Posted by ljmacphee on March 12, 2008 under HTML, blogger template, graphics, hack your template | 
Creating icons for iPhones and the iPod Touch is not all that different than creating bookmark icons. First you create a 57×57 png image.
If you want an icon for all of your website or a default for pages that do not have individual icons then just name your image:
apple-touch-icon.png
and upload it to your home directory.
If you are on Blogger or some other software where you can’t upload the icon you can place it anywhere on the web and create the following link in the ‘head’ section of your pages:
<link rel=”apple-touch-icon” href=”http://your-icon-location.com/your-icon-name.png”>
If you have different pages people might wish to bookmark and you wish to have a separate icon for each then:
- create the icons
- upload them to the root directory of your website
- In the head section of pages that you wish this icon to appear add the following:
<link rel=”apple-touch-icon” href=”http://your-site.com/icon-name.png”>
I tried doctoring photos and shrinking them and using them and the results were pretty good. Gimp works well for creating icons this way. One site reported that creating larger icons and letting Apple convert them resulted in clearer pictures. It didn’t for me but if you are using photo images you should give it a try.
Apple will round the corners and gloss up your icon. You just need to create the square image and let Apple do the rest. ‘Trust the force’. 
I could not get this to work on an old section of a website that uses frames. It may or may not work on framed sites.
If you change or add an icon it does not update on users phones/touches. It must be rebookmarked for the new icon to appear.
Posted by ljmacphee on September 7, 2007 under blogger template, hack your template |
Let’s face it 800×600 is more than a little cramped and less than 10% of the population is using 800×600 screens. A bit more real estate on Blogger would be nice. Denim, Stretch Denim, Washed Denim and Stretch Denim Light are nicely hackable templates. It is very easy to change the colors, up load a header picture and no one will recognize it before long.
First back up your template!
Go to your dashboard
->layout
->Template
->Edit HTML
and select Download Full Template.
Now pick your favorite Denim Template
Template
->Pick New Template
Pick any one of the Denim series and hit ‘Save Template’
Go Back to ‘Edit HTML’
There are only 4 lines we will edit on this template:
OLD
#header{
width: 760px;
#content-wrapper{
width: 760px;
#main-wrapper{
width: 464px;
#sidebar-wrapper{
width: 240px;
NEW
#header{
width: 950px;
#content-wrapper{
width: 950px;
#main-wrapper{
width: 580px;
#sidebar-wrapper{
width: 300px;
Then click ‘Save Template’.
View it and see how you like the new look.
You can play around with the main-wrapper width and the sidebar-wrapper width but keep the total of the two 880px.
Posted by ljmacphee on August 13, 2007 under blogger, blogger template, how to, multimedia |
I’ve been meaning to cover this for weeks and kept getting detoured. You can add You Tube videos to your Blogger posts, Wordpress posts, or just regular webpages and it is totally painless.
First sign up for a free You Tube account.
Add the video you wish to post to your favorites.
Go to My Account -> My Custom Players -> Create Custom Player
Answer the questions about how you want your personal You Tube Player to appear
Add the video
Copy and paste the code right into your post.
* Did you know you can take video on your mobile phone and send it straight to You Tube? How cool is that? I’ll have to go take some videos now.
See also: Blogging Video from your cell phone
Posted by ljmacphee on July 18, 2007 under blogger, blogger template, hack your template, how to, wordpress |
Log onto your Google account and go to GMail.
In the upper left corner is a Calendar link - click it
In the left sidebar is a small link at the bottom ‘Manage calendars’ - click it
Up will come a list of the calendars you’ve created
Click on the link for the calendar you wish to add to your sidebar
Near the bottom you will see a section ‘Calendar Adress:’ and ‘xml’ ‘ical’ ‘html’
Click on the HTML button.
A pop up window will appear and you have two choices. The first is a direct link to your calendar
The second is a ‘configuration tool’ - Click that one
A page will appear with all sorts of details you can select - calendar format, size, &c.
Set things up how you like and click the ‘Update URL’ button.
Code will appear in a box ‘2. Add the calendar HTML to your page’
Highlight and select all the text in that box and paste it into notepad or some other
text tool you like to use.
In Blogger go to Template->Add Page Element->HTML/JavaScript - ‘Add to Blog’
and paste your text into the box and save
In Wordpress, go to Presentation->Themes->Theme Editor and paste it into your sidebar in an
appropriate spot.
Or you can just add it to any HTML page by pasting the text where you want the calendar to be.
You can see an example of this at Herself’s Houston Garden
These are useful for websites and blogs about local hobbies where there are events that will interest your readers. Or for blogs about clubs and organizations such as blogs for local photography clubs. Google calendars are nice since people interested in specific events can then just import them to their own Google calendar.
I found I needed to widen the sidebars in the blogs I put calendars into to about 340px. But I’ve been widening websites to 1000px any how since only about 10% of internet users are still using 800×600 displays.