tigtog's corner » Web 101

Tech Tips and chitchat

Viv — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 02:01:49 +0000

tigtog.net’s VIVidWeb forums are now open to field your webwrangling questions and chat about other stuff too. Absolute beginners are very welcome.

I’m happy to be the main answerer for people’s questions at first (by dint mostly of linking to existing excellent tutorials most likely), but I’m hoping to build a community of helpful people there eventually. If being part of such appeals to you, please come along and join.

N.B. Membership to the forums must be approved, and the discussions will be moderated. Be kind or be binned.

How to turn off Facebook “Places”

Viv — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 22:13:56 +0000

Crossposted.

If anyone is wondering why pretty much the only thing I ever mention on Facebook has to do with sharing comedy links (with occasional politics links once in a while)? It’s because if it wasn’t for my comedy-blogging need to keep in touch with what comedians are up to, I’d have left the damn site long ago.

The new “Places” feature is yet another form of geotagging that lets everybody in the world know where you are, and which you can limit to “Friends only” or “Only Me” by going to the Privacy settings, but which you cannot turn off entirely.

Lifehacker shows you how to turn off the “Places” “feature” so that you can at least stop your location being inadvertently shared to strangers by your FB friends:

Keep in mind that any friend could potentially check you in anywhere. You don’t actually have to be there. If you don’t want anyone playing a practical joke and checking you in to a strip club, for example, this is a good thing to turn off.

You will need to edit your own Privacy Settings AND your Application Settings to ensure that your location information can’t be inadvertently shared with FB apps your friends are using.

Obviously, the other thing to double-check is whether your smartphone, should you have one, is broadcasting your location to everybody in your contacts and shared apps lists for all sorts of other networks, not just FB. I don’t find having the locator enabled is much of a help even when I’m looking at a map app, so I certainly can’t see the point of it otherwise.

Basic HTML for bloggers

Viv — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 02:22:36 +0000

Every now and then I get asked about this, by both authors and commentors, so I’m listing a few good resources here so that they’re all together in one place.

For Blog Authors:

N.B. It’s worth noting that some of the short HTML tags ( etc) seem to be deprecated i.e. not all new browsers render them, so it’s often better to use the XHTML tags ( etc) – except on platforms that don’t accept them, of course.

Basic HTML for Bloggers.
- from 2007, but excellent introduction

Basic Blog HTML Language
- introduction with a table listing TAG-ACTION-EXAMPLE for simple formatting

Blogger HTML Tutorial
- typically good introduction from eHow

Basic HTML tag for bloggers
- simple list of tags with formatting actions

HTML Text Formatting
- W3Schools is the best all-round resource, with widgets that allow you to test the code for yourself on their site – not much on detailed explanations though.

For Blog Commentors

In WordPress, the blog authors can use a wide range of HTML tags, while blog commentor’s options are restricted to some basic formatting tags. Other blogging systems similarly restrict the markup allowed in comments, in order to limit potential avenues for exploits.

Html allowed in comments #2

Most of the articles listed above offer links to more advanced tutorials at the end of their own tute.

How to change your display name on wordpress.com

Viv — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 06:38:56 +0000

This is coming up for me every now and then as a question from the perplexed.

It’s obviously not quite as obvious as it could be.

I tend to get this mostly from users who need to gain admin/editor/author access to a group blog created by somebody else. New users have to create a wordpress.com account to become an author, the administrator cannot just add them as a user manually as they can on a self-hosted blog. The usernames generated by wordpress.com appear to be getting longer and more randomly generated, which is A Good Thing for security but not so good for displaying on the blog, and people appear to be unclear on how to change the name that is displayed to readers of the blog.

Luckily editing your display name is pretty easy :-

My Profile and enter the names you want in the Basic Details fields" title="Change your wordpress.com display name" width="300" height="199" class="size-medium wp-image-244" />
Click to enlarge

The Personal Settings option in the Users section allows one to remove the visual editor option (for those who prefer to write directly in HTML), to push Twitter status updates to one’s blog, and more.

No reader’s comments display in your sidebar? Do you want more comments or not?

Viv — Sat, 02 Jan 2010 22:41:37 +0000

I don’t understand why anyone who blogs would not have some sort of “Latest Comments” widget in the sidebar, but it appears that quite a few don’t. I wonder if they realise that this might be why they don’t get as many comments on every post as they might like?

I find that on sites without a comments widget the discussions on older posts just wither away as new posts take the sweet spot at the top of the front page. With a comments widget, people can see that a discussion is ongoing on a post they’ve already read and perhaps commented on, and are encouraged to check those latest comments and maybe add more to the discussion. Without a comments widget, they have to want to revisit that post they’ve already read just on the offchance that new comments have been added. How many of the readers are going to do that?

Sure, they could subscribe to the blogs Comments RSS feed, or maybe just the specific Comments feed for that post if they are tech-savvy enough, but how many do? I generally don’t follow comments by RSS, the option just doesn’t appeal. If someone like me who follows hundreds of Posts feeds by RSS isn’t generally going to click on a post’s Comments feed, how many others do you think are going to do it?

In WordPress, the default Comments widget is pretty basic: a simple list of commentor names & gravatars (optional) that doesn’t show how many comments a post has in total and can show a maximum of 15 comments. I prefer a bit more information about comments (although obviously on this very new blog I don’t have that many comments to display yet).

I’ve long been fond of the plugin for Brian’s Latest Comments (plus widget), but for ages that wasn’t being updated. I’m glad to discover that it has been updated after all, in July 2009. I’m normally a bit leery of plugins that aren’t in the official WordPress repository, but I’ve liked and used earlier versions of this plugin for over 3 years, so I’m not about to stop now. As you should be able to see in the sidebar, it shows the post-title of the most recently commented posts, the total number of comments for that post and the latest 5 comments on the post.

More Comment Encouragement: I’m also a big fan of the Subscribe to Comments Plugin for helping keep discussions alive. This is an old plugin, hasn’t been updated for yonks, but still works perfectly well up to WPWordPress publishing platform 2.9. The additional plugin Subscribe to Comments Now! adds the necessary code to your comments template to include the option for people to subscribe without commenting, so you don’t have to add it manually.

Common website mistakes #1: Images

Viv — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 09:14:05 +0000

I see otherwise well-done amateur websites ruined by a lack of knowledge about images on the web all the time.

Too many people take an image straight out of their digital camera (or an image meant to be sent to a printer at high resolution) that is huge (1000-3000+ pixels wide), upload it directly to their server and insert it into a page as-is, using HTML to shrink the display to only 500 pixels wide, or maybe only 150 pixels wide. When you first realise that browsers can shrink or expand images to any size you like, it seems like a cool trick, and it is. But it’s also a trap. Browser-shrinking very large images creates the following problems:

it always looks horrible, with the image distorted and grainy

chews through the website’s allocated data storage as more and more are uploaded – when your webhosting plan has 100MB storage and you keep on uploading 5MB images, it doesn’t take long to reach your data storage limit -> increased webhosting costs

chews through the website’s allocated monthly data transfer as people access the page (similar to above, can lead to increased web host costs)

chews through the internet user’s bandwidth allotted by the ISP (can lead to increased costs to them)

worst of all, it slows down the loading of the page, leading to users losing patience and not clicking through to further content

And yes, if you are sending huge images straight from the digital camera to other people via email, that creates similar problems.

Solution:

Look at the page, work out what size you want the image to be, resize it to those dimensions, and save the smaller version to your website images folder with a simple descriptive name* (none of this DK4033-x1 numbers that your camera uses).

Then, use your Image Management program’s auto-adjust feature to balance the colours, brightness and contrast and sharpen the image up a bit so that it looks its best at the smaller size. Then you are ready to upload.

There are free Image Managers and Image Manipulation programs out there if your camera didn’t come with custom software that does this for you. Picasa, ImageMagick and GIMP are two very popular such programs, and there are free tutorials online.

Now, you don’t always have to only have a very small image for the page. You can use small images that link to a larger version of the image so that you can show off your images without slowing down the page load time and giving your readers the choice whether to view the larger version.

Many website manager programs have a thumbnail generator as part of their Image Gallery management tools, but if your program doesn’t have this, you can still resize the image to an even smaller version, upload that small image to display on the page, and also upload your larger (but not camera-original size) image that your smaller image can link to for a clearer view.

e.g.

Viv at Dorrigo (overlooking the Coffs Harbour hinterland)

So, if you see what I did there?

Firstly, I named the image with a simple description “viv_at_dorrigo.jpg” and used the underscore character to separate words so that the browser doesn’t insert nonsense characters into the file string when it’s served to the reader’s computer (“viv at dorrigo.jpg” would be rendered as “viv%at%dorrigo.jpg” or even worse).

Secondly, I uploaded an image that was already quite small, and to display it on this page I only used the thumbnail generated by WordPress when I uploaded that image. This means that the loading time for this page is as short as reasonably possible, making my internet users happy!

Thirdly, the slightly smartarse bit – I used a feature called “shadowbox” to display the larger version of the image when people click on it – instead of the default browser behaviour, which is to take them to a new page displaying only the image, the shadowbox effect darkens the page they are already on and opens a pop-up display of the image. This effect works even when you use a picture that resides on another server (e.g. photosharing services like Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa) , which means that you are no longer directing your readers to another site to see the larger version of the image. Shadowbox/Lightbox/Thickbox are all similar effects that require custom code added to your website either in the base code or via a plugin.

What I didn’t do: I did NOT just upload a huge image, let WordPress generate the thumbnail so that this page loaded quickly, yet still have that huge image load in the shadowbox. That’s because the shadowbox still uses site and user bandwidth to display the image, so page load for the shadowbox would take forever for a very large image, and the very large image would be too large for the browser, which would default to resizing it to fit, so it would still look horrible (as well as using up valuable data storage capacity).

So don’t do that, OK? Resize your images and display them so that pageload times are minimised and your site looks slick. Also, don’t always go for the .jpg option – other formats are often better, depending upon the type of image.

* simple descriptive names for images are good for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – they help search engines index your page accurately according to your content. The more descriptive caption, which in WordPress is also used as the image’s ALT tag for search engines, is also good SEO practise.

This article was originally published at my portfolio site, which I no longer wish to use as a blog.

ADDENDUM: The absolute best way to serve photos online is to use one of the specialist photosharing websites out there to host your images, and then embed images/galleries on your website. This is best because once you’ve uploaded the website to a photosharing site, they generate thumbnail and web-sized images automatically, and provide the embed codes for you – you don’t have to do it all by hand. Check out my Galleries pages for ways in which this can be done from a variety of sharing services.