Archive for April, 2006

Sunday, April 9th, 2006

How to Break Your Blog

I’m often asked the question: “Why is my sidebar showing up all the way at the bottom of my blog?” Generally, there are two reasons for this to happen and I’ll try to explain it using a couple of images I created to help you visualize how your blog layout works.

This is another how-to article that can also be found in the section linked in the sidebar here at Blog Flak. Be sure to check out the whole line up with lots more to come!

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Friday, April 7th, 2006

More Free Blogger Skins!

I’ve put up a couple of new free blog skins / templates over at in the past couple of days. These two new ones are for the guys out there looking for something a little more exciting than the usual stuff. I know the girls usually get all the attention when it comes to free blog skins but I’m planning on coming out with more in the near future, just for guys!

Need help with installing, backing up or editing blog posts, don’t forget, there’s plenty of info available here at Blog Flak in the section!

Ads by AdGenta.com

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Friday, April 7th, 2006

Google Continues to Shun Blogspot Users

While Blogger Buzz sings the praises heaped on it from a recent article, still seems to be using the “no follow” protocol to stop their own search engine spiders from indexing Blogspot addresses. This is totally unfair to the majority of blogs hosted on Blogspot. There are many, many highly rated blogs on Blogspot but they certainly don’t get any search engine loving from Google. A few quick searches on several different search engines will easily display the disparity in page rankings for a particular blog address. If it’s hosted on Blogspot, you’re lucky to find any listings for it at all on Googles search engine. The same exact searches on MSN or Yahoo will give you some eye opening results. Try it yourself and see! This seems to be Googles “dirty little secret”.

Most blogs are legitimate as opposed to being a spam blog or “splog” created by the hundreds and thousands by automatic software and used only to dump thousands of links to boost search engine rankings. Unscrupulous users of these automated programs are certainly ruining the experience for everyone else but ultimately the blame lies clearly at Googles feet. By not implementing anti-splog measures early on to stop the use of automated blog creation programs they let the situation get out of control. Their knee jerk reaction of wholesale removal and blocking of blogs using their own anti-splog bots has caused quite a few legitimate bloggers to be locked out of their own blogs. And then instituting a “no follow” to block their spiders from properly crawling and following all links originating from any Blogspot address has caused a devastating effect on their own blogging community.

Blogspot has certainly become the “red-headed stepchild” of Googles own making, yet people still love it for its easy to use interface and features and it’s many great long time communities. Yet they continue to advertise it heavily everywhere you look, too bad they don’t tell you up front that your blog no matter how ultimately popular it becomes will be shunned by their very own search engines.

A new article today on Blogger Buzz claims they are making “progress” in the war on spam blogs but I say it’s not enough. They should give back the respect to the many legitimate Blogspot communities by removing the “no follow” rule and giving all the great blogs on Blogger the spotlight they deserve!

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Thursday, April 6th, 2006

Firefox Leaping Over MS

Checking my site stats lately has been a bit suprising in a number of ways but the biggest one is how many people are now using Firefox for their browser. The past couple years I’ve noticed a slow but steady gain when it was just a trickle to start with. Now it seems suddenly that nearly 50% of the visitors to my sites are using the alternative browser. I like Firefox quite a lot and I use it about half and half with IE on a daily basis.

As a web developer and site designer I can’t just use one or the other, site appearance and optimization demands that I use both, usually at the same time to view and edit pages. Often I’ll have both my main machines that are sitting side by side open to the same pages that I’m editing and using a different browser on each with different screen resolutions. By far though my favorite thing about Firefox is the Web Developers tool bar that can be added on as an extension. With it you can outline tables and block level page elements to visualize how different sections of a web page are interacting. It also has a built in pixel ruler that can give you length and height measurements directly on any web page and even call out dimensions of a box or rectangle shape on screen.

It also has a number of other very nice functions built in for viewing a number of hidden details about pages, site validation right from the tool bar, site loading speed and tons more. Another very cool extension is the color picker. You can get hex codes and color triplets with an eye dropper right off of any section on any web page including all the images. Tres cool!

IE also has a web developer tool bar that can be downloaded from MS but it doesn’t have near the functionality as the one for Firefox.

Get your Firefox web developer tool bar

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Thursday, April 6th, 2006

Google Sets New Toolbar on Fire!

Today has announced an update to their ever popular tool bar, this one is a beta (of course!) for Firefox fans. I love the features available on my Google toolbar for IE, and now it’s nice to see some of the cool new functions built into the FF version v2. It also has a new anti-phishing Safe Browsing extension built right into the interface. Other features include feed integration with their page, spelling correction, popular querys and several other features that enable it to be highly customized to suit your needs. I’m always glad to see innovative products like this, and free makes it even better! Get it while it’s hot!

Get your new Firefox tool bar

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