I’m not sure how comfortable I feel at the moment in positioning myself as the Thanet Bloggers geek guru after reading a resume like this. Still, I’ve made my bed and never let it be said that I’m not one to lie in it.
As laid out by the internets founding father, Tim Berners-Lee, the web is so called because of the use of links. Rather than having to go to a central repository of indexed information we find our way following links placed on sites. Not everything shows up on front page Google, so we follow these little alleys and at times we find gems.
I’ve seen a few of my fellow bloggers here having problems with links. It’s easy enough for most of us to make links in our posts. A case of highlighting the text we want as a link, clicking the little world with a chain next to the T with a colour pallete in the create post window and cutting and pasting the address from the address bar into the pop-up. More info here.
The problem most people seem to have is putting links into the blogs sidebar. There is no quick easy way with this. You’re going to have to get down and dirty with the code you find on your template page. Near the bottom of this code you’ll find the links you already have on the side, they say things like ‘edit me’ or ‘google news’. All you have to do is replace these with similar like information for your own links. Just make sure you re-publish your entire blog. Anyhows, the good people of blogger have provided instructions for this.
Funny though. When I first started all this blogging it seemed we all tended to just add any local blogging link. Now there are a few more of us it’s giving us the choice to be a bit pickier, if we want. I would certainly feel uncomfortable removing a link once I had one. Funny really, despite the webs percieved anonymity, you don’t want to hurt peoples feelings, no matter what you think of them. Hmm, risky topic this, think I’ll move on.
My point of writing this is that I feel if we have our own webspace, like the blog, we should be providing links to stuff we like, or not. Things we find usefull, or even pointless. But for the sake of being able to find things we would of anyway, we should link. I guess thats why I like sites like del.icio.us, a social bookmarking site.
Here, I’ve banged on about links now so I’ll give you one that you would never have searched for: Ian’s 17 steps
The straight answer is no, on this blog I’m not. I’ve been playing with the W3C’s validator tool. Mainly for oonagi as it makes a difference to how high you appear on a search engines results (we call this Search Engine Optimisation, SEO). It’s taken me a bit, but I’ve managed to make oonagi valid all bar one warning (though this isn’t an error, so I’m still valid). My feed from Arts & Elbows. This is all down to the ampersand in his title. Still, I’ve asked him if he wouldn’t mind terribly fixing it and then it’ll be all good. On this blog I have 56 errors, maybe I’ll sort it out when I have more time on my hands as it’s good practice. I’m not as bad as Thanet Life though, with 443. It’s no biggy and I’m not too worried, even the big guns don’t bother. Today the BBC had 37 errors and yahoo have 253!
Snailpace asked that I post some instructions to turn comments in blogs on to help out The Angina Monologues, but it seems that in not getting help from us he’s getting his friends daughter to visit. I wouldn’t want to deprive the poor old boy of that pleasure as well as confusing him with my technobabble.
I’m doing an open post here in a vain hope that it may be spotted by the author of the blog by the title we see above. Though I know it unlikely to be spotted due to techy the nature of my blog, I’ll try anyway. If you want to visit it, just click here.
The blog name is excellent, especially considering the demographic. He (I thought it to be a she at first, considering the title) was an Eastcliff Richard fan, but lost his way after the link was removed from the doctors site. I know I’m still linked, for now. Anyway, I wish the writer the best of luck and hope they keep writing. Unfortunately I can’t tell them directly as they currently have the comments and all forms of contact turned off.
Or not, as the case may be. I was at the wrap party last night for the thanet film Ruby Red Chequer which stars Bob Hoskins. For those of you that don’t often grace the red carpet, a wrap party is a celebration of the end of filming. Alas, Bob wasn’t at it as he was off filming elsewhere, but that didn’t stop the party. Each guest was given free drink tickets but the organisers neglected to inform them that these were only for certain drinks, which meant some angry punters. I’ve never seen so many people complain about free drinks. Anyway, everyone seemed to get very drunk and did seem to be having fun, in that ‘trendy gliterati’ style. There was a fella going round doing card tricks who was very good, though I like to be fooled by those things. He also got a lady to lay on a table while he cleft her in twain with a power saw. People made speeches, smoked cigars and generally slapped each others backs in congratulations. Though I guess that’s what it’s like at these feature film shindigs and as they are locals who put it together I can only say good luck and I hope it does well. btw, I did already meet Bob.
Eek! It’s like when you’re having a dream where you’re in a public place without any clothes on. I kept trying to say ‘look again’, as if they’d be there next time, but nope, stripped bare.
Of course this isn’t a dream, it’s the internet. Though I’m sure many other parallels could be found, I’ll leave it there. My internet nakedness today has been my lack of a cascading Style Sheet (CSS). Where as once upon a time all webpage were made from HyperText Markup Language (HTML), laying the page out with things like tables. Today they are normally a combination of HTML files and CSS files. The HTML holds all the things like headlines, text, links and suchlike. CSS deals with the layout and the style. This means that if, for example, you are visually impaired, you can have your browser just show the text, without and confusing graphics, or even just use a Braille reader.
The problem I had today? My CSS file was held on google servers somewhere and it wasn’t being called to action for some reason or other. My solution? I’m now hosting the CSS file on my own webspace at oonagi. Thanks Mr Snailspace sir for pointing this problem out.
If your still just seeing the text only version, then try holding shift and clicking refresh. Doing this does a full reload rather than reloading with some of the temporary files on your computer.
Also, I’ve removed the link to thelrsessions.blogspot.com to the right as they don’t a) update and b) don’t have the HTML file, thus, no content, which is poor.
While bouncing around the local blognet I spotted a neat chart on one of the sites which displays all mentions of ‘thanet’ on the blogosphere. I liked it so I added it to mine too.
I’ve done what all self-obsessive types (read blogger) do and I’ve been checking my stats. The first thing I couldn’t help but notice is the gradual drop off in visitors since my all time high of hosting the Eastcliff Richard news with link from his site. That’s fine, I never expected to get as high a rating as him anyhows and at that time the whole blogger network was on fire. We’ve calmed down alot now (in some cases almost stopped) but the stats still reveal some other interesting figures. btw, if you do have your own blog, the guys I’m using are pretty neat for tracking your hit counts.
The thing that I found most interesting is the relatively high proportion of Firefox users who visit this blog. The internet average is approx 80% Internet Explorer, 15% Firefox, 5% other - probably made up mainly as a combination of Mac users or whichever browser the odd Linux user prefers e.g. Konquerer. On this blog the average daily rates see-saw 50-50 between IE and Firefox. I expect this is because bloggers are a little more tech savvy than the average web user.
As I’ve said before, firefox is uber cool, but it’s not the only alternative browser out there. Another good one for PC users is Opera. I used this a bit before firefox came out, but the free version (what’s the point in paying when you already have a free one with IE) always had built in banner ads. I really do hate banner ads. Opera has now removed these, probably funded by is expansion into the handheld markets. Your likely to be using an opera based browser if ever you use the net on your mobile (a good use of net on the mobile is Windows Live Hotmail, which means you can email through WAP, you could even email your blog post with the auto email publish tool on blogger).
So I’ve been trying out Opera for the PC. It has some very neat functions. Firstly, it’s has a very clean and minimal interface which means a large viewing window. It has the tabbed browsing which we all love about Firefox, but it deals with it differently. It saves the history of tabs from when you last closed it, which is neat. Opera also has RSS built in. Infact, it is a very good browser, but it’s not as easy to modify as Firefox. Another major problem is that man of the new ajax sites don’t support it (see the webmail webmail webmail post) so alas, though I will say it’s better than IE6, it’s not as good as Firefox.
Here I am, banging on about Firefox, Firefox, Firefox. But you can’t keep an old dog like IE down. Enter IE7 beta. The first thing I’ll say is… “what a firefox rip off”, even down to the re-styled logo. The boys at Microsoft have clearly seen that the are seriously lagging in the browser department. The new explorer is neat, they’ve included tabbed browsing (hurrah!) and they have also now included RSS feeds capability. The RSS has been approached differently though, rather than headlines with links that you get in FF, it’s a separate page which loads the whole feed like in Opera (you can get a FF extension that does the same if you like). Also included is the little search-bar in the top right which is an invaluable tool on the fox which makes the return to IE6 all the more difficult. So IE7 is a huge leap for the explorer range but will not be shipped as standard till the release of Windows Vista, which will be next year for us home users. Though of course they will hold a degree of browser market share due to users lacking the technical knowledge to change and of course those who fear change, I think that more people are getting tech savvy.
Considering the gap of 5 years between version releases, I find it difficult to think that a monolith like Microsoft will be able to keep up with smaller browser developers like Mozilla’s Firefox, as has been shown with Microsoft’s ambivalence to browser improvements since beating Netscape in the original browser war and subsequently being caught with their trousers down. But Microsoft is resilient, though they don’t have the advantage of being able to employ their bullying techniques, they have shown time after time that they are an irresistible force. We shall have to wait and see what the outcome of this new browser war is.
I’ve been with the girlfriend for the past few days and we’ve been looking around at some fun stuff on the net. We started with something a friend of mine from college told me about called Hard Gay from Japan. Here is a YouTube link (I won’t embed it, though you can do that with anything from YouTube). It’s pretty crazy what they can get away with over there. Hoooo!
From that I took her to some old classics that everyone should check out at some point. Many of these are flash, but you’ll get the links at each site if your missing the nessecary flash plugin.
Thats about as much as we got through as I’ve got her addicted to myspace now and she has to make regular checks on that. Anyhows, I’ve gotta roll as I’ve revision to do.
The word on the street is that there is a new government tagging system that’s been put into place to help other motorists spot bad drivers. Apparently the new system will involve drivers who have been spotted as being a potential hazard being required to have a flag attached to the side of their car. The government directive has chosen the well known St Georges cross flag as the primary marker to be used so as to be clearly identifiable. Particularity bad drivers will be required to have two flags. So if you see anyone with these tags attached to their car, be sure to steer clear.
I know many people like to use POP and IMAP email through a client like MSOutlook or Thunderbird. Of course I’ve used these myself and see many advantages, quick loads, offline reading etc. but there are huge advantages in using webmail. Thanks to always-on broadband, most of us have a constant internet, so we no longer need to quickly connect and collect. The long suffering problem for webmail though has been slow loading of pages for each and every message you want to look at. But thats been changing thanks to the new services being provided by the likes of Google, Microsoft and Yahoo and their implementation of AJAX scripting. I wanted to get a good look around these new webmail services what the best is.
I started my webmail days with the then wonderful hotmail (I guess it was AOL, but they suck, so I try to forget about that). I’ve now been wooed away by Gmail (google mail) thanks in large to super smooth loading, simplicity and nearly 3GB of storage. There are also firefox extensions and other apps whereby you can use all this space as online storage thanks to a good third-party API implementation. This ‘beta’ has been spreading on invitation only for quite a while now and is proving very popular.
So hotmail have countered with Windows Live Mail - you have to click the ‘try beta’ by the title at sign-in. They didn’t support firefox at first, then they did, now they don’t again. Most of you will still be using Internet Explorer (God help us!) so this won’t be too much of a problem, but even in IE it still uses up to much header space with banner ads. This means the whole email package is squeezed into the bottom half of the screen. They also fill up the right side with banner ads, this is all leaving little space for the serious business of email. Still, it does feel like using outlook express and is fast.
So the third contender for the crown is yahoo!. I’ve signed up with these guys a few times before, this time to use their messenger service (please o’ webgod, when do we get a universal messenger?) but as always with them I’ve found the whole experience heavily ad laden. The whole ‘beta’ webmail experience though was a hell of a lot better than Windows Live. They even have they neat, if not pointless function of dragging and dropping emails into the trash. Also, it all works fine in firefox! All in all, it’s not too shabby.
Conclusion as to which is the best? Gmail by a head and shoulders. It has so many more innovative functions, eg grouping replied to emails, tagging rather then putting emails in folders, integrated googletalk. Also, the discreet text ads that you hardly notice and certainly don’t interfere make Gmail a winner.
If you want a gmail invitation, just mail me through my profile and I’ll send you one.
