Blog Flak

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 right here…

Technorati tags: tool bar, Firefox, web design, web developer, extensions, mozilla, Internet Explorer

Today Google Blog 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 Google Personalized Home 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 right here…

Technorati tags: anti phishing, tool bar, blogging, feeds, google, safe browsing, firefox,

There’s a report going around that the blog service provider MySpace has dumped over 200,000 users for a number of different reasons including risque content, hate speech and objectionable profiles. They’re not too particularly worried it seems, they still have over 66 million users and 250,000 new users signing up each day! Whoa, that’s a lot of blogging… or something. I know they have to have a twinge of fear in dumping that many users at once, what if it creates a back lash and they end up with a mass exodus of people jumping ship for cooler places to blog.

My personal experience with MySpace was and still is very mixed, I think they have the ugliest templates on the ‘net with a wildly confusing interface and very little in the way of customizing “YourSpace” and tons of obtrusive advertising, but hey, to each their own! At one time I had to actually block all emails from MySpace while spam bots were running rampant, emailing members over and over and over again to request you add them to their “friends” list. Most of the mailings were from people either trying to see who could have the largest number of friends or companies using the site to send out spam advertisements.

Source: Financial Times

Technorati tags: myspace, blog, blogging, hate speech, objectionable content, templates, spam bots

Do you have a Google homepage? If you have a Gmail account you do, only you may not know it. If you do you should be able to find it using this link: Your Home Page Now they’ve added tons of options for adding new content to your page with mass quantities of popular site links that can be dropped in with a single click, and an easy drag and drop interface for organizing and editing the content. You can also add games from different providers, all your latest Gmails, a free cell phone text mesaging interface, local weather and all your favorite site feeds. The site feeds is my favorite part, I can keep up with all my favorite websites from one location, adding and deleting is so simple even a cave man can do it! My apologies to any cave men reading this of course! Check it out, make it your homepage!

Source: Google Blog

tags: google, blog, blogging, home page, feeds, news, content, homepage,

The goodness just never stops here at the world famous Blog Flak underground headquarters in New Orleans. I’ve put up a cool new tutorial intended just for you newbie bloggers. I know you’re out there! Recent statistics from Technorati show that as many as 70,000 new weblogs are created each day all over the world! To help get you into the swim quickly and avoid some of the riptide, I’ll be bringing more and more easy to follow tutorials on how to do lots of basic things to your blog but you were too afraid to ask!

This one is just what the title of the post says, making a backup copy of your blogs template or “skin” as many people call it, they are one and the same. The HTML coding is how your web browser knows how to display the colors and images and layout of all webpages including blogs and it can be easy to screw it up if you don’t know your way around. Customizing the appearance of your blog is a natural urge for most people, of course you want it to look different from everyone elses! It’s YOURS after all, right?

Often people are afraid to mess up anything by tinkering with the code to pretty up their blog, but if you have a backup copy of what it was like before hand you can tinker away fearlessly! I know when you first look at the tutorial it may appear to be a long process but it really takes less than a minute to do from start to end. After you’ve done it a couple of times you will see just how simple the procedure is. Give it a try!

You can find the tutorial right here… Or by clicking “Blog Help” in the sidebar.

tags: templates, skins, blogging, tutorials, tech help, wordpress, blogger

Drive More Traffic to Your Blog!

I’ve written up a fairly comprehensive tutorial on how to put del.icio.us link tags on your blog posts for both Wordpress and Blogger. The setup when done properly will not only open a new window but it will automatically copy in the page link AND the page title into the submit form for you! How cool is that? You’ll still have to write in your own tags though. What? I can’t do everything for you, the tags are something you’ll just have to take care of yourself!

To see how it works just click my little “TAG IT” link at the bottom of this post. I’m running the latest Wordpress at this writing (version 2.0.2) but I’ve also tested it in an earlier version (version 1.5.1.2) and it worked exactly the same.

A big chunk of credit goes to the guys over at Fresh Blog for the Blogger version. They also have lots more cool stuff that you can use on your blog. I saw their version for Blogger which inspired me to rework it for Wordpress. I tweaked it a bit to come up with a solution that’s much simpler than any version that I’ve seen posted anywhere else. No plugins are needed and it doesn’t even use PHP to accomplish except for the “includes” which are already in my code.

You can check the tutorial out right here…

tags: del.icio.us, tags, linking, blogging, tech help, tutorials, Blogger, Wordpress,