Cat Chit Chat

Saturday, 30 May 2009

Html Table Background Image

Html Table Background Image.

This short post (as it is fairly straightforward) explains the html needed to place a background image in a table.

The results of the first block of code below can be seen on this page (note that both the page and the table have backgrounds. The code below just relates to the table and as the image is small it is automatically repeated).

The code for the table background image is highlighted in red. You can see that the code to be inserted is:

background=”URL of the image” (where URL = the location on a server of the saved image)

Here is another page where you can see the image in the header (the cat’s ears!): Maine Coon Cat ZAK

The code for the Maine Coon Cat header with the ears is (note that I am referring to the main table as there are several tables in the header):

The relevant part is highlighted in red and as can be seen the tag is “background” followed by the location (URL) of the image.

That means the image has to be stored (saved) on a server somewhere. In the first example it is saved on Google Picasa Web Albums. Anyone can sign up to Google Picasa Web Albums and share images there so that is good way for people who just have the Blogger blog to save images (it also produces the code for the image location). There is no reason why the background image couldn’t be saved to Blogger servers by uploading it using the compose window upload button and then getting the code from the Edit html window but you’ll need to remove the link as all uploaded images are by default linked to a separate image (click on the image and see what I mean). Although this can be removed easily.

In the second example, mentioned above, the image has been saved to a Site Sell SBI server that feeds my main website: Pictures of Cats org. Make sure that the image is not too heavy (file size should be reduced to the lowest level consistent with image quality) to ensure load times for the webpage is as fast as possible.

You should work with an image editor to do this such as Photoshop Elements or Paint.net (which is what I use – it is a free download).

Friday, 29 May 2009

Google Blogger Guide for Dummies

I can’t resist having my say on the subject of Susan Gunelius and Google Blogger Guide for Dummies. I have not read the book. This is a review of the Amanda Fazani review of the Susan Gunelius Google Blogger Guide for Dummies or more accurately a review of the issues surrounding the hiring of the author. I make what may be considered slightly provocative remarks. This is deliberate but not intended to be personal or hurtful. People have a right to express their views provided they are presented politely and these are simply my views.

I have read Amanda’s review and the comments to the review. I have read what Enviroman (Blogger Tips and Tricks) has said about writing this book and I have read about Susan Gunelius from her website (which has moved). In short I have read everything surrounding the book except the book! I have not read the book because I know it will not be money well spent. This is because it will not be technical enough. And I am not a computer geek; far from it. This last comment of mine really says it all, in fact. And I have also read the Amazon product description for the book. Some people will say how can you review a book without reading it? Well first, I am not strictly reviewing the book. I am talking around the subject. Secondly, I have seen the contents of the book from the Amazon reviews so I know what is in it. Plus read the other stuff as mentioned.

This is my opinion on the subject for what it is worth. Why didn’t the publishers ask Amanda Fazani to write the book? Maybe they did and see turned them down, I don’t know. I know that “Enviroman” was asked but eventually it seems he was rejected. He complains on his website that he was treated rather poorly by the publishers. It would seem that the publishers decided to fall back on a writer rather than a person who knows Google Blogger inside out as Fazani and Enviroman do. In fact there is another person or persons who could and maybe were asked, the creators of Tips for New Bloggers.

Susan Gunelius has “20-years of marketing, branding and copywriting experience”. She is CEO of KeySplash Creative, Inc.. This is a “full-service marketing communications and branding solutions provider.” Susan has a blog called “Women on Business”. But I have a clear sense that her considerable talents lie in the field of business, copyrighting, marketing and plain writing and not blogging at the level required to successfully write a really useful book on Google Blogger. What I mean is the person should know Blogger inside out to then write about it in a way that makes even the technical stuff understandable. However, perhaps the publishers decided on the content.

Because of what appears to be her lack of first hand knowledge of the nuts and bolts of working with Google Blogger blogs the book is written very much at the beginner level, it seems, addressing, mainly, people who have not started (or just started) rather than people who have and want to crank up the ante and make things sharper and better. And I would have thought the latter objective was the better one and one that would attract the wider audience. Or at least it is one that should be included. The publishers would say in defence that this is a Dummies Guide and is therefore targeted at beginners. I would disagree because you don’t need a book on how to get started because the Blogger team explain it beautifully. The whole process is intuitive and very easy. What is more tricky is customizing the blog and there are a lot of people who want to personalize their blog; make it their own. I know that from the success enjoyed by Fazani and Enviroman with their websites, which are, incidentally far more successful as sites than Gunelius’s blog, “Women on Business”. That on its own tells us something about the qualifications for writing the Google Blogger Guide for Dummies.

I am not even sure it was a good idea for Susan Gunelius to write the book never mind for the publishers as it is a little out of her field of specialization from what I can gather from the bio on internet. Actually, it seems like Susan Gunelius decided to do the book to heighten her profile vis-à-vis computer technology. People like Enviroman and Amanda Fazani, though, would have been better placed to write the book. Amanda writes very good English while Enviroman is less strong on the English language. But this could have been fixed in editing.

When you read the Amazon blurb it says the book covers such topics as , “What you should know about moderating comments”. The only thing people should know about that is how to get comments! Moderating them is the last of our worries. Another unrealistic topic is “Does making dollars make sense? — explore options for Google Adsense®”. Once again 99% of Blogger sites need not think about this until they have lots more visitors. You can make a few bucks on 30 visitors a day on Adsense but you’ll need thousands a day and an Alexa ranking in the order of 100,000 to make enough to have an impact on your life. Which conveniently brings me back to my original point, the book is written for beginners but the question of Adsense is for more advanced users i.e. bloggers with some real traffic.

You know, the truth is you can find all you want from the Blogger help web pages and the sites mentioned on this page.

In short the book looks (admittedly from the outside) to be a little unrealistic because it is written by someone who has not, it seems, worked with Google Blogger and made a success of it. The three people I mentioned above have done this and were therefore better choices for the job of author.

From Google Blogger Guide for Dummies to Home Page

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.

From Free Html Blog Templates to Home Page

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.

From Html Table Codes to Home Page

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.

From Make Easy Money on the Internet to Home Page

Pages