and sites mostly in two parts. One, they can be used instead of link texts, that is, instead of having a text link to one of your posts or an external blog/site, you can put an icon or button. This is pretty straight forward use and can be done by anyone.
An example of using icons or buttons as links is as given below. Click on the icon
and it will take you to the RSS Feed for this blog.
The code for this is a so simple as given below
Now the second use is as background for headers and some other information. You can see the user icon shown below the post title in this blog, just before my name. You cannot click this as this is specified as the background for the division which holds my name. Well, this is also pretty simple and the background is defined in the CSS.
We will see how to add an icon as background to a post title. We already have an article published on how to edit post title in your blog. For this we need to find the style definition for your blog's post title or header. This usually comes in the style sheet of your blog template. If you are using a customized template, chances are that the style is defined in the title tag () itself.
To do this find search for and find
in your blog's template code. This XHTML tag is normally wrapped inside aor a
tag. This differs from template to template. But in almost all the cases it will be either and h2 or an h3 element. Also chances are that this will be like
or a
.
At present the header will look like this as given below, without any backgrounds. Just a plain header.THIS IS THE POST HEADER
Once you found this tag, get the CLASS name or ID name, in the example above it isCLASS_NAME
, as specified in your blog's template code. Search for it in your blog template's style sheet. If it is defined asclass="CLASS_NAME"
, it will appear as.CLASS_NAME
, or if it is defined asid="ID_NAME
, then search for#ID_NAME
.
If it is defined as a CLASS then the style should be defined as given below. There might be difference in the contents, but it will be wrapped like this..CLASS_NAME {..................}
If it is defined as an ID then it will appear as given below.#CLASS_NAME {..................}
Now check whether there is a property calledbackground
defined inside this. This normally comes like this.background: #ffffff; /*background color*/
Change this as given belowbackground: #ffffff url(URL_OF_THE_ICON_WHERE_YOU_STORED_IT) no-repeat left;
Replace URL_OF_THE_ICON_WHERE_YOU_STORED_IT with the URL of the icon you want to show as the background.
This is the resulting header, with a background icon added to it.THIS IS THE POST HEADER
As you can see, the heading comes above the background and it hides the background. we don't want it to happen like this. We need the background also to be shown.
For this, find for thepadding
property inside the style definition.We need to change this also so that the image is shown before the heading, not below it. We have to move the header a little bit to the right so that the background is shown. At the end of the CLASS or ID definition addpadding-left: 25px;
as given below. Take care that you place the line above the}
, the closing parenthesis. This is to ensure that if there is some left padding properties defined inside this CLASS of ID, this will override that definition. So the resulting code will look like this..CLASS_NAME{
OR#ID_NAME{..............
............
existing properties
............
............
background: #COLOR_CODE url(URL_OF_THE_ICON_WHERE_YOU_STORED_IT) no-repeat left;
padding-left: 25px;
}
Replace the #COLOR_CODE with the color code for your blog background or the background color of your choice. Also replace URL_OF_THE_ICON_WHERE_YOU_STORED_IT with the URL of the icon you want to show as the background.THIS IS THE FINAL POST HEADER
You can increase or decrease the padding-left depending upon the size of the icon you are using as the background. Also please take sure that you don't make changes to other properties which are defined inside the CSS CLASS or ID.
You can download excellent and beautiful icon sets from here.
Hope this will help you to understand how to make use of icons and buttons in your blog. This background property can be used with any of the element, like the sidebar header, the comments header etc.
Let me know if you need any help regarding this and will be happy to assist you in that. Please leave your suggestions, questions and comments.Binish MathewAdding Digg Button Inside Your Blog Posts - With More Options
2008-09-28T17:24:00.000-07:00Earlier, somewhere in July, I published an article about how to add a Digg button inside you individual blog posts. Even though nobody hasn’t said anything about the article, or no one has any comments about that article, I can see a lot of people referring to that article through my site statistics. So I decided to publish an updated article about how to add a Digg button inside your blog posts, with some extended features.
In the earlier post we saw how to add a simple Digg button inside your individual articles. It just takes you to Digg site, with the reference to the article URL as shown below.
Adding Simple Digg Button to Your Blog
In this post we will see how to send the Article Title along with the article URL to the Digg website. This will avoid the need to type in the Title Digg website, when the readers are submitting the article. So after adding this the submit form in Digg will look like as given below.
Add Digg Button To Your Blog Posts With More Options
To have this function enabled in the Digg button embedded in your blog, you need to make some changes in the code which I had already published in the earlier post. If you don’t have the Digg button embedded in your blog posts, refer my previous article about how to add a Digg Button to you Blog.
The code which I had already published in my previous post is given below. We will make some changes in the code. Take care that the steps are same as in the previous post. We are only going to make somechangesadditions to the existing code.EXISTING CODE / FINAL CODE IN THE PREVIOUS POST
In this code we are going to add two additional JavaScript variablesdigg_title
anddigg_window
, of which,digg_title
will be used to hold the Article Title anddigg_window
will hold the condition whether you want the Digg submission page to be opened in a new window when the reader clicks the Digg button. If the value fordigg_window
is left blank the Digg submission page will open in the same window as your blog article page.
Now those who already have the above code in your blogs, replace the above piece of code with the piece of code given below. Those who are not having a Digg button embedded in their blogs, they can also add a Digg button be copying the code given above and pasting it inside your blog template code. The steps to follow are described in the previous post about >how to add a Digg button.MODIFIED DIGG BUTTON CODE WITH ADDITIONAL FUNCTIONS
The code, if you use it exactly as given above, will open a new page wit the Digg article submission page, with the Article Title field already filled with the title of your blog post, when a reader clicks on the Digg button. If you don't want a new window to be opened up replace the linedigg_window = "new";
with thisdigg_window = "";
.
Now, there are more things that can be passed to the article submission page automatically.- First one is the Topic under which you want to submit the article. Before submitting an article in Digg, you need to select the appropriate Topic. Using this option inside our code might be a tricky one as most of the blogs publishes articles in diverse topics and we can only set a single topic for the whole blog.
But if your blog articles comes under a single topic, say World News, then you can send this as the default topic of all the articles which are being digged by your readers. To enable this in your Digg button add a new line to the code which we modified above. Modify the code as given below. - Second one is the background of the Digg button. By default, the background color shown for a Digg button is white and this will not look good in a blog/site which is having a different background color.
To change the background color or the Digg button change the code as given below and replace the BACKGROUND_COLOR with the color code of your blog/site background. For example, if the background of your blog/site is black, replace the BACKGROUND_COLOR with #000000
PS : Adding Digg button to your blog/site is fine and should do. But, don't forget to Digg this article.Binish Mathew- First one is the Topic under which you want to submit the article. Before submitting an article in Digg, you need to select the appropriate Topic. Using this option inside our code might be a tricky one as most of the blogs publishes articles in diverse topics and we can only set a single topic for the whole blog.
10 Free Web Icon and Button Sets for Web Designers
2008-09-27T22:06:00.000-07:00Presenting before you in this article is another set of web icons and buttons for web designers and bloggers, which are free to download and use. The collection contains some inspiring and cool designs.1. Web 2.0 Icons
Cool nice icons (RSS, YouTube, Flickr, Technorati, Del.icio.us, Feedburner) in sizes of 48×48 pixel and 32×32 pixel free for download. Download [46 Downloads]2. RSS Feed Icons Wood Design
This set contains a collection of RSS Feed icons designed in wood shades and styles designed by WebFruits.This set contains 12 icons in .png format and are licensed under Creative Commons, which means that they are free to Share — to copy, distribute and transmit the work except that you may not use this work for commercial purposes.
Download [24 Downloads]3. Blog Social Bookmarking Icons
This set includes three set of icons for Del.icio.us, RSS Feed, Technorati, Flickr, YouTube which are designed mainly for blog users and are very attractive, also from WebFruits.4. Social Web Buttons
This set includes buttons for Anobii, coComment, Del.icio.us, Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Last-FM, Pownce, Slideshare. A stunning collection of Social Web buttons from Webfruits.5. Silk Icons
“Silk” is a smooth, free icon set, containing over 700 16-by-16 pixel icons in strokably-soft PNG format. Containing a large variety of icons, you're sure to find something that tickles your fancy. And all for a free from famfamfam.
Download [27 Downloads]6. Aquatics Social Icons
This icon set contains 30 iPhone-inspired icons (in Aquaticus flavor) of the various social networking/Web 2.0 sites, from Quake9.Each icon is available in these 4 sizes: 60×60 pixels, 48×48 pixels, 24×24 pixels, and 16×16 pixels.
Download [77 Downloads]7. On Stage Web Icons
The set contains 49 free vector icons including PSD which can be useful for both corporate and personal setting. You can use the set for free — without any restrictions whatsoever. This icon set was designed by Deziner Folio.
Download PNG files + PSD Sources [61 Downloads]8. WebDev Social Bookmark Icons
Download this free icon pack for your Website or Application. It is an Add-on to IconTexto Webdev icon pack. 8 icons in PNG (128x128, 48x48, 32x32, 16x16) format.9. Function Free Icon Set
A beautiful set of 128 free icons free for any use. Includes various popular social media Icons.
Download [38 Downloads]10. Free Developers Icons
90 Free Developers Icons in this set, Including three kinds of color , Blue, Green and Yellow, in Png and Ico formats. This set contains icons of size 32x32, 24x24, 18x18 Pixels. Download [43 Downloads]
After selecting the Icon sets and downloading them, leave your comments about this so that I can provide you all with more and more posts of this kind. Suggestions and critics are Most Welcome!Binish MathewCreate CSS/HTML and Images for Rounded Corners Easily
2008-09-26T05:43:00.000-07:00Many websites and blogs use divisions or blocks with rounded corners these days and needless to say they are pretty good too. Ever wondered how to create rounded cornered divisions in your blog or website? We already have an article about creating rounded corners using CSS. But I would like to introduce to you all a smart website which is dedicated for rounded corners. This is just around the corner as well. Just Kidding...
All right, here is the main thing of this article. Guys from RoundedCornr are there to help you to create rounded cornered divisions or sections for your blog or site.
This website offers you pretty simple ways to create divisions or sections with rounded corners. All you need is to specify the corner radius in pixels, the background color, and the color of the box. Click the button and you can see the preview how the box will look like. They also generate 4 images for four corners to be downloaded.
The best part is they will tell give you the CSS & HTML codes to create the rounded corners. This is the highlight of this service as the process is simple and is understandable by even a layman. Only thing you need to take care of is to specify the background color as same as the background color of the page where you want to place these sections with rounded corners.
You can also create rounded corners with simple gradients through this site. This generates code for a box with rounded corners and a color gradient, just like the box surrounding this section. 'Gradient height' determines the distance to make a complete transition from the top color to the bottom color. You can specify any gradient angle between 0 (vertical) and 90 (horizontal) degrees.
When you are at this site, don't forget to checkout the Rounded Corner with Border and Single Rounded Corner services. If you want to make some good buttons with rounded corners use the Single Rounded Corner Image service. You can create a single GIF image of a box with rounded corners, border, gradient, and/or text. You can use this image as background for your buttons, tabs, text box, etc.
If you are not at all interested in creating rounded cornered boxes/sections/divisions with images, then your should check out here to know how to create rounded cornered divisions with just CSS.Binish MathewCoquette Part 2 - Free Icon Set for Download
2008-09-25T11:58:00.000-07:00Guys at DryIcons has just released a new set of Icons, 2nd in the Coquette series. These are the better, improved version of one of DryIcons' most downloaded and most popular free icons sets. They have included 50 brand new icons in this set for the users.
Download Free Icon Set from DryIcons
This playful free icon set contains curvy and colorful free icons made with one goal, to get all the affection to your projects. These free icons flirt with style! "Coquette" free icon set contains 50 high quality, free icons in these sizes: 16x16px, 32x32px, 48x48px, 64x64px and 128x128px and 32-bit transparency PNG file format.
They come in .ico, .ong and .icns ( for Mac users). You can donwload the whole set of icons from DryIcons web site. Also a complete list of these icons are also avialable for preview.Binish MathewEntreCard Giving Credits for Blog Posts - This is Awesome!
2008-09-25T07:28:00.000-07:00This is Awesome! Really Awesome!!I was going through my Entrecard account and saw that my points had increased enormously. Yesterday when I was in my account and after purchasing some advertisements, the left out points were around 200. But today it is showing more than 1000 points in my account.
EntreCard Giving Credits for Blog Posts
I was surprised to see this as this never happened with me and as far as I remember I haven't won any contests that give entrecard points. I checked into the transactions list and saw as shown above.
I was given EC Credits for my blog posts! That too 25 EC credits for a single post...I don't know whether this is an error from entrecard side or not. Whatever it is I am happy that I am getting something in return to the time I am spending to post these articles. Thanks Entre Card.
I do agree that entre card drives traffic to your site and mine. But it is a fact that no users stay in the site for more that 3 seconds. That is the time they need to drop on the entrecard widget. Everyone is interested in getting credits via drops and not in the blog or blog contents. This is really sad and also affects the bounce rate in our sites as there users are coming in and leaving in seconds.
I hope entrecard will do something to keep the users in the site for at least 30 seconds. Being done that entrecard droppers will stay in your site or blog from some time.Binish MathewHow to Style Different Elements in Blogger - Post Title
2008-09-24T21:18:00.000-07:00Recently I was going through the site statistics of my site provided by statcounter and found an interesting thing. I saw a lot of blogspot users searching for terms like "how to change font size of date in blogger", "how change color of post title" etc. Well even though these things are simple queries and can be done by anyone, I also searched for these terms and found nothing.
How to Style the Post Title in My Blog
It is interesting to see that there are hundreds of blogs providing tips and tricks to customize the blogger template, there are no posts for these basic things. So here we go. In this article we will see how to change the font size of different elements in a blogger blog.
Before editing your template or performing any action in your template I would prefer you read this article about editing your template.How to Change The Post Title Font Style
All the styles for different elements in a blogger template is defined in the Style sheet that comes in between the and tags. So to change the style of an element we need to find under which ID or CLASS name the style of that element is defined. Finding this is pretty simple. Follow the steps given below.- Go to Blogger Home
- Click on Layout option for the blog and click on Edit HTML
- Now check on the "Expand Widget Templates" check box at the top right corner of the HTML Editor.
- Inside the HTML search for the piece of code as given below.
- For almost all the blog templates the Title of the Post comes immediately after this. This is an element in 99% of the blogger blog templates. This should look like as given below.
- In this case the class which defines the style for the post title is title as you can see in the line
- Now search for the word .title in your style sheet. Don't remember the .[dot] before the title as this helps you to get the class definition easily.
- If you can't find anything like that in your style sheet don't worry. we will add a CSS Class of property with that name.
- If you already have a class or id named title in your style sheet, you can edit it to change the font style. If the font styles are already defined, edit them as per your needs. The basic font styles used are font-family, font-size, font-weight, font-color.
So, to have a title with color black, size 22pixels, of family Arial, Verdana or Tahoma, and which is bold, add the blow given piece of code in your title style definitions..title{
font-family: Arial, Verdana, Tahoma;
font-size: 22px;
font-color: #000000;
font-weight: bold;/*replace bold with normal to make the font normal*/}
OR#title{
font-family: Arial, Verdana, Tahoma;
font-size: 22px;
font-color: #000000;
font-weight: bold;/*replace bold with normal to make the font normal*/} - Save the Template
If you dont have this class or id in your style sheet, or if no class or id is specified inside the tag, don't worry. We can add them in the style sheet.
First you need to create the class in the style sheet. Copy the code given in STEP 9 as given above (copy the one with the .title) and paste it inside your style sheet ( best place will be above ]]> ).
Second, find the place where the Post Title is placed. For this refer the steps 4 & 5 given above. When you find the tag replace it with . Take care that no other class or id is not defined inside the tag.
Save your template and you are good to go. The post titles in your blog will be displayed as in black, bold, Arial letters with a size of 22 pixels.
Now even after this, the style is not changed its is because of this. Your post title is also an acnhor text. That is, it is a link to the page where that particular post is displayed individually. There might be some styles defined for links which are also h2 headers.
In this case, the style we specified for the title class we defined comes before the style which is defined for the h2 a(the link object).
Now to change this you need to find something like this in your template code and edit it to meet your requirements.h2 a {..........}
To find more options and CSS styles for the font property you cna refer this article which tell you everything about font styles.Binish MathewPromote Your Website With Host My Post!
2008-09-24T09:15:00.000-07:00What's your story? Hi there! Welcome to Host my Post! We're a bit different, but in a good way. We're going to talk to both sides in the game, so hang loose. Should you keep reading? The headline news couldn't be better. "Both sides benefit!" So keep your eyeballs tracking.
First on to the mound to pitch: Advertisers Who? You're the content producers, the guys who slave over every crafted word and then want to see those words get out there. You could be a PR or advertising agency. You've got a marketing campaign to get underway and you need fast distribution for your Press Release or SEO optimized infomercial articles to the maximum number of high ranking sites.
Welcome to Host My Post! Couldn't be easier. Just load up your copy, offer to pay the going rate for Publishers to take your content, and watch your copy fly out round the net. There's no easier or faster way to get distribution. This is the single, most cost-effective way of running a campaign. You could be an author (perhaps running your own sites). You want to establish your expert status by getting your work out there. More importantly, you want inbound links to your own sites to boost their ranking.
Welcome to Host My Post! If your content is good enough and fits what the Publishers need, it will fly out of the virtual door for just a few dollars of promotion funding. First up to the plate: Publishers You're the guys who run those thousands of websites with the higher rankings. Stand up and take a bow. Thanks for coming.
You're here for two reasons: (1) you want to boost your rankings even higher by getting those inbound links so you're going to act like an Advertiser and offer some of your content to other Publishers; and/or (2) you're in business to make money (now there's a radical idea!) so you're going to take the cash to publish other people's copy when it fits into your sites. More good content on your sites. No need to commission it. No need to pay for it. Better ranking. More advertising and affiliate revenue. Can't see a downside here!
Welcome to Host My Post! Just register your sites. We'll check out their ranking - the higher the better - and then leave you to view the content on offer. Whenever you see something that fits your sites, you download a copy and take the dollars on offer. What could be easier? Well, if you run WordPress sitesWordPress sites, we've got a neat piece of code that automates the process so you just keep taking the money while your sites do the rest! So there you have it.
Advertisers meet Publishers, exchange content and cash. Everyone wins in this game! Sign up today!Binish MathewComing Soon - Music Albums Sold on Memory Cards
2008-09-23T14:52:00.000-07:00Just as vinyl once gave way to compact discs as the main physical medium for music, could CDs be replaced now by a fingernail-sized memory card?
Perhaps not entirely, but SanDisk Corp., four major record labels and retailers Best Buy Co. and Wal-Mart Stores Inc. are hoping that albums sold on microSD memory cards will at least provide an additional stream of sales.
The companies unveiled plans Monday to sell memory cards loaded with music in the MP format, free of copy protections. Called "slotMusic, " the new format is meant to address two intertwined trends.
Most albums are still sold in a physical format — 449 million were sold on CDs in 2007, while 50 million were sold digitally, according to Nielsen SoundScan — yet CDs are decreasingly popular. Albums sold on CD dropped almost 19 percent last year.
Given this, the record labels — Vivendi SA's Universal Music Group, Sony BMG Music Entertainment, Warner Music Group Corp. and EMI Group PLC — are hoping slotMusic can be another physical revenue source, and one that is more versatile than CDs given the kinds of gadgets people carry around these days.
Unlike when the CD was introduced and people had to buy new players, many people already have the ability to play slotMusic albums, since many cell phones and multimedia players support microSD cards.
These new albums will come with a small USB dongle that lets buyers use them with computers, too. [The USB dongle will also enable users to transfer the songs to iPods, which don't have memory-card slots, via a PC.]
Buyers will be able to use extra space on the cards to hold songs and photos from their own collections.
[The files will be MP3s encoded at a bitrate of 320 samples per second, the highest possible setting ensuring roughly CD-quality sound.]
The cards and dongles will come in boxes similar to current CD packaging, and Schreiber expects the cost of slotMusic releases to be "in the ballpark" of current CD prices.
It's not yet known exactly when — or how many — albums will be initially sold in the format, but Schreiber expects retailers to give a "sizable amount of shelf space" to slotMusic albums.
The albums are expected to debut at multiple retailers, including Best Buy and Wal-Mart stores in the U.S., and later in Europe.Binish MathewGoogle Phone Debut Scheduled for Oct. 22 | Price : $179.00
2008-09-23T13:50:00.000-07:00
The first phone that harnesses Google Inc.'s ambition to make the Internet easy to use on the go was revealed Tuesday, and it looks a lot like an iPhone.
T-Mobile USA showed off the G1, a phone that, like Apple Inc.'s iPhone, has a large touch screen. But it also packs a trackball, a slide-out keyboard and easy access to Google's e-mail and mapping programs.
T-Mobile said it will begin selling the G1 for $179 with a two-year contract. The device hits U.S. stores Oct. 22 and heads to Britain in November and other European countries early next year.
The phone will be sold in T-Mobile stores only in the U.S. cities where the company has rolled out its faster, third-generation wireless data network. By launch, that will be 21 cities, including New York, Los Angeles, Houston and Miami.
In other areas, people will be able to buy the phone from T-Mobile's Web site. The phone does work on T-Mobile's slower data network, but it's optimized for the faster networks. It can also connect at Wi-Fi hotspots.
The data plan for the phone will cost $25 per month on top of the calling service, at the low end of the range for data plans at U.S. wireless carriers. And at $179, the G1 is $20 less than the least expensive iPhone in the U.S.
Android, the free software powering the G1, is a crucial building block in Google's efforts to make its search engine and other services as accessible on cell phones as they already are on personal computers. The company believes it eventually might make more money selling ads that get shown on mobile devices than on PCs, a channel that will generate about $20 billion in revenue this year.Binish MathewBold And Beautiful - 25 Inspiring Web-Designs
2008-09-22T05:18:00.000-07:00Designing a website itself is a great job. Designing it different, inspiring and exciting is for people with special designing sense and they must have a line of thought different from others.
We always want to see something different, something inspiring, something we can enjoy. There are thousands of fabulous website designs in the net, most of them are known only to a niche of people. Unless until your work or design is known to the millions of people who are surfing the net daily, it will remain familiar only to a small number of people.
Here are some of the inspiring and beautiful website designs which I found. Some of these are in flash, while others are pure CSS designs.
Binish MathewYou Don't Need to Learn Anything to be an SEO Expert
2008-09-21T09:51:00.000-07:00What do you think about Search Engine Optimization? Do you think its is any use to do SEO? What do you need to do to become and SEO Expert? There are a lot of different views and opinions about this roaming around. Read on to find some of these views and opinions.Hi,
Kindly suggest me, how to become a SEO expert, I don't know any thing about SEO. Kindly give the steps to become a SEO expert from the scratch.
Thank You.This seems to be a valid question by someone who wants to learn something or he wants to know about something. What will be your answer for this question if you are asked with this question?
Well, It seems that a lot of people know different things about SEO. I came through a forum where this question is asked and being answered by a lot of people. It seems that the person who asked the question will never ever touch a computer after reading the answers. The type of answers he received for this question will make him think about SEO in a new perspective for sure. God only knows whether he will come up with a new idea of SEO which is a mix of these different ideas or not.Answer No 1 : You Need a Time Machine
Go back to 90's and build a lot of sites for yourself. Make your won theory about rising and falling of web sites and sell SEO services to small companies.
His advice is : "Build your sites for users, not for search engines". - sounds good, isn't it?Answer No 2 : SEO? There is nothing Like That
Don't waste your time with SEO. The only thing, related to SEO, that you need to concentrate on is writing valid code.If you build a content rich, interesting , well written site then you're already an SEO expert.Answer No 3 : Its not What Developers Do
SEO is not just knowing what to do it is knowing what not to do. (This guy is blaming developers for everything from design to deployment.)Answer No 4 : Get some Scapegoats
You don't need to learn anything about SEO to be an SEO expert. Call some companies offering to SEO their website. Tell them you will initially charge no up-front fee - you will be paid only for positive results according to some formula. Do something to their site. If something positive happens call them. Otherwise don't call them back. Now you are an SEO expert.Answer No 5 : Seems to be Honest.
SEO takes work, and its really something you learn over time working with your website. Once you have a website, you need to monitor its ranking in Google etc, and learn through modifying it how to get higher up the ranking tree. If you stick to KISS (keep it simple stupid) you will be over 50% of the way there.Answer No 6 : SEO Expert? But Why?
This guy wants to know why the person who asked the question wants to know about SEO. He will give the advice based on this only.Answer No 7 : Lather... Rinse.... Repeat...
Same as any other field; learn about it; do it; learn some more. Keep up top date. Learn some more. Do it more ... and better. Learn some more.SEO is no different to anything else. There are no short cuts to expertise.Answer No 8 : There is Nothing Like That
Sure, just give us a few years to type it up again for you. Would HTML or PDF be better? There's no such thing as a SEO expert. Those who claim to be so, are most likely lying and are definitely bragging.Answer No 9 : Convince of Confuse
So for a beginner, which is what this thread topic is, rather than getting diverted, I'd suggest that the best place to start is to get a grasp at the conceptual level of SEO, rather than getting bogged down in extraneous issues beyond the necessary level, in order to get an initial grasp of the process and purposes. - Is this for a beginner?Answer No 10 : The Moral of The Story Is....
With all said above I can't do anything but agree...However, thinking outside the box is not necessarily needed. In social media optimization some creativeness is a must - in SEO - there are some strict rules to follow and some others, referring to algos and stuff, that you need to discover yourself.
Now, what do you think of SEO. What do you think you need to learn to become an SEO Expert? You might have some different views about this. Is this what you were thinking about SEO? You might be now confused about SEO.To be frank, I am!. Really confused what is SEO and who is an SEO Expert...Binish MathewImages In My Blog Are Crazy | How Can I Style Them?
2008-09-19T13:13:00.001-07:00Recently I was surfing through some blogs as part of my routine blog trips to find something interesting and new. Instead of finding something interesting I saw the pathetic situation of some blogs with excellent content. Most of the blogs I found are having good content and are well presented.
Apply Styles to Your Images Enahnce Your Blog Appearence
But a common flaw in all these blogs are the images inserted inside the articles. Some of them are exceeding the blog width; some are place in between paragraphs where they are not related to etc. A little of style added to these images, and I am sure that they will attract more and more visitors and will have more readers to their blog.
This post will tell you how to stylize your images you post inside the posts. We will look into how to align images, how to add borders and captions, how to add margins and padding etc.Align Your Images
Aligning your images inside the article is an important thing that you need to take care of. A situation where you will need is when the width or size of the image is less that the size of the article container. For example, if your image is having a width of 200 pixels and your article area is of 500 pixels and if your image is not well aligned, you are wasting the 300 pixels available after inserting the image. Have a look below.
Image Not Aligned : If you place an image without any alignments it will look like this with the article paragraphs appearing above and below your image. The article area of 300 pixels is wasted after the image. Do you like this kind of presentation or the type of presentations given below?Right Aligned Image : This image is now aligned to the right and the article contents appear to the left of the image, where we have an area of 300 pixels available. Remove the 20 pixels which are added as the margin of the image, we still have 280 pixels of space available.float:right; margin: 10px 10px;">Left Aligned Image : This image is now aligned to the left and the article contents appear to the right of the image, where we have an area of 300 pixels available. Remove the 20 pixels which are added as the margin of the image, we still have 280 pixels of space available.float: left; margin: 10px 10px;">Add Margins
Add margin to your images when you are aligning them to left or right, which gives enough space around the image, that makes the image standing out of the paragraph and gives the reader enough space. To add margins to an image add the property margin: 10px 10px; to the style. The image shown to the left of this paragraph has a margin of 10 pixels in all the four sides.margin: 10px 10px;">
The above given line of code adds a margin of 10 pixels to all four sides of the image. If you want to add margins only to the left and right, use this : margin: 0px 10px;. Likewise you can also add margins to top and bottom side of an image using this : margin: 10px 0px;.
Also if you want to add margins to some particular sides of an image use this : margin: 10px 0px 0px 10px;. This will add a margin of 10 pixels to the top and left of the image. The default form of margin property is as follows.margin: top-side-margin right-side-margin bottom-side-margin right-side-marginAdd Borders
Adding borders to your images make them more stylish and effective. This depends entirely on the designer or the person who manages the site or blog. Adding borders to your images doesn’t harm the display of the content, in-fact, it makes the display more effective.
In the image which is shown above I added a border of thickness 1 pixel and of color #DADADA. In order to see the border I padded some space to all sides of the image with a width of 4 pixels. Now the border is 4 pixels away from the image in all sides. I also changed the background color of the image to #F3F3F3, which makes the image appears like it is pushed up a little bit.
To add a border to an image add the property border: [border-width] [border-style] [border-color]; to the image's style.
The three elements can take the following values
border-width: The desired thickness
border-style : solid / dotted / dashed / none [if you don’t want to display a border]
border-color : The desired color code.
To know more about CSS border feature visit this article about CSS Borders.Add Padding
Adding some space around the image will help you if you are specifying a border for your image. This will show the border of the image stand out. Adding margin to an image also add some space around an image but the difference is that if you add a border and a margin to an image, it will add some space around the image and the border together. See the difference below.
Image with border and Padding
Image with Border and Margin
Thats all for now. Hope you enjoyed this article and will make use of this. We can do much more by applying styles to images. But as of now the article is getting bigger and bigger. We will discuss about how to add a caption to your images and other styles in our next article.Binish MathewMETA Tags | Powerful Tags to Drive Traffic to Your Blog or Site
2008-09-19T10:00:00.000-07:00Meta elements are HTML or XHTML elements used to provide structured metadata about a web page. Such elements must be placed as tags in the head section of an HTML or XHTML document. Meta elements can be used to specify page description, keywords and any other metadata not provided through the other head elements and attributes.
The meta element has four valid attributes: content, http-equiv, name and scheme. Of these, only content is a required attribute.
An example of the use of the meta element : In one form, meta elements can specify HTTP headers which should be sent before the actual content when the HTML page is served from web server to client. For example:
This specifies the page should be served with an HTTP header called 'Content-Type' that has a value 'text/html'. This is a typical use of the meta element, which specifies the document type so a client (browser or otherwise) knows what content type to render.
In the general form, a meta element specifies name and associated content attributes describing aspects of the HTML page. For example
In this example, the meta element identifies itself as containing the 'keywords' relevant to the document, blogger templates and blogger hacks.
To add the Meta tags follow the steps- You need to add the below given three lines in your template code. Copy the lines given below and edit them as describe. Iclude your keywords and description in the space provided.'DESCRIPTION' name='description'/>
'KEYWORDS' name='keywords'/>
DESCRIPTION HERE:Write your blog description
KEYWORDS:Write the keywords of your blog - Now find the below given line of code in your template code and paste the META TAG lines you copied from above under this line.
- Save your template.
Use in Search Engine Optimization
Meta elements provide information about a given webpage, most often to help search engines categorize them correctly. They are inserted into the HTML document, but are often not directly visible to a user visiting the site.
They have been the focus of a field of marketing research known as search engine optimization (SEO), where different methods are explored to provide a user's site with a higher ranking on search engines. While search engine optimization can improve search engine ranking, consumers of such services should be careful to employ only reputable providers.
Major search engine robots are more likely to quantify such extant factors as the volume of incoming links from related websites, quantity and quality of content, technical precision of source code, spelling, functional v. broken hyperlinks, volume and consistency of searches and/or viewer traffic, time within website, page views, revisits, click-throughs, technical user-features, uniqueness, redundancy, relevance, advertising revenue yield, freshness, geography, language and other intrinsic characteristics.
The keywords attribute : The keywords attribute was popularized by search engines such as Infoseek and AltaVista in 1995, and its popularity quickly grew until it became one of the most commonly used meta elements. Unscrupulous webmasters could easily place false keywords into their meta elements in order to draw people to their site.
No consensus exists whether or not the keywords attribute has any impact on ranking at any of the major search engine today. It is speculated that it does, if the keywords used in the meta can also be found in the page copy itself.
The description Attribute : Unlike the keyword attribute, the description attribute is supported by most major search engines, like Yahoo and Live Search, while Google will fall back on this tag when information about the page itself is requested (e.g. using the related: query). The description attribute provides a concise explanation of a web page's content and allows the webpage authors to give a more meaningful description for listings than might be displayed if the search engine was unable to automatically create its own description based on the page content.
The description is often, but not always, displayed on search engine results pages, so it can impact click-through rates. Industry commentators have suggested that major search engines also consider keywords located in the description attribute when ranking pages.
The language Attribute : The language attribute tells search engines what natural language the website is written in (e.g. English or French), as opposed to the coding language (e.g. HTML). It is normally a 2 letter abbreviation for the language name. It is of most use when a website is written in multiple languages and can be included on each page to tell search engines in which language a particular page is written.
The robots Attribute : The robots attribute controls whether search engine spiders are allowed to index a page, or not, and whether they should follow links from a page, or not. The noindex value prevents a page from being indexed, and nofollow prevents links from being crawled. Other values are available that can influence how a search engine indexes pages, and how those pages appear on the search results. The robots attribute is supported by several major search engines.
NOINDEX tag tells a search engine not to index a specific page. NOFOLLOW tag tells a search engine not to follow the links on a specific page. NOARCHIVE tag tells a search engine not to store a cached copy of your page. NOSNIPPET tag tells Google not to show a snippet (description) under your a search engine listing, it will also not show a cached link in the search resultsAdditional attributes for search engines
NOODP : The search engines Google, Yahoo! and MSN use in some cases the title and abstract of the Open Directory Project (ODP) listing of a web site for the title and/or description in the search engine results pages. To give webmasters the option to specify that the ODP content should not be used for listings of their website, Microsoft introduced in May 2006 the new "NOODP" value for the "robots" element of the meta tags.
The syntax is the same for all search engines who support the tag.
Webmasters can decide if they want to disallow the use of their ODP listing on a per search engine basis
Google
Yahoo!
MSN and Live Search
NOYDIR : Yahoo! also used next to the ODP listing the content from their own Yahoo! directory but introduced in February 2007 a meta tag that provides webmasters with the option to opt-out of this.Yahoo! Directory titles and abstracts will not be used in search results for their pages if the NOYDIR tag is being added to a web page.
Robots-NoContent : Yahoo! also introduced in May 2007 the attribute value: class="robots-nocontent".This is not a meta tag, but an attribute and value, which can be used throughout web page tags where needed. Content of the page where this attribute is being used will be ignored by the Yahoo! crawler and not included in the search engine's index.
Examples for the use of the robots-nocontent tag:excluded contentexcluded contentexcluded content
Google does not use HTML keyword or meta tag elements for indexing. The Director of Research at Google, Monika Henziger, was quoted (in 2002) as saying, "Currently we don't trust metadata". Other search engines developed techniques to penalize web sites considered to be "cheating the system".Binish Mathew- You need to add the below given three lines in your template code. Copy the lines given below and edit them as describe. Iclude your keywords and description in the space provided.
Improve Your Search Engine Rankings | You Can Do It Yourself
2008-09-18T04:59:00.000-07:00Whether you are a blogger or a web master, all of us wants our blog/site to be at the top of search engine rankings. We will do our best to get this done and are constantly in the process of achieving this goal. What should we do for this? Of course, hiring an SEO firm or a professional is a good option but many of us are limited to that option. The main problem is we are limited to our spending power. So what else can we do?
INCREASE YOUR SEARCH ENGINE RANKING | SEO
Well, there are some ways for us to improve the SEO rankings for our site or blog. We already have an article which tells you how to improve your SEO ranking through intelligent use of CSS styles. In this article we will see the top 10 tips to improve your SEO rankings, which you yourself can do and should do.Bold is Gold
: Whenever you include the keywords in your content use the tags around them. But take care not to use them everywhere the keyword appears. Once or twice is enough.Linking, Linking Linking
: The more links coming in to more pages in your blog/site, the more it is worth. Its tells a search engine that you have a lot of worthwhile content in your blog/site when other web sites are linking to different pages on your site. But if all the links are coming to your homepage, it tells that search engine that you a site/blog of little value and that your links are generated by automation rather than by the value of your site.Offer Newsletters
: The links with ezine publishers stay alive in their archives for many years. Offer articles to ezine publishers that archive their ezines.Text Menus & Image Links
: If you can't remove the image links in your navigation bar, make sure you include text links also and that the text links show up first in the source code, because search engine robots will follow the first link they find to any particular page. They won't follow additional links to the same page.Multiple Domains
: If you have several topics that could each support their own website, it might be worth having multiple domains. Why? First, search engines usually list only one page per domain for any given search, and you might warrant two. Second, directories usually accept only home pages, so you can get more directory listings this way.Article Exchanges
: You've heard of link exchanges, useless as they generally are. Article exchanges are like link exchanges, only much more useful. Get the permission and publish someone else's article on your site with a link back to their site or article. They publish your article on their site, with a link back to your site. This way both of you can have contents and will get legitimate links also.Using Links? Title it
: Use title for your links. This helps visually impaired surfers in a way that they will know where you are sending them. Some search engines figure this into their relevancy for a page.Get a Site Map
: A big site needs a site map, which should be linked to from every page on the site. This will help the search engine robots find every page with just two clicks. A small site needs a site map, too. It's called the navigation bar.
These are just some simple tips that you can do for search engine optimization by yourself. There are a hundred other things and more that you can and should do for good SEO. But these tips to improve SEO will help you to significantly improve the ratings of your site or blog.Binish MathewHow to Show Animated Images As Your Blog/Site Favicon
2008-09-16T13:39:00.000-07:00One of my blog reader, well, rather than referring as just a blog reader, I would like to mention as my online friend, asked me how to create a favicon for her blog. She tried a lot of favicon generators, but as she wants an animated image as the favicon for her blog, it was of no use. Almost all of the favicon generators create a .ico (ICON) file from the image you supply it might not be an animated image you get as the result.
How to Show Animated Images As Your Blog/Site Favicon
If you have an animated image stored somewhere in an online image storage, like Photobucket or Imageshack, you can use the image directly as a favicon for your blog/site. But the disadvantage I had seen with this is, Firefox shows the favicon without any issues, but Internet Explorer refuses to show the favicon.
This might be because its a .gif image or its of a higher dimension. If you are not worried about this and want to show the animated image as it is just include the blow given line of code above the tag inside your blog/site XHTML/HTML source code.GIVE THE ADDRESS OF YOUR FAVICON HERE"/>
Replace the portion given in red with the URL of your favicon, copy the code and insert it to HTML source file, right before the .
You can see the animated penguin as the favicon of my blog and the code for this is as given below.Now what is a Favicon?
A favicon (short for favorites icon), also known as a website icon, or shortcut icon, is an icon associated with a particular website or web page. Browsers that provide favicon support typically display a page's favicon in the browser's URL bar and next to the page's name in a list of bookmarks. Browsers that support a tabbed document interface typically show a page's favicon next to the page's title.How to create a Favicon for a blog / website?
You can create a favicon for your website/blog so easy. Follow the steps below.- Find an image, preferable a picture with equal pixel (e.g. same width and height) and the picture content is still visible after resize to 32×32 or 16×16 pixel.
- Search the net for some websites that helps you to create favicons. Just provide the path to the image you want to create a favicon from and they will create the favicon for you. Some of the favicon generators are as listed below.
- Download the generated Favicon or you can store it in an online image storage like Photobucket or Imageshack.
How do I add a Favicon to a blog / website?
To add a favicon to your Web site, you'll need both an image (favicon) and a method for specifying that the image is to be used as a favicon. Originally a favicon was defiend for a website by placing a file called favicon.ico in the root directory of a web server. This would then automatically be used in browser's favorites (bookmarks) display.
This works best ofr webistes, but for blogs, mainly hosted with Blogger, this idea won't work as bloggers normally don't have a root directory. For WordPress powered blog, the blog root directory is where you extract the WordPress core files, i.e. the directory where you see index.php, wp-config.phg, etc.
A more flexible system was created using HTML to indicate the location of an icon for any given page. This is achieved by adding a link element to the section of the document as detailed below. In this way any appropriately sized (16×16 pixels or larger) image can be used and, although many still use the ICO format, other browsers (though not all versions of Microsoft's Internet Explorer) now also support the PNG and animated GIF image formats.
Now, the Favicon should will be automatically picked up by browser when the blog or the blog page is loaded.
Bloggers can add a faviocn to their blogs by including the HTML tag which is given below above the tag. Before editing your template code read this article about editing your blog template.GIVE THE ADDRESS OF YOUR FAVICON HERE"/>
Replace the portion given in red with the URL of your favicon, copy the code and insert it to HTML source file, right before the .
Hope this article was useful for you readers. Any comments, suggestions, critics, please leave them in the comments section.
