When and how to use internet image formats

a good article on when to use JPEG, PNG and GIF format files.

Textorize your pictures

Oh My Dear

Came across the captioned article from Lifehacker, and tried out Textorizer.

Performancing extension of Firefox

Two weeks ago I installed Firefox and the Performancing extension, and played with Performancing to write on this Blog. It got me into big trouble. I posted and updated entries with both Blogger and Performancing, and ended up with an almost corrupted Blog. To save my Blog, I uninstalled Performancing, hoping that Blogger will recover by itself. For several days, there was still an inconsistency. When I check today, it seems to be back to normal.

The lesson I have learned is that Performancing should not be used in conjunction with the Blogger editor.

Tags:

• Firefox
• Performancing

More Colour Tools

I found more colour tools on Vitaly Friedman's website: The Web Developer's Handbook. This is probably an overkill for me, but it is definitely worth recommending to other people.

Draw your music and create ring tones with Hyperscore

Illustration: The first minute of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony recreated with Hyperscore

Came across this "Roll Your Own Ringtone" article in Wired News. As a music lover, I couldn't wait to see what Hyperscore offers, and wow, I'm impressed. Hyperscore lets you compose music without learning the theory. With Hyperscore, you don't write music; rather you draw it. The user interface is intuitive, and I was able to create some simple tunes within 15 minutes.

Choose your favourite colour with Pixie

I am very delighted to see Dan Rubin's reply to my question that I posted on his Thisaway Blogger template support forum. Dan directed me to Nattyware's Pixie software which is exactly what I was looking for.

It's a colour picker that includes a mouse tracker. Run it, simply point to a colour and it will tell you the hex, RGB, HTML, CMYK and HSV values of that colour. You can then use these values to reproduce the selected colour in your favorite programs. Pixie will also show the current x y position of your mouse pointer.

Visible Earth

The following images: Hong Kong SAR, Namibia Sand Dunes, The Blue Marble are from NASA's Visible Earth site.

My first Writely document

I am now trying out a new tool named Writely that I read about in the article "The Best Web 2.0 Software of 2005". Along with some of the familiar tool-bar icons and menus that is found in Word, the user interface has tabs for "collaborate", "publish", "blog", and "revisions".

The tool automatically saves my edit from time to time, which is very good. Now I shall try to post it on my Blog...

When I tried to preview as blog post, the spacing of the paragraphs look too wide to me. Anyway, let me try and see how it goes...

After some hiccups, I have managed to post to one of my blogs, but not the one that I targeted. But it seems that Blogger.com was having some problems during the time. So maybe I try this feature some time later...

A couple of hours later, it is confirmed that I can post this writing to my intended Blog, and I can update and re-post the writing.

Good things about Writely:

1. Portable word processor. I can do word processing not only with my desktop, but also in Internet cafes, etc.
2. It remembers my user name and password so that I do not have to log in to Blogger every time I want to post an article.
3. Other points to be jotted down later.
   

Netvibes

Not long after I started Blogging, it became apparent that RSS is the way to deal with the vast amount of information popping up on the web every day. Recently, I have experimented with the new version of MyYahoo, which works with RSS feeds. But it wasn't until today that I find the suitable portal for my browser, thanks to Don Hincliff's article Best Web 2.0 Software of 2005.

I like the Netvibes look and feel. It appears to be less U.S. centric than Yahoo, and most importantly, the modules occupy minimal space when collapsed, which is crucial if you want to pack in a lot of RSS feeds.

One drawback of Netvibes is that though it has a module for Yahoo Mail, only paid users are able to make use of it. I am hopeful that this restriction will be removed.

Easy Photo Sharing on the Web

Read the captioned article by Michael Calore in Wired news. It discussed about Flickr in a useful amount of details for the beginner, and also mentions two other photo hosting services: Zoto and Shutterbook.

Tags: photo Flickr Zoto Shutterbook

Del.icio.us

The first time I came across Del.icio.us was by reading the news that it was acquired by Yahoo. I went in to the web site to take a quick look, and didn't find it interesting. Several more time I saw the name menioned again and paid no attention to it. Then it was mentioned in the Web 2.0 article that I referred to last week. If so many people were talking about it, and it was touted one of the key tools, it must have some merits, I thought.

Then somehow I navigated on the article The Several Habits of Wildly Successful del.icio.us Users, which hit me on the head. Let me quote the first paragraph:

First things first, real quick like. At it's core, del.icio.us is a place where you can store your bookmarks and get to them from anywhere you can find an internet connection. Accounts are free, get yours today.

This alone is a very good reason to use Del.icio.us, don't you think? Many people use computer in not just one place. For example, they may use it in the office, and at home as well. If they don't use the same notebook in both places, then having a Favourites list maintained on the web is certainly a good thing to have. There are of course many other nice features about this tool, and you can find them in the above article.

Tags: tagging del.icio.us

Nova on Internet

The PBS's Nova TV programme has been one of my favourites when I lived in the U.S. Today, I just learned from Del.icio.us that we can view Nova on the web. I navigated to the Nova site and watched the programme Artificial Life. Excellent! Now I have gained a little vocabulary of life:

Container - Physical or chemical barrier to make the life-form distinct from its environment.

Engine - To metabolize energy from the environment in order to grow, repair itself and reproduce.

Instructions and Scribe - Generic information that guides the initial assembly of the organism and directs how it will grow and thrive; information encoded in DNA in the sequence of four chemicals known by letters A, T, G and C.

Evolve - Changes in genetic code during reproduction so that some of the offsprings can adapt to changes in environment.

Tags: PBS Nova

Bloglines

Most of the standard Blogger templates has a sample list of Blog sites that you can link to, under the heading of LINKS. The list is called a Blogroll. You can maintain your blogroll by editing the template. As you know, working with template is not as easy as creating new postings. I have come across two tools that help maintaining blogrolls, and I would not hesitate to recommend Bloglines. For an introduction of Bloglines, please refer to the About Bloglines page.

Bloglines is a very feature rich toolset, but I'll just touch on its Blogroll feature in this posting. My Blogroll list has about 20 items. Compared to those maintained by many other bloggers, this list is very humble. Still, I think maintaining the 20 items in the side bar is not that desirable. The good thing is that I have found Bloglines to be so useful that nowadays, I browse my blogroll sites with the My Feeds Bloglines page rather than from my blogs. My Feeds lets me create folders for the Blog roll so that I can better organize my Blogroll list. More importantly, the Blogroll is very frequently updated in My Feeds page to show the number of new postings that have not been browsed. Once I browse a site's new postings, the number would automatically be reset. Another advantage is that if I view other blogs from My Feeds page, the time it takes to display the blog is much less than if I go directly to the site, because only the updated postings will be shown instead of the entire blog. The increase in efficiency is a benefit of the RSS or atom feeds that have become very popular on the web BTW, each Blog built by Blogger already has a atom feed automatically set up, so that it is as easy as clicking a few buttons to let your postings be subscribed to.

Tags: Bloglines RSS Blogroll

Dion Hincliffe's Web 2.0 Blog

Came upon Dion's Blog today by following an article in Wired News, in which he talks about the (subjective) Best Web 2.0 Software of 2005. Great stuff! The web is developing so fast that it's hard to keep up with. Articles like Dion's can really help the casual user like myself.

Tags: Web2.0

Flickr

There must be at least a dozen of photo hosting services on the web. I have seen a few from my friends. Lately, I find Flickr being used in quite a number of blogs, so I chose to use Flickr. This tools is so easy to install that it needs no introduction.

As soon as I opened my account in Flickr, I uploaded some of my photos and in no time, I had used up my monthly free quota of 20MB. So I have to wait until January to load more photos.

Of course you can keep your photos in Blogs. Flickr gives us a good alternative way to do it. To decorate my Blogs a little bit, I have put up a Daily Zeitgeist on this Blog and a Flickr Badge on An Amateur's Blog(s).

Tags: photo Flickr

To Archive or Not To Archive

So far, I have not turned off archiving for all of my blogs because all of them are set up as short projects. However, this blog is growing fast, so I may have to turn archiving on. Actually I think it would be better if I can group the articles into categories so that readers can choose from topics of the same category. I saw this in some people's blogs, which seem to be a good way to organize. If both archiving and categorizing can work together, it would be even better.

Tags: blogging

Playing with Colours

Last night I did my first customization to my favourite Template, Tic Tac. Only a minor change was made. The stadard template will change the font colour of text that bear links from blue to green when the cursor hovers over it, which is not eye-catching enough to me. Therefore I changed the green colour to orange, which incidentally is just like the Blogger software behaviour. The code changes were:

/* links */
a:link {
color: #69c;
}
a:visited {
color: #666699;
}
a:hover {
/* change from green
color: #693;
to orange */
color: #ff9a00;
}

Even though this is a small change, I am quite happy with it because I am getting to understand more about templates. During the course of finding the colour code for orange, the following colour tools were also discovered:

ColorMatch 5K

Web Color Reference

Color Scheme Generator 2

4096 Color Wheel

Tags: blogging templates

Thisaway Rose Template

There are not that many different colours that we can choose from the standard Blogger Templates. Dan Rubin has a series of four Templates that are almost identical in design, except for colour. Of these Templates, the one that caught my attention is Thisaway Rose; it's lovely and perhaps that's why it is called Rose.

I reserved to use this for very special Blogs, and the only time I used it was for the World Harmonica Festival 2005 Closing Ceremony when the Hong Kong Delegation snapped five of the twelve 1st Prizes.

Am delighted to find out that Dan maintains a Discussion Forum for his Thisaway Templates. I'll check out more details later.

Top Ways To Use Web Analytics to Improve Your Blog or Website

Came across this article Top Ways To Use Web Analytics to Improve Your Blog or Website today, and thought it is worth reading.

For a casual Blogger like myself, it is a bit too soon to talk about increasing visitor traffic to my site. Well, you create web pages either for your own sake, or to let other people see them, or both. I think most of us belong to one of the last two types, so even though increasing visitor traffic is not our goal today, it may well be later.

Jeffyfish, etc. Templates

I'd like to discuss four Blog Templates in this posting.

Names: Jellyfish, Simple II, Herbert, Sand Dollar
Author: Jason Sutter

All four Templates can be considered as a class by themselves. What sets them apart from the others is the Templates' ability to wrap the text to fit different window widths in both the main body and the side bar, and perhaps this is why Jellyfish is so named. I think this design is very good for text oriented Blogs, because it enables the user to easily view the contents. With the other types of templates, when the Blog window is resized to a narrower one, then a horizontal scroll bar will appear on the bottom of the screen.

Personally, I find the use of colour for these four Templates to be less soothing than the Tic Tac design, especially for Herbert. I prefer the red colour in Herbert to be replaced by the brown colour that is used in the background of the Sand Dollar Title bar.

Window Snapshot Inserts in Blogger

Up until the last posting, I had not included any photos and pictures in this Blog, which was quite rare for me. There had been no need to post any photo, and I had been looking for a good way to capture window snapshots. But finally I got my acts together.

The following describes how I just added the first screen shot to my post about the Tic Tac Template :

1. Opened a window and displayed the Tic Tac posting.
2. Pressed keys Alt Prt-Scr (BTW, I use Window XP) to copy the window image to the paste buffer
3. Opened another window and started the Windows Paint program.
4. Pasted the image into the Paint window.
5. Saved the file to a JPEG file. This part is important because Blogs accept images as JPEG files.
6. In the Blog Posting window, inserted the image from the JPEG file.

With hind-sight, this is pretty straight forward. I should have found this simple method earlier.

StatCounter

The third free counter service that I have used is StatCounter.

The setup procedure of this tool is pretty much like the other two that I have used. Some Java script code is generated for insertion into the Blog Template which was described in the posting about .

Pros:

1. Like SiteMeter, StatCounter provides quite comprehensive statistics.
2. StatCounter gives you a little flexibility in terms of the log size of each counter. While BraveNet sets a fixed limit of 20 log entries for each counter, StatCounter sets a total (free) limit of 100 entries. The maximum number of entries for each counter can be set by the user, but it must be at least 30. Hence a little arithmetic will tell that you can have a maximum of 3 free StatCounters, each with about 30-40 log entries; and if you choose to have only one counter, then your log size limit is 100 entries.
3. The counter does not slow down web page display time as much as SiteMeter, at lease it appears so.

Cons:

1. The counter aesthetics is not as good as the other two.

Bravenet Hit Counters

I mentioned about Site Meter Counters in an earlier posting, because I used a Site Meter counter on this Blog. However, my first encounter with counters was actually with Bravenet Hit Counters, which I first saw on one of Jeffifer's Blogs.

What I like about the Bravenet counters are:

1. Quite easy to install
2. Have a choice of counter designs to choose from. Particularly, the music notes design fits very well with my other Blogs.
3. Fast execution time, i.e. does not slow down the web page display.

Up to 3 free counters can be used. I used up the quota in no time.

Disadvantages of Bravenet counters is that usage information is not as comprehensive as the others that I now know of.

Blogger Template - Tic Tac

A Blogger Template is what defines the appearance of a Blog. In addition, my limited understanding is that you can define defaults in a Template, e.g. fonts.

I think it is worth while to spend some time to discuss about the Blogger standard Templates, because afterall, these are the only choices available to a beginner Blogger. To start with, I'll mention the Templates that I like and why I like them.

Name: TicTac
Author: Dan Cederholm
URL: www.simplebits.com

This is the Template which I am using in this Blog as of today, 6th Dec, 2005. I may well change it for experimentation from time to time. There are a couple of Tic Tac versions to choose from, and the colour scheme of the one in use is soothing to my eyes. The Blog Title on the top is pale green with Blog name in white font; the side bar on the right is pale blue with words in darker blue; the main body is white. The Blog Title is decorated with squares of different sizes and shades of the respective colour; the side bar sections are consistently decorated with the Tic Tac icon. In the main body, the Dates are in Blogger orange, the Posting Title is in either Blogger orange or dark blue depending on whether it is a link, and the body text contents are in black. All of these blends well together. In addition, the different sections are very well separated to give a neat and tidy look. I leave the Blog Navigation Bar in the default dark blue colour which matches well with the rest. I give this design a 5 star rating.

Site Meter Counters

Say you have begun posting entries to your Blog, and you think your Blog looks pretty decent; do you ever wonder if anyone is reading it, or how many people have visited your Blog today? I'm sure you have seen many web page counters. If you want to install free counters for your Blogs, go on reading.

I have just installed a Site Meter counter on this Blog. To take advantage of the service, just go to http://www.sitemeter.com/ There you will see instructions which I won't repeat.

Things I like about Site Meter:

1. One of the counter styles allows you to specify the counter start use date, which I think is quite useful to some web authors
2. They have a method to directly insert HTML code into your Blog template, so that you don't have to mess around with editing the template (and make mistakes). See more comments below.
3. At first glance, the statistics looks very comprehensive. I have only one visitor so far, therefore the stats may make more sense when I read them later.

What I don't like is that account name must be prefixed. For example, mine is prefixed with "s17". Thus I cannot use a consistent name across all services.

Although Site Meter allows you to directly insert HTML code into your template, I think this is only good for beginners. If you are a little adventurous like me, you may want to opt for the JavaScript code, which gives you more stats info. To do that:

1. Remember to back up your template before you do any editing
2. Remove the HTML code that was automatically inserted by Site Meter. You should be able to find it near the end of the template.
3. Copy the JavaScript HTML code from Site Meter
4. Paste the code into your template. I recommend you to do it at the bottom of the Side Bar section. Search the template with the strings id="powered-by"> and www.blogger.com on the same line, insert the JavaScript code below it.
5. Preview the template. If you see problem, then you should start over by clearing the edit, or just quit. Note that you may not see the counter at this stage.
6. If template looks ok, then save it, re-publish your Blog and view it. Check whether the counter is displayed correctly.

Back Up Your Blog Template(s)

Blogger has a collection of standard templates that you can choose from, and I have tried most of them. You can switch between templates for any given Blog, and they work well with your posts. I use different templates on my Blogs to make them a little more interesting, and to match with the theme of my Blogs.

Before you use any tool that requires adding code to your template, I strongly advise you to make back up copies. While Blogger allows you to cancel your template editing, it does not allow you to fall back to previous template versions. So it is up to you to safe guard your template(s). Trust me. If you are not familiar with HTML, it pays to do a back up every time before you edit your template.

The way I back up my template is:

1. Click on the Template tab to start the edit session
2. Make a selection of the entire contents
3. Open a NotePad
4. Paste the copy to the NotePad
5. Save the contents to a file with the Blog Title is file name
6. Email the file to myself so that I have a disk version and a email version of backup copies, and email allows me to keep multiple versions without bothering about version numbers.

Post Your Photos with "Hello"

The best way to learn to Blog is by Blog hopping. Just casually wander around by pressing the "Next Blog" button on the top right hand corner of your Blogger window will start your journey. The Blogger world is full of gems that you can pick from. The first I did was Hello when I visited one of Jennifer Su's Blogs.

Like Blogger, Hello is so easy to use that I'll just say that you can find the explanations in http://www.hello.com/ Note that you could also navigate there by clicking on the Title of this posting. In fact, you will find that every posting Title of this Blog will lead you to the site of the subject being discussed. I just retype the URL link in the posting for those who are not aware of the implicit links.

Even though the vanilla Blogger editor allows you to post photos, Hello is an excellent alternative because it can speed up the process by probably 50%-70%, and it has a very nice user interface. But if you need to upload multiple photos in one posting, then you might want to use the vanilla Blogger editor.

I should credit Jennifer for the use of Hello and the style of her blogging, which I stoled for all my Blogs up to now. Each of her Blogs is a short story of a travel. She recaps the trip at the top of the Blog. The rest are all photos, some of which bearing additional descriptions. It may not be the best recipe for everyone, but it is a good style especially for beginners.

Blogger basics

First of all, let me show you what I have achieved with Blogger in less than 2 months' time.

HK Delegation in World Harmonica Festival 2005

A Day of My Harmonica Life

WHF 2005 Pre-tour Concert Rehearsal

Sight-seeing in Vienna

Blogger is so easy to use that it needs little introduction. Just tune your browser to the Blogger home page http://www.blogger.com/

The top of the Blogger home page is a Sign In prompt for existing users. So if you already have an account, you can sign in to post new contents. Going down the screen you will see some scrolling names of Blogs that have just been updated. You can take a look at some of them. The Blogs of Note are more interesting ones which I recommend reading too.

The most prominent part of the screen, you can take a quick tour of what a Blog is. Just follow the three easy steps and you're in business.

When I created my first Blog, I had a slight problem in step 3. To avoid this, you should maximize the window, choose a template, and then click on the orange button in the lower right hand corner to complete the template selection process.

That's it for a quick start. Of course there is a lot more to Blogging than just a few simple steps. But you can learn as you post new entries like I have done. I was introduced to blogging by a friend who created a Blog. I went in to play with it for a while, and then started posting new entries and creating new Blogs.

Motivation

In a gathering yesterday, a friend asked me what software I used for writing my web pages, and praised me on the look-and-feel of the web site that I asked her to visit. "I thought you might be using Dreamweaver," she said. "No, I don't use any software," I replied.

In fact, what you see on this web page is done without using any software. It is all done by Blogger.

There are many casual users out there who admire what they browse on the web, but never thought they themselves could create web pages. When they go to a bookstore to search for learning materials, they are intimited by the jargons HTML, Java, Active-X, XML, etc. I should feel ashamed to say that as an ex-I.T. professional, I felt the same.

If this is not your first time to see a Blog, then chances are that you already know what I am talking about, and could even be my teacher. But I bet there are still a great number of users who are not aware of these easy-to-use tools on the web. This is what motivates me to create this Blog.

Besides Blogger, my intention is to introduce other free useful tools as I come across them. Also, I shall be using this Blog to jot down interesting Blogs or web sites that I have visited.