Archive for the ‘useful sites’ Category
How to and where to find images for your website
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
Perl script to add Google Analytics code to your website pages
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.
