Web Stuff Scan » Blogging Tips

How do I create an Icon for my Web page?

webstuffscan — Mon, 25 Dec 2006 09:09:07 +0000

When you visit Web sites in Firefox, you would have noticed that for many sites an Icon is shown on the left side of the URL field (Address field). For example, for Gmail it is a “letter” icon while for Google it is a “big G” icon.

In web speak, this icon is know as the favicon since it appears on the favorites list (in both Internet Explorer and Firefox). Now how do you add such a feature to your own Web page? It is rather simple.

1. First create an icon (name it as favicon.ico) which represents your site. This can be any picture file with dimensions 16 by 16 pixels. You might want to make the background using transparent color, otherwise a white rectangle will appear behind your Icon.

2. Upload your Icon to the document root of your web host. Typically this where your index.html is!

3. Add reference to your icon in all the web pages (inside HEAD tag). For wordpress, the following line can be added to the header.php inside head tags. I think this is not necessary in most browsers.

Thats it!

Desktop editor for blogging – w.bloggar

webstuffscan — Sat, 25 Nov 2006 07:25:41 +0000

If you blog once in a while, interface provided by blogging tools such as Wordpress or Movable Type is ok. But if you are a regular blogger, this becomes tedious and slow. Saving the post obviously takes couple of seconds and soon gets irritating.

So recently I started blogging using w. bloggar which is a desktop based application for blogging. This tool allows you to directly post to your blog from desktop. You can also review your previous blog posts, edit or delete them. It is also possible to upload files or images to your site and then directly link to your post. All this is possible without leaving w.bloggar.

You can start using w.bloggar in 4 simple steps.

1. Download and install w.bloggar
2. Setup your account – Here you need specify your blog address, user id and password.
2. Setup upload properties (Under blog properties menu) – Provide ftp settings for your web site. Provide URL to Link if you put your images/files in a sub directory.
3. Setup preview properties – Specify you site CSS and other properties here. This will make the preview same as the actual blog output.

Other Desktop Blog Editors
Qumana
Ecto (contains thumbnail and scaling tools)
Perfomancing for Firefox (requires firefox)
BlogJet (commercial)
Zoundry (currently in beta)

Server Side Includes for page reuse

webstuffscan — Thu, 23 Nov 2006 14:57:53 +0000

Consider the following scenarios,
1. Multiple blogs with shared content. You have couple of blogs and you want some common piece of information on all blogs(possibly on side bar, header or footer).

2. Single blog with multiple templates. You have a Movable Type installation and you want some common information across index pages and archive pages.

The commonly followed practice is to include the page fragment in all pages. This becomes a nightmare after a while. Whenever there is a change in the common page fragment you have to change all related pages.

Blogging tools such as Movable Type provides some mechanism to include other files. For example, MTInclude directive can be used to reuse page fragments. The problem with this approach is that you have to rebuild all the pages and for a large installation can take a lot of time.

The perfect solution to this problem is to use server side includes. For this your Web server must be configured for server side include (Most hosting providers enable this by default). For example in my Movable Type templates I have the following line,

...



...

In the above case note the virtual attribute in the include directive. This means that navbar.html is searched from the root of your web server. Another alternative is to use file attribute.

More Resources
Using MTInclude and PHP Include
Apache Tutorial on Server Side Include