Archive for the ‘Articles’ Category:
Understanding Floats in CSS - Making a 3-column layout
Written by Jai on April 11, 2008 – 2:41 pm - 2,628 views
Sharing knowledge is cool and if your audience is willing to learn - its Uber cool! 
With that note, here is my little contribution towards the code monkeys.
This article is meant for the people who are beginners or are in the mid-way of learning CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). When I started learning CSS, the most difficult problem that I faced was using floats and how to align and position the divisions (DIVs) in a page.
In a pure CSS based design, the formula for coding your layout lies in the fact, as to how best you can position your DIV tags. In this article, I will try and give you a better understanding of using the float property of CSS to position your elements.
Let us assume that we want to create a 3-column layout for our new WordPress theme. I am taking up this example because many people do not understand how to do this and have asked me questions in the past about this technique. In this tutorial, I am assuming that you know the basics of HTML. Read more »
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Written by Jai on April 5, 2008 – 11:32 am - 1,964 views
There are many ways in which you can maximize your RSS subscribers. I have tried to compile some of the best ones here:
1. Making the most out of your blog posts
- Write descriptive headings for your blog posts – They should purely point to the content in your post and describe optimally about what is written and it is relevant to whom and what.
- Write articles for your post with a minimum of 150-200 words because too less content will dissatisfy your readers who are trying to find information on a topic (that’s why they subscribe to the blog).
- Put internal and external links related to your articles and it would also be better if the keywords in your title match the links you have posted with the article. It adds more relevance and usefulness to what you are informing your readers about.
- Make the post user friendly and your blog easy to subscribe. The new readers of your post, who liked your article, are willing to subscribe, should be easily able to find the ‘subscribe now’ option on your site.
- When possible, try eliminating the pronouns and putting more descriptive nouns. The sparking idea behind this is that when the search engines start searching for the key words, they identify the semantics in your article and thus the searcher can approach your blog site or article. It helps your post reach its highest potential.
2. Comments should be encouraged on every post of your blog. A well written blog entry invites more readers and comments from them. Make it known to them that you value their distinct comments and they herald an improving ladder for you.
3. Give people different options on how they want to subscribe as readers like e-mail and different RSS feed readers (e.g. Google Feed Reader). Some may even prefer feed readers depending on their Internet browsers.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!How to Add a Drop Down Menu to your Theme
Written by Jai on April 2, 2008 – 4:32 pm - 2,069 views
A lot of people wanted to know the technique for adding a Drop Down Menu to their WordPress themes. So, here is a quick way to do this. This tweak will let you create menus, sub-menus and sub-sub-menus and it applies to your pages, categories and archives.
Step 1
Download the Suckerfish Dropdown Menu for WordPress. Even if you have installed WordPress 2.5 recently, this plugin works perfectly. Extract the plugin and put the files in your wp-content/plugins folder. Activate the plugin from your wp-admin section.
Step 2
Now, open your existing theme folder which you have applied to your WordPress installation. Most probably, you already have a navigation menu in the theme (most themes have it in the header.php file). So, just replace your existing menu code with this command :-
<?php suckerfish(); ?>
Save and close the file.
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Written by Jai on April 1, 2008 – 6:23 am - 1,287 views
Today, I am going to talk about that part of the SEO (Search Engine Optimization) process, which an ordinary blogger does not know of, or tends to forget while building his blog. Normally, if you are using WordPress as your blogging platform, a bit of SEO is already done for you, thanks to the WordPress development team. But here are some very important key points that you should remember while running your blog. Let us start from the basics and move on to some advanced techniques.
Title Tag
You should never ignore the importance of your <title> tag. The keywords for your blog/website should be included in the title tag and the length of the title tag should fall between 60-90 characters. The search engine spiders always look through your titles while looking for relevant content. In WordPress, the title tag is usually formed by the name of your blog which can be found in Options menu of the wp-admin section.
URL Keywords
Make sure that your keywords are also prominent in your blog links. WordPress saves you from the hard work by providing custom permalink feature, which allows you to choose the suitable link structure as per your requirements.
Keywords in Heading Tags
This is another place where your keywords play a major role. When using WordPress, these tags are commonly used in the post titles (<h2> tags). Remember that your post content should also have those particular keywords that you used in these titles.
Keywords in Image Tags
When using images in your documents or posts, always specify the alt text for the same. Search Engine spiders cannot see the images but they can index their textual descriptions specified in the <alt> tags. This process is also used for validation purposes.
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Written by Jai on March 27, 2008 – 3:34 pm - 1,304 viewsTired of looking for content to post in your blog?
Recently, I came across an article at Techcrunch.com about a Firefox plugin called Zemanta which can ease your life by suggesting relevant links and related content to your post. This plugin integrates with your WordPress, Blogger or TypePad installations and helps you by providing links as and when you are creating a new post.
Let’s take a look at how it works.
When you start writing a new entry in your blog, it surfs the Internet for news based on your keywords and after every 300 characters, provides you with a list of related news links. You can then enter those links in your post by the simple click of a mouse button (you can see them at the bottom of this post too) or you can visit the particular website where that news has been published. Moreover, the extension also automates the process of adding tags to your posts.
Zemanta also has the ability to pull images from different sources based on your post keywords and lets you include them in your post in the same way like the news links. I am sure that this feature will save a lot of time for bloggers who have to hunt the Internet for relevant images to publish in their posts.
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Written by Jai on March 17, 2008 – 8:11 am - 2,824 viewsWordPress 2.5’s release has been delayed twice and it is now supposed to be released on March 17, 2008 which is today. To give you all a glimpse of the new features included in this version, here is my little report. The new release of WordPress will have the following upgrades.
An Overhauled Administration Interface
- The administration section will now have a different color scheme of light blue, gray and orange colors. I am sure this will bring some relief to the people who are bored of the old colors but can also turn off some loyal users. There will be two default color schemes from which the user can choose and apply their favorite one.
Here is an article on how to create your own admin color scheme for WordPress.
- The “Presentation” section has been renamed to “Design” and all your widgets, themes will be listed under this category from now on.
- The search functionality has been given extra power by allowing the users to search through the posts, pages and comments based on status, months and categories.
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Written by Jai on March 14, 2008 – 1:18 pm - 1,626 views
People get scammed everyday, at the drop of a hat. If you think you are someone who can never be scammed, and trust in your sixth sense, read the following and think again.
You CAN be scammed if you are :-
1. The Curious One
Whenever you see a crowd, and you cannot hold the urge to inquire about what’s happening or has happened, then you are the sort of person that has “SCAM ME” written all over him.
2. The Green Eared One
Buddha once said “There is no fire like passion, there is no shark like hatred, there is no snare like folly, there is no torrent like greed.” So if you are the sort of person who gets happiness out of jingling coins, get ready to be scammed.
3. The Ignorant One
When your daddy told you to read the newspaper everyday and you ignored his advice blatantly, you fall in this category.
4. The Rich Jerk
From your childhood, you have been dreaming of getting rich overnight, you even went one step ahead to buy the Rich Jerk’s e-book, let me tell you the fact my friend - you have already been scammed
5. The Chosen One
A true believer. You have subscribed to all the newsletters of all the horoscope websites for your sun sign that came up in Google’s search results for the word “My Horoscope”. My friend, my good wishes are with you.
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Written by Jai on February 25, 2008 – 9:44 am - 1,663 views
In the modern Internet World, the increasing number of advertisements and the never ending list of ad-networks are making the Internet users’ experience worse than ever. How to get rid of them? Is there a way? I am sure people are using a lot of ad blockers, but today I am not sharing any ad blocking techniques but will share the types of annoying ads present on the Internet.
Audible Ads
The most offensive ad ever made is the one that plays audio on your personal computer without warning. The one thing I hate is when I open a website and it bursts my speakers when I am working in the night. Both the advertiser and the website publisher should be totally blamed for this. Most of the online advertising companies say that one out of ten video advertisers want audio when you roll your pointer over the ads.
Flash Animated Ads
I know that the revenue brought in by the advertisers is important but what about the irritating Flash based ads? Is there anything that can be done to remove these ads? The worst thing is that the advertisers make it really difficult to close these floating ads until they are completely animated. They always float into what we read and you also have to wait until they stop animating before you can close them.
Page Takeover Ads
How much more annoying can online advertising be? You just cannot escape from popular page takeover ads like the banner ads that stretch into full- page screens when you point the cursor at them and they would not stop until you move your mouse away.
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!5 Cool CSS Hacks & Tricks
Written by Jai on February 17, 2008 – 2:15 pm - 3,686 views
1. Create a stunning 3D push button…
Nowadays, we can see 3d push buttons nearly everywhere. Most of them are achieved via JavaScript. The main problem of using these scripts is that there are greater chances that they might get blocked by the browser. And with the advent of many ad blockers it has become a serious drawback. In this situation, the CSS comes to rescue. Thought we can’t create 3d push buttons as professional as created by using JavaScript, we can create a basic 3d push button with the help of CSS.
The main CSS commands you’ll need are:
<font color="#0000ff"><code>a.pushbut {</code></font><font color="#0000ff"> </font><font color="#0000ff">color:#26a;</font><font color="#0000ff"> </font><font color="#0000ff">display:block; </font><font color="#0000ff">border:1px solid; </font><font color="#0000ff">border-color:#aaa #000 #000 #aaa; </font><font color="#0000ff">text-decoration:none;</font><font color="#0000ff"> </font><font color="#0000ff">width:8em; text-align:center;</font><font color="#0000ff"> </font><font color="#0000ff">height:2em; line-height:2em;</font><font color="#0000ff"> </font><font color="#0000ff">background:#fc0; font-weight:bold</font><font color="#0000ff"> </font><font color="#0000ff">}</font><font color="#0000ff">a.pushbut:hover</font><font color="#0000ff"> </font><font color="#0000ff">{</font><font color="#0000ff"> </font><font color="#0000ff">color:#26a;</font><font color="#0000ff"> </font><font color="#0000ff">background:#ffd633;</font><font color="#0000ff"> </font><font color="#0000ff">position:relative;</font><font color="#0000ff"> </font><font color="#0000ff">top:1px;</font><font color="#0000ff"> </font><font color="#0000ff">left:1px;</font><font color="#0000ff"> </font><font color="#0000ff">border-color:#000 #aaa #aaa #000 </font><font color="#0000ff">}</font>
^^These must be within <style> tag.
Off course, you can change any settings you want like back color, alignment etc.
Now to create a button, we must specify the class object as push but within the <BODY> tag…that’s all
Ex:
<p><a href=”http://www.blogohblog.com/” onclick=”return false” onkeypress=”return false” title=”visit my blog” class=”pushbut”>Visit blogohblog</a></p>
In order to view how the above example looks, click here
To view the complete source of the above example, click here
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