From The Front End - ZDNet Edition
My ZDNet version of my blog. Will feature news my mad opinions and relevant posts or partial quotes from my blog - http://www.fromthefrontend.co.uk
Topics: Wed Standards, Tools and Services for Designers, Photography and graphics, Accessibility and other Front-End Webdesign related info.
Wednesday 1 November 2006, 9:21 AM
Get more from you ZDblog!
Want to make sure you get the most from you ZDNet blog? In the right hands it's an incredibly powerful tool. I will post a series of articles helping you get he most from it.
My first 3 tips are to do with getting more people to read you blog posts
1) Use HTML/CSS. Did you know your ZDblog supports standard HTML and inline css styles? Use this to improve your posts. This is not just to make thing pretty with colours. Using HTML you can create links, create headings, insert images etc. Don't know HTML? No Problem - Your on ZDNet! This means your surrounded by professional web developers/designers/producers. Alternatively just post a comment on this blog post and I'll aim to respond with instructions within a few minutes if I'm online (yes i'm that addicted to ZDNet).
A couple of quick things I'll show you are:
i. Links To create a standard link type <a href="yourlinkurl" >Your Link Message </a>
To make a link open in a new window or tab (i.e. Links that take viewers away from the ZDNet site) take advantage of our javascript library and add the rel attribute: <a href="yourlinkurl" rel="external" >Your Link Message</a>
ii. Highlight text To make text appear bold simply enclose text between the strong tag: <strong>yourtexthere</strong>
Alternatively you could just use a WYSIWYG editor to prepare you posting and then past it into your blog. (I am working on a template you can use to see how you work will look on the ZDNet site including the css styles created for bloggers to use).
I believe the guys at ZDNet are working on an enhanced version of the blog to assist you with using HTML in your posts but there is no eta on this yet.
2) List you blog on Technorati. If you've never heard of it Technorati is the Google of Blogs. By listing you Blog on there your articles will be visible to hundreds of thousands more viewers.
For a step-by-step tutorial on how to use add your ZDBlog to Technorati click here.
NB. At the moment if you want Technorati to know when you've made a new post so it can index/list it you need to visit the site and click the ping button next to your site. The ZDNet Team are working on having this built into the ZDBlog so it will automatically notify your chosen blog directories (including Technorati).
3) Feed you ZDBlog into your Wordpress Blog. Been trying to figure out how to run your Wordpress blog ASWELL as your new ZDBlog? Well fret no more. If you don't have time to update each seperately you can tell your WordPress blog to duplicate any posts you put into your ZDBlog. If you ever want to turn off this feature you can without losing any posts copied over. You can also delete individual posts if they were only intended for ZDBlog.
For step-by-step instructions on adding your ZDBlog to Wordpress Click Here.
You can also feed you posts into a standard website as news feed - keeping fresh content on your site. I will show you how to do this another time.
Why only 3 tips? Well I don't get paid to write blogs like some lucky people. I have to get on with work like everyone else. What you see here is what I have time to do on my bus journey too and from work (or in my lunch break).
Coming soon
+Why you should have a blog/ZDBlog
+Using images into a ZDBlog
+What makes a good Blog?
+Easy Blogging - tips for busy/lazy bloggers
+What Preloaded CSS classes can I reference?
Feedback is always appreciated so leave a comment whether it's good or bad. Too technical? Not enough detail? Let me know.
You can also contact me on my other blog From The Front End
Tuesday 31 October 2006, 3:01 PM
02 Trialing the Orbit
Following on from David Myer's blog post on The next incarnation of Windows Mobile.
O2 are currently trialing the O2 Orbit which features built in GPS. I hope when it ships it will be one of the first phones include windows mobile 6.0 or whatever they'll call it.
I currently use the XDA EXEC which is brilliant for mobile office features. I do the majority of my blogging directly from the handheld. It was one of the first devices to feature Windows Mobile 5 and while the first release of the firmware really made the mobile OS sluggish a further update a few months later made it much more stable and zippy.
Tuesday 31 October 2006, 2:44 PM
BIG SMALL - Bigger and Better ZDNet
I was worried when I heard ZDNet would become even wider that it would be even harder to navigate on my Mobile/PDA.
Despite the wider format it is actually easier to navigate.
The Main navigation (unordered list) becomes verticle and doesn't require me to scrol horizontally.
The pages load faster, clearer to read and overall a better mobile browsing experience.
Tuesday 31 October 2006, 10:19 AM
My FireFox 2.0 Review
Seems every tech blog in the land has picked up on the hot release of the week - Firefox 2.0. I heard a lot of good things about it while still in Beta and I finally got round to giving it a spin today.
IE7 also saw a new release this week but got a lot less attention/praise (unless you work for Microsoft) as it didn't offer much extra compared to RC1 which I already had installed. Opera's latest release has impressed as it's the first browser to pass the Acid2 test.
So is FF2.0 worth the download. Well if you haven't got Firefox at all it's an obvious yes. Once you've tried Firefox for a couple of weeks you'll find it a frustrating experience to try and browse the web with anything less. However, I am sure I'm preaching to the converted so I'll focus on What's New in 2.0.
Firstly upgrading was a doddle. I was concerned about loosing settings or my favorite extentions but most of my favourite settings and extentions are now built in to Firefox as standard. Most of the other custom extentions were updated during the beta so it was a simple matter of running the update for them when prompted asI opened FF2.0 for the first time.
Improved Tabbed Browsing Tabbed browsing was one the best features Forefox had to offer when it came out. Since then it has caught on in a big way. I typically have 10 or more tabs open at a time so this new release has enhanced the tabs further for me. Now each tab has it's own close button instead of having to view the tab and click close at the end of the tab row (you can of course still middle-click to close but handy for when I'm in an internet café with a no/broken middle button/scroll wheel)
Remember cursing when you accidently closed the wrong tab. Now the new History menu option allows you to restore recently closed tabs. Not only is the tab restored but any text you were filling in forms. A life saver when you close you blog page without saving. This often happened when I had been working with a large number of tabs and couldn't see enough of the title to see which tab was which. Now FF2.0 has a handy button at the end of the tab row (where the close button used to be) which when clicked shows a drop-down list of all the open tabs with their favicon and title.
Improved RSS support Viewing the xml RSS feed was always difficult to read in fact I never bothered. Just copied the url for whatever purpose I needed the feed for. Now when you view a feed page Firefox styles the xml for you so there are legible titles, text, and links. At the top of the page it also gives you the option to create a live bookmark for the page or add the feed to bloglines, google reader or Yahoo. It also gives you the option of other so you can use you favourite reader if not already listed.
Faster Browsing One thing that will benefit all users regardless of whether they are a power user or not is that Firefox 2.0 is less resource hungry and is actually faster. Faster to open, faster to open tabs and even load pages in cases. Despite the improvement you can tweak things further. Firefox prefetches pages by following links on a page before you click them. If you click the link the page loads very quickly as it's already downloaded, however, if you don't click a link to a page it's prefetched for you it's wasted bandwidth and cpu cycles. If you ISP has a bandwidth cap or you want to reduce the load on your cpu then you can disable this feature. You can also cap the amount of ram ff uses. See the about:config section below for more info.
More Customiseable Firefox was already highly customiseable. With the huge selection of themes, settings and extentions already available in FF1.5 no two people seemed to have the same looking and functioning Firefox. Version 2.0 takes it further with enough tweakable elements to please even the most fussy. See some examples in the about:config section below.
Session Restore I loved the session restore extention and now this is built in to 2.0. When you close/crash Firefox you don't lose all the pages you were viewing. Re-open the browser and everything is restored the way you left it, even half completed forms. To turn this feature on choose Tools > Options > under Main tab there is the option - When Firefox Starts: - choose Show my Windows and Tabs from the last time.
Intergrated Spell Checker I believe this was in version 1.5 but I didn't notice or use it until 2.0. Now you can set it to spell check single line form fields aswell as large text areas.
Better intergration with Search engines In previous versions of Firefox you could add search engines to the top right window of your browser but this has now been improved. FireFox now detects if a page has a search facility and gives you the option to add it to your list of search tools. It also adds ajax powered search like Google Suggest. This means as you type it will suggest search terms using a combination of your past search entries (i.e. autocomplete) and using AJAX to search the search engines results/database.
about: config By typing about:config into your address bar you can view a huge list of tweakable elements within Firefox. Rather than me explain away each feature check out some highlights on lifehacker.com
A more detailed item by item describtion can be found on MozillaZine.
So what are you waiting for? Get FireFox 2.0 now!
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