Posted by ljmacphee on July 16, 2007 under graphics, useful sites | 
OK, maybe you are not going to go out with a camera and take your own photos for a website you are designing. The thought of sunlight is just too scary. Or maybe you need a picture of a ship, or kangaroo and there just aren’t any of those hanging out in your neighborhood.
You can go to Flickr and selected ‘advanced search’ and search for Creative Commons licensed photos.
Or you can go to Yotophoto which collects Creative Common licensed photos from several websites.
If you are looking for more professional quality photos you can give up a few dollars ( $1-$15 ) and find professional photos at iStockphoto.
Remember if you are using Creative Commons photos be sure to give some back to the community. You’ll find several at my Flickr account. The things that are every day things in your world won’t be for some website designer or blogger thousands of miles away.
A new site offering free quality images to bloggers is PicApp
Posted by ljmacphee on July 2, 2007 under blogger, how to, perl, tools, useful sites, wordpress |
Google Analytics is yet another free statistic collector for your website. Google Analytics tallies up the data once a day. You’ll get incoming link information, number of visitors, location of visitors and time spent on your site and the pages each visitor viewed.
Analytics will give you more data than most of the free statistics tools out there. But I’m still a fan of StatCounter too. They update data much more often.
I waited a long time to use Google Analytics because you have to enter the JavaScript with your code on every page on your website. Now that TimesToCome is cleaned up and much of it moved to blog format I decided it was time. Still there were about 500 files that needed the code added to them.
So I wrote a small PERL script ( permanent link on top left of page ) to do this. It searches every file in the directory you place it in for ‘</body>’ and adds in the Google Analytics code just before that tag. Read the notes in the script before using it. You’ll need to enter your personal analytics code number to the script.
Of course for your Blogger and Wordpress blogs you need only change the template and enter the code just above the </body> tag. One entry is needed for Blogger. You may have to change index.php, single.php and page.php for Wordpress depending on your theme. Where ever you find </body> in your template files you need to add the script.
Posted by ljmacphee on May 30, 2007 under blogging, how to, useful sites |
EFF: Blogger’s Rights is probably the most comprehensive source of legal information for bloggers in the United States. EFF is and has been actively fighting for blogger’s rights and has a comprehensive website covering various problems you may run up against.
What to do When Someone Steals Your Blog’s Content
12 Important US Laws Every Blogger Needs to Know.
Posted by ljmacphee on April 2, 2007 under blogger, blogger template, css, useful sites |
I spent last week crash-course brushing up on CSS. I’ve determined that CSS was put together by insane COBOL programmers.
1) It is far more verbose than COBOL, who’d've thunk such a thing was possible
2) and it requires more hacks than COBOL to work properly
3) and in no other computer language will white space or lack of it break things so comprehensively.
As you can see we’ve a new template here. The first of many I’m sure.
I never could’ve gotten going on or put this template together with out The Blogger WorkShop: Creating a Blogger Template. If you are just starting out with Blogger templates, you’ll want to give that 4 part series a walk through.
I set up a free blogger blogspot.com blog and used that for testing. That way I could break things and fix them with out panicking. You should add a blog for testing to your blogger blogs if you’ll be doing much template work.
Template
Download the file. Change template-3column-webtools.text to template-3column-webtools.xml. Then go to your test blog site, go to template, edit html, and upload it from your hard drive as directed.
Be sure to save the information from your widgets. Google doesn’t save that information when you up load a new template.
And again, be sure to test and adjust it putting in your header image and telling the template where to find the image in a test area, not on your main blog.
I did not include the header image. I’ll be happy to send you a copy of it if that is what you want instead of using your own image. Or just drag and drop the image to your desktop same as you would with any other website image you like, then upload it to where ever you host your misc. blog images.
see also:
Beginner’s tips for using CSS