Archive for December, 2007

Lately, I’ve been noticing websites that make use of varying background images for sections within the sites. Unfortunately, I’m having a little trouble thinking of many good examples right now. I’ve assembled a few below, but let me know if you have any to add.

The general idea, though, is the sites have a “main design,” but the background image assigned to the body tag changes throughout the site. For example, you have the Lego.com design. When you go to the Lego Indiana Jones page, the body tag’s background-image changes. It adds a bit more visual interest, and makes the images and Flash animations blend-in with the main layout more.

Here are a few examples of such behavior. Send me some links if you know of some others. (more…)

If you’re reading this, you probably know what a permalink is. This article is about optimizing your permalinks for both search engines and your readers. That said, do not change your permalink structure if you can help it. If you’re starting a new blog, put a bit of thought into your permalink structure of choice. Otherwise, you should probably leave them alone. By changing your permalink structure, you’re basically killing off all of your search rankings and incoming links (kind of defeats the purpose). However, if you are an .htaccess expert (and feel like setting up a complex redirection scheme), you could update your permalink structure (though I’d still advise against it).

Some of the More Common Permalink Structures

Wordpress’s default format for permalinks is http://www.yourdomain.com/?p=456. The number “456″ is the numerical id for the post. If your permalinks look like this, then change them immediately. They’re not very user-friendly, and they won’t rank well in search engines. Even if you’ve been blogging for awhile, you can go ahead and change them. Doesn’t that contradict what I said earlier? No, because the default permalinks always work, and will just redirect people to the updated URL. (more…)

• Web Browsers VS Web Standards - Goldfries compares browsers’ standard compatibility and rants about their incompetence. A great read, especially now that Firefox/IE are battling to follow the standard to the letter.
• Did you know there are 140 Named Colors
• Looking for some design inspiration? Here’s a list of 60 design galleries.
• For those of you who live under rocks, logo designer David Airey’s domain was stolen several days ago. Well, he managed to get it back yesterday. Unfortunately, there’s no doubt that this little mishap has hurt his search rankings. On the plus side, he got some valuable publicity.
• Logo-Palooza: Creative Use of Whitespace
• Smashing Highlights 2007
• The Five Worst Ideas in Content Theft
• How Longer Feature Posts Improved My Blog
• Archives Suck (and 3 Ways to Save Them)
• Ben Cook of BloggingExperiment.com talks about an interesting new service called ScratchBack.
• Kick ass Creative Logos

I’m trying out a new service I found earlier today. It’s called ScratchBack, and it looks promising. You’ve probably seen sites that solicit tips through PayPal. Sure, it benefits the site and it’s owners, but what about all the people who donate? Wouldn’t it be more fun if they got something out of it as well? If someone’s nice enough to give you a few dollars, then shouldn’t you give them a shout-out?

That’s the premise behind ScratchBack. You put a JavaScript widget on your website, which has room for a few links (five, ten, whatever). Then people who like your website and want to give you a small tip can just click the link on the widget and send you a couple dollars through PayPal. After putting some dough in your tip-jar, the generous reader can then have a link to his or her website shown in the widget. The links have nofollow attributes on them, so there are no worries about Google penalties, but the tipper gets a little publicity.

It gets even more fun then that. The widget shows 5-20 text links (or images if you prefer), and by default the most recently added link is shown at the top. As more people tip you, their links bump older links down the list. If you don’t like this default behavior, then you can set the widget to just show links for a preset amount of time (a day, a week, a month). Personally, I like the “AutoBump” mode better. If you don’t get many tippers, then the links stay on longer too.

You can set the tip amount when you create a “TopSpots” widget, and it can be pretty much any value you want. I set mine (it’s in the sidebar to the right) to the minimum of one dollar.

Want to get in my TopSpots? After all, we all know how little the U.S. Dollar is worth.

roScripts is a blog/forum/Digg-for-scripts. Their “articles” section has several categories worth of coding tutorials (PHP, Flash, AJAX, HTML, etc). Then they have the “scripts” section, where you can easily find pre-made scripts to suit your purposes. The interesting part, though, is that they’re sorted in a Digg-like manner. You can vote-up scripts you like, and “bury” the ones you don’t.

roScripts has changed a lot since their launch, and they keep getting better.

Generally I prefer to avoid using the term “hack” in the way most people use it. However, I will, for the duration of this post, use the term in the way the average non-geek would use it. In short, I will use the term “hacker” with the meaning of “someone who vandalizes websites” instead of the definition used among geeks, which is basically a synonym for geek. Read about the controversy at Wikipedia. That aside, let’s move along.

Imagine this scenario: You start-up your computer one morning, and head over to your website. Instead of seeing your well-designed site, you see a black screen with red text reading “This Site PWNed by TehH4k3r.” Uh oh, that’s not good.

If something like this happens to you, drop everything and investigate. You need to move fast, or risk losing visitors and search rankings. Fire-up your FTP client, and log-in to your database admin panel (e.g. phpMyAdmin). Your mission is to figure out what happened exactly, fix it, and find out how the sneak got in in the first place. (more…)

It’s almost 2008. Too bad, I like the sound of “2007.”

When the new year starts, you’ve got some work to do. You need to clean-up your blog, fix things that have broken over the year, and get ready for another year of blogging.

• Change the dates on your copyright notice.
• Go through old posts. Look for dead links, broken images, and other things that may need a quick update. While you’re at it, keep an eye out for posts you could expand upon.
• Check browser compatibility. As you’ve updated things in your template, you may have made your blog look horrible in certain browsers.
• Evaluate your design. How long has it been since your last redesign? How is the current one holding up? Is there anything that needs a little tweaking?
• Publish a “Best of” post. Highlight your best posts of the last year.
• Update things that have changed. Does your about page say something like “I have been blogging for two years?” You’d better update that!
• What have you been putting off?

Those are my suggestions. I’m sure you can find plenty more things to fix. Feel free to share your plans in the comments.

Do you have too many email accounts? Up until a few days ago, I did too. Every day I’d check several accounts for new messages, which took longer than I liked.

My tip for today is too merge all of your email down into one account. GMail, and Google Apps, make this fairly easy. If you have a domain, I recommend using Google Apps. It’s much cooler to have you@yourdomain.com instead of domainlessguy73@gmail.com.

Once your new GMail-based email account is set-up, head over to the “Accounts” tab on the settings screen. Here you will configure your account to be the one place you go to check your email.

(more…)

The Apple Addicts over at Macworld.com, the website for the popular Macintosh magazine, have been busy redesigning their site. And it really needed a redesign.

Let’s start with the header. Here’s what the new header looks like:

Note that the logo says “BETA” next to it now. The horizontal navigation is similar to that of Apple.com, though with a bit of a twist. Overall, the header looks pretty good.

Down the page a bit, they’ve got a cool tabbed box with highlighted content. (more…)

• 47+ Excellent AJAX CSS Forms
• Adii’s Top Blog Designs of 2007
• 60 horizontal navigation bar design inspiration
• List of 180+ Best Design Inspiration Sites - If you need a lot of inspiration…
• How do search engines see your website? SEO Browser let’s you see for yourself.
• Ben Cook of BloggingExperiment.com reviews new ad service 125box.
• Be on the lookout for flying pigs! Internet Explorer 8 (which is still in development) has passed the Acid2 test. Firefox 3 has also. However, I’d like to know what OSes IE8 will run on. Will it work on XP, or is Micro$oft going to use it to lure more people to Vista? Further reading: Ars Technica, 456 Berea St.
• FTC allows Google-DoubleClick merger to proceed
• Need an easy reference for the submission URLs for the major social bookmarking sites? Look no further.
• Firefox 3 Beta 2 released.
• 50+ Amazing Jquery Examples- Part1
• 10 WordPress Plugins Every Blog Should Be Using
• Dilectio: A Smashing Wordpress Theme