Cat Chit Chat

Friday, 29 May 2009

Free Html Blog Templates

There are many websites that provide free html blog templates and I am talking about Google Blogger templates on this occasion; although there are free templates for any type of website, blog or not. This shortish post is intended to take the slog out of finding them. A small word of warning about free blog templates. They are written by talented and skilled people, yes. But the people at Google are the most talented and proficient of the lot. Google hires the best people, they can afford to. What I am saying is that the templates that Google produce function beautifully and although they can be customized (and the Blogger team accept this) sometimes the customization looks good but doesn’t function as well as the original template.

It is a bit like buying a Ferrari and asking the local garage to do a bit of work under the bonnet (hood in the USA). When you customize you have to be careful. Also, I don’t know about you, but when I see a slick blog I have a feeling that it is going to contain weak content because the effort has gone into making it slick. The old fashioned sites often have great content and content is king as they say.

The bottom line is that function is more important than form. As a result I would make sure that the template functions well in all ways before finally adopting it.

Secondly, I notice that Google generally and the Google Blogger people as well, have extremely simple and functional websites. They are almost plain, a little boring perhaps, but highly functional and useful. Sometimes the look of the site gets in the way of its function. Take the blogs with fancy backgrounds. A website provides these (The Cutest Blog on the Block). They are nice and the blogs that use this service are very pretty. But they will load more slowly because you are loading an image for the background. Sometimes they will load considerably more slowly if in addition the blog has lots of widgets containing third party scripts pulling in stuff from other sites. Add to that some large jpeg images on the blog and it will definitely load slowly. This can be a put off for visitors in a high speed world.

With free html blog templates you can either download from the site that provides the template (and then upload it to your site) or copy all the code and paste it into your edit template window. The former is probably the better. I look at the technique further down this post for people who have not tried this.

Anyway here is where you can find free html blog templates. The first three also provide information about getting the best from Blogger blogs (like this site but on a bigger scale):

1. The website, Bloggerbuster, is perhaps one of the best sources for free blog templates as the lady who runs the site, Amanda Fazani, has templates on site and she links to other sites (as I recall) that provide more examples. Plus she provides a lot of useful tips etc. This is the page to start from: http://designs.bloggerbuster.com/

2. The next website that provides blog templates is run by a guy called “Enviroman”. He is a self confessed introvert who must spend all day in front of the computer! He also must be concerned about the environment – good for him. He has a good site but it loads way too slowly (to speed up load times, click the refresh button while it is loading – this gives it a kick up the backside and speeds things up a bit). While Bloggerbuster provides new looking designs, Mr Enviroman tends to focus more on extending existing designs (e.g. more columns etc.). I prefer the gentle modification of a blogger site as you can retain the perfect functionality of the Google team’s template while adding your personal touch (see for example my contribution: Add Third Column to Minima Template). Here are a series of pages from Enviroman to visit and explore:

http://www.bloggertipsandtricks.com/search/label/templates

3. Another well known site dealing with customization of Blogger blogs and one I would call part of the “Big Three” is, Tips for New Bloggers. These guys (there appears to be more than one person) have been on holiday for the last year or so! Their site still does damn well. They tend to do what Enviroman does and provide customizations as opposed to complete new zam bam designs. This is the link to the “template” label which will show a series of posts on this subject:

http://tips-for-new-bloggers.blogspot.com/search/label/Template

4. The next site is dedicated to providing free html blog templates. It contains hundreds of templates. This is the best site for choice. I uploaded one to test it (see it here: http://cats-how-to.blogspot.com/ – this is a dormant test site). As you can see it looks great, very professional. But I couldn’t use the comment function and I have tried, believe me (update: the comments work! - sorry). I don’t like the fact that the navbar has been removed. Plus there are functions that need some work. For example, there is an “Edit” button in the horizontal navbar that seems to do nothing; not sure what it is for. It puts a # after the URL. Seems odd. It is this kind of functionality that I am referring to when you use third party free html blog templates. And they tend to look bland. I prefer the homemade personal look. It is more basic but the better for it, in my opinion. Here is the site:

http://btemplates.com/

To upload the new template:

Important: Save by downloading to desktop the existing template. This puts an XML file on desktop for easy upload if things go wrong.
Download the new template from the supplier site.
Open the downloaded ZIP file.
Drag out the XML template file to desktop.
Go to Dashboard of Blogger site.
Access Layout>Edit Html.
Using the upload function, browse for the XML file on desktop and upload it.
The new template is saved.
View and use blog if you like it. If you don’t like it upload the previous template from desktop.

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Thursday, 28 May 2009

Html Table Codes

I’ll talk you through how to produce what I call a “Wikipedia style” table, the only table (really) worth producing; an elegant table with a fine border. I would not get involved with tables that have thick borders. When I see these I think novice etc.

You don’t need to know html table codes. It is useful to know what to look for but to write a table in html is pretty well pointless, in my opinion, as the html editors create great code for tables and the editors are free downloads. The following is an example of the code for a simple elegant table. The end result is shown below the code. Note: I am using simple html not CSS to produce sophisticated tables.

Produces this:

This	That
One	Two

This can take on any number of variations (the table inside the box):

This	That
One	Two

This	That
One	Two

Or this:

This	That
One	Two

The code for the latter (the inner table portion) is:

The strength of these tables for me is that they are elegant, look professional and easy to produce. But ironically the border setting for them all is always “0”. They have no border. The border is produced inside the cell spacing, by setting a difference between the table colour and the cell colours.

OK, so how do we produce tables like this at will and in an endless range of combinations? As I mentioned you don’t do it manually. But you need to know how to get the elegant fine line border and how to fill in the table with colour.

As mentioned, the underlying method is to create a table and paint in the table with a desired colour. The colour will be the colour of the border (note: remember there is no border, as the border is the colour in the cell spacing). The table should be given Spacing of one pixel (enter “1” against “Spacing”). The cells inside the table are then painted in a different colour. This will be the colour of the cells. When the cells are painted in, what remains of the colour selected for the table is just the border, all the rest is the cell colour.

The key is to use an html editor to give flexibility and speed. There are many free editors. I use NVU. It is a free download. Once downloaded it can be installed in the usual way. Here is the home page for NVU.

Once you have NVU installed (or any other html editor which should have the same facilities) you will usually write your webpage in it but if you simply want to write some html code to, for example, create elegant html table codes that is fine.

These are the steps employed in NVU to produce the above tables:

Open a new page (click , “New”).
Click, Insert>table>select the number of cells per chart.
Double click on the table that is produced, which takes you to table properties.
Select Table>Spacing>insert “1” (this means that in effect the “border” so produced will have a one pixel width, the finest possible border and the best in my opinion.
Click Background Color and select the colour of the border. At this stage this will be selecting the table colour.
Next there is a choice to colour in the cells. Either click “Cells” and go through each cell sequentially and select the appropriate colour or click OK, highlight the entire table and select the table or cell colour icon in the tool bar:

That is it. You will need some practice and experimentation obviously unless you know it all already! When the table is right for you go into the “Source” window and copy the page and paste it into the webpage that you are working on.

If you are working in the Blogger Blog compose mode window to write your post, the best way to transfer the table produced in NVU to your post is as follows (note: if you simply copy and paste the code the result is unacceptable):

Save the table in NVU.
Click on the browser icon.
Copy the table by painting it in while in browser mode.
Paste it into the compose mode window of Blogger.

Html table codes are all about working in a decent html editor and producing simple and elegant tables.

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Wednesday, 27 May 2009

Make Easy Money on the Internet

Is it possible to make easy money on the internet? I don’t believe it is. Why should it be easier to make money on the internet than on the ground? We are dealing with the same business principles, the same clients and business associates, ultimately. In short we are still dealing with people. Sure there are differences. These are both good and bad. But the differences are not the kind of differences that make it easier to make money on the internet. They simply relate to the methods of making money because of the nature of the internet.

In fact, the very ease of starting an internet business can be its undoing. The start up costs, in terms of hard cash, can be almost zero. This is very attractive to millions of people, particularly cautious people. A lot of people hanker after running their own business but are frightened. The internet lets them put their toe in the water of the business world with no downside, no risk. However, most successful business people are not averse to taking financial risks at some stage. An overly cautious approach is the death knell to successful business building, in my opinion. The great benefit of low start up costs also creates false expectations and a carelessness which combine some time down the line to demotivate and before long fizzle sets in. Another failure.

The great benefit of the massive world market that can be tapped into on the internet is also both a positive and a negative. A huge market means lots of customers. A huge market also means lots of suppliers (websites). And that means a ton of competition in which you can drown without a trace. It is easy to be completely invisible on the internet for ever. No one will ever read what you say unless you learn how to get noticed. And that is the first indication that the start up costs are not that low after all. You’ve gotta learn how to do it. That translates to time, your time, hundreds of hours of it and more. And time is the equivalent of money in the business world. The start up costs are not low after all.

Making money on the internet from scratch is about a lot of up-front work and the income comes much later down the line. So if you are alone, the financial start up costs are low but the effort start up costs are high. You can’t buck the economics. Of course, you can get someone to build the website for you and you can advertise using Google Adwords. That reduces work start up cost but significantly increases financial start up costs. The formula is in balance.

How about those, make easy money on the internet websites? They often get lots of traffic. I see many with Alexa rankings in the 20,000 and better. That means at a guess, unique visitors in the order of 50,000 per day. Some of these visitors buy into what these sites are selling because they have learned that it is not easy to make money on the internet but can’t quite accept it. So they turn to that warm helping hand at a very enticing cheap price to get their site noticed and to make quick bucks. It is very tempting, I know, but to be avoided.

The truth is that if you are making about $2,000 dollars a month the safe way you will need about half a million USD in the bank at about 5% interest. That is before tax. Some people take years to earn that and most (99%) never save that amount over their lieftime. I am talking worldwide. What I am saying is the effort needed to earn or make enough money to achieve a monthly income that supports you is high. And you can’t, in my view, buck that formula. There are stories of people making fortunes on the internet but they put fortunes into it and got more out. The fortune that was put in was made somewhere with great effort.

The bottom line is this, the financial model is always in balance. If it is easier one way it is harder in another way. Expectations to make easy money on the internet should be curtailed, reined in. For individuals with no particular outstanding talent it will be hard work and a long slog but no less enjoyable for that for the right person.

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Monday, 25 May 2009

Speed Blogging and Efficient Blogging

If we are to “succeed” (and this is a personal and subjective concept) on the internet with blogs we need to consider not only search engine optimization and all its facets but also how to put it all to use efficiently. Speed blogging and efficient blogging is more a necessity that a luxury and this is why.

First, lets get the concept of “success” out of the way. In this post success is deemed to mean getting the maximum number of visitors and page views and therefore revenue. For some people, though (and rightly so) it will not mean that.

As you gradually progress up the Alexa hill to the lofty ranks of the bigger established wiz kid sites you find yourself in the first division and you have to raise your game if you are to keep on going up that slippery slope. Sometimes these sites have more than one person creating the content and there will be a geek of a computer person who gets a head start on the likes of me and thee. We have to compete against this.

Provided you turn out quality, original content, the faster you do it the better; that is a no brainer and the best way to compete against sites where more than on person creates content. So, what does that mean? We have three major sources of knowledge from which we create content:

Our heads (experience)
Books
Internet

If everything we write comes straight from our heads and no where else this is the fastest way to create. That is extremely unlikely and people who are looking for quick fixes can sometimes fall into the trap of doing just that; waffling on in a conversational way churning out unchecked information that is simply poor quality. So we need to fall back and rely on the internet. And books should, where possible, be used to supplement internet information for the sake of fresh information and to check the internet, which can be unreliable (but can also be extremely reliable).

Our Head

I find the old clichés are true. I have small windows of what I call “enlightenment” on problem solving and ideas when (a) in the shower and (b) after about half a glass of wine – absolutely true. These should be used where possible. Memory though is gradually damaged by excess alcohol consumption! Ideas should be jotted down as they are fleeting and can disappear as fast as they arrive. And they should be left to mature for a day to check if they are as good as first thought.

Books

I would guess that these are often ignored. I wouldn’t ignore them. Old books can provide new content under fresh circumstances and also stimulate new thoughts. Often book material will overlap with internet material but there are often small pieces of new information in books that are not readily found on the internet. Working with books is also easier than using information from the internet as it is a hard copy avoiding the need to jump from tab to tab or window to window when using websites for research. When you get to know a book you know where things are and working fast becomes a breeze.

Internet

Perhaps this is where the great savings in time can be made. I recommend these ideas for speed blogging and efficient blogging:

Use Firefox or Google Chrome. Firefox is the best. It loads quicker and is more reliable and;
Use tabs for new web pages (press Ctrl T for a new tab). This allows a series of tabs to be opened from various sources to which reference can be made as the blog post is being drafted. This is more efficient than new windows that blank out the other windows.
{note:I currently use Windows Live Writer for blog posts. If I am using images that I want to be stored on a Google server I use the compose window in Blogger and upload from there. If I want to draw tables I use Google docs and copy the table from the web (published table), not the code to the compose window, see these posts (a) Google Docs to Create Blogger Posts (b) Writing Blogs With Windows Live Writer (c) Creating Tables for Blogger Blogs.}
If you have been to a site before and want to find it again, you don’t have to search history or use Google search. In Firefox and Google Chrome all you do it click once on the URL in the address box at the top of the browser window, which blue highlights the web address. Then type in the first few letters of the website that you are searching for; Firefox finds the site and a list of alternatives. Click on the chosen one. You can scroll down the list and press enter if you wish. This saves time. In fact, in Chrome the URL box is the search box.
When writing articles, when I find the information that I want I copy it (wait, this is not breach of copyright – read on) and drop it into the page I am using (Google Docs, Live Writer or Compose mode in Blogger). I drop it in about 5 lines down. From there I can use it more conveniently as an information source before deleting it. If it is heavily formatted and is creative commons material, I go into html mode (Edit Html in Blogger) and drop it in there, which produces entirely unformatted clean text. You can also use the unformat button (an eraser) but I prefer the former method as it is more controllable and cleaner.
If you use similar pieces of text each time in every Blogger blog post and work in the compose window, use the template function. This reproduces the text in the compose window each time you make a new post. You can do this by going to Dashboard>Settings>Formatting>look at the base of the page “Post Template”. Type in there the links and text that are to be part of your standard page.
Pictures: Use Flickr creative commons images. Comply with the license to the letter. Download to desktop and upload to the page using Google Blogger image uploader or in Google docs or Windows Live Writer using the facilities in that software (very easy).

Speed Blogging and Efficient Blogging -- Further reading:

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Page Rank Improvement

In terms of getting traffic to your blog, Page Rank Improvement is equally as important as ensuring that your web page is search engine optimized (at least to a minimum level: see: How To Get Traffic To Your Blog), perhaps more so. Judging by an interview with Matt Cutts, a Senior Engineer at Google, (or he was in 2005 and as far as I am aware he still is – who would leave Google probably the best employer on the planet?) this is the case.

Lets think of the basics: Google is a highly profitable business based on internet use. Internet use is founded on the fact that it is a useful service. The more useful it is the more it grows and so does Google and Google’s profit. It is that premise that underpins Google’s concept of Page Rank, which in turn is based on quality inbound links (backlinks). Sites that are the recipient of quality inbound links are good quality sites providing a useful service. Thus is what Google wants more of. And so do we and all internet users.

Here are two questions asked of him (from the website: http://www.seroundtable.com and reproduced under a creative commons license):

Question: Let's go back to text links.
Answer: Best links are earned, not sold or traded. You may not get what you pay for. He said, if someone is selling text links, they should give you a free test trial to make sure it works. They have both manual and algorithmic approaches to detect paid links. He said Google.com gets emails asking to trade links. The guy who came up with the pixel homepage thing, that was creative.

Question: Do you use the toolbar to figure out what to crawl and how often?
Answer: Nope. Its all pretty much based on PageRank.

OK, what does this mean? Answer: that inbound links are very important as it improves what Google call Page Rank. This, as I understand it, is a measure of a website’s worth or value on the internet. It is measured by the number of inbound links. This means the number of other sites referring to your blog by linking to it. By far the best links are those occurring naturally and voluntarily because these are genuine and “real” i.e. not bought or exchanged.

It is claimed, in the answer above, that Google can differentiate between “real” high value links from good Page Rank pages from bought links and there are a lot of online businesses selling high value links. These are links from web pages that have high Page Ranks. A high Page Rank is one above 3 (PR 3 or better is the target and the higher the better).

The more high quality naturally occurring inbound links you can get pointing towards your blog the better. If your blog (and web pages on the blog) have a decent PR, Google will favour it in listing pages (with decent PRs) higher in search result listings (note: this concept is disputed by the author, “Enviroman” - username, of the blogger tips and tricks site). Page Rank improvement ultimately comes about by writing good original content. That is the core of any website. And it is not really of any great value to simply regurgitate other people’s stuff. It is best to have an opinion, good or bad! One point worth making is that it is possible to provide your own inbound links, legitimately, by writing articles for other sites (article sites) and embedding links in those articles. The site that gains the most from this is the article site, however. Another way is to get listed in high page rank directories. These are good starting points. I wouldn’t listen to people who promote the idea that you can get instant thousands of backlinks (inbound links). This is not real and the Google algorithm will, I believe, spot this. It may even go against your blog or other website.

Once I did buy some inbound links but I stopped the process mid-stream as I realized the only way is to keep building good content, publicizing the website and using SEO as best as I know how. These are the three planks of success on the internet and the fourth flows from them: Page Rank Improvement.

Note: Anyone who leaves a comment of ten lines can leave a link to their site in the comment. While this page is the home page that means an inbound link from a PR 3 page.

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