Jul | 17 | 2007

Tweaking your blog’s HTML? Avoid these horrible tags!

Posted by Ia as Blog Tutorial, Design, Design Features, Opinion, Tips If you've been blogging for sometime now, you would have tinkered with HTML several times of already. In fact I've shown how you can use several HTML tags to make your posts more readable. The bad news is, HTML has a dark side: it has tags and attributes that are not very useful or meaningful (i.e., deprecated) but can still be used by the ignorant, especially since HTML is very easy to learn. But if it is not learned correctly, your blog might load more slowly or not work at all in other people's browsers. Warning: Do NOT try these at home!

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Jun | 29 | 2007

Illacrimo Theme for WordPress Released

Posted by J. Angelo as Design, Design and Themes Bloggy Network has recently announced via LifeSpy the release of the Illacrimo theme for WordPress.

We have a great three column theme for you called Illacrimo. Created by Design Disease, and released here on LifeSpy. It is the third free theme that Bloggy Network has released. Illacrimo has a strong color set, that should appeal to many, and works well with the plugins we have included in the download file, or without. The theme is actually a creation by the very same designer that did the design overhaul of Blog Tutorials. The theme reminds me both of OS ...

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Jun | 27 | 2007

A few reminders on third-party Image Hosting

Posted by Jeff as Blogging Tools, Design Features, Images, Tips If you have a blog that's hosted in Wordpress.com, or Blogspot, or any other free* service, or if you have unlimited resources, that is, truckloads of money to pay for all that uncapped web space, you may be least likely concerned about the gigabytes that images can easily consume from what you have arranged with your webhost of choice. The rest of us common men with an inkling of what saving both gigabytes of allocation and the bandwidth needed to pump out all those images may consider hosting these on a separate service, or outsourcing to a third-party image hosting ...

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Jun | 12 | 2007

Template Designers Get Ready: Safari 3 for Windows is coming

Posted by Jeff as Blogging News, Design Talk about getting your head in the game. As if testing on two browsers is not enough (or three, for Opera, so stop writing that email now! I get flamed enough already, thank you), Apple sets loose its flagship browser onto Windows machines in WWDC07 in an effort to what can be interpreted as a move to increase awareness of the Apple experience. Or, in El Jobso's own words, "giving a glass of ice water to somebody in hell". In case you lost track already, here's a quick review at what we have now: the Gecko engine (utilized by ...

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May | 31 | 2007

Five Steps To Quickly Change Your Blog’s CSS Design

Posted by Brix as Design, Design and Themes Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) is an HTML standard that Web site developers use to control over how pages are displayed. With CSS, designers and users can create style sheets that define how different elements, such as headers and links, appear. If you are already familiar with CSS, here's a way to quickly make test changes on your blog's design: 1. Download and install the Mozilla Browser. 2. Download in install the Firebug plugin. This plugin will allow you to edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page. 3. Open your blog in Mozilla. Click ...

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May | 22 | 2007

Lowdown on the technical aspects of design

Posted by Jeff as Design, Design Features, Featured Articles, Tips Clearly, I'm asking for trouble here by laying down a list of what is regarded as good design. Hopefully though, this does not turn out like O'Reilly's Bloggers' Code of Conduct which he later took back: Proper use of fonts - as a general rule, no more than three font families are to be used on a single page. Too similar fonts make for a staid feel, while over-using fonts is gaudy. (This one I remember from my elementary Journalism class) Font families - unlike in print media, the use of serifs (Garamond, Times New Roman, Cambria) and sans-serifs (Arial, Tahoma, Calibri) are ...

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May | 14 | 2007

Two Design Tactics To Improve Your Blog Income

Posted by Brix as Design, Design and Themes, Images Adsense is one of the most popular ways to monetize your blog. Two of the most popular Adsense advertising tactics that became widespread last year were: 1. Putting Adsense Ads beside images 2. Blending the design You earn money on Adsense through clicks. Whenever a visitor clicks on the ad, revenue from advertisers is credited to your account. Putting thumbnail images beside ads increased the overall number of clicks. This works because people often associate the images with the ad and clicked on it. The latest Adsense blog on images beside ads clarified this rule. You can no longer put images beside ...

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May | 12 | 2007

Maximizing Stock Photography

Posted by Benj as Design Features, Images, Tips Hi everyone, I'm Benj, one of your new writers for BlogTutorials. Even with the preponderance of technology to allow bloggers to take and modify their own photos, there are still individuals (*clears throat*) who are still not well-versed in the subtle art of photography. It's a good thing that now, people who weren't born with a feel for the lens have alternatives as sources of embellishment for their blog posts.

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May | 12 | 2007

Use Image Attributes to Boost Your Blog’s SEO

Posted by Phillip as Images, Marketing and Search Optimization, SEO Features Last month, we had a post about image relevance in blog posts. But images aren't just there to spice up your posts -- they can draw in traffic as well, that is, search engine traffic. When properly used, images can help your blog's search engine optimization. You'll need to pay attention to two attributes/HTML tags: alt and title. The alt attribute stands for "alternate text", which stands in for the image when it can't be displayed properly. The alt attribute is a pillar of website accessibility, and is a boon for visually-impaired users and those who use speech synthesizers. But aside ...

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Apr | 29 | 2007

Voices Carried Thru Blogging

Posted by Professor as Blog Tutorial, Community Building, Creating a Blog, Design and Themes, Opinion, Submissions, Terminology, Tips, Writing Blogging has been getting quite some attention lately and the bottom-line of it all is the fact that blogging holds a lot of what a person holds in his mind, mostly expressions he or she holds back most of the time. There is no question that most people hesitate to let their voices be heard, apparently being wary of possible violent reactions from people who know more about particular areas and do not accommodate any points that would not have sufficient claims. Blog Discussions

Blogs are not meant to replace the usual definitions and terminologies that all ...

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Design and Themes

Is Your Blog W3C Compliant?

Last night I checked my personal blog’s code hoping I can proudly display the W3C Validated Button. Since I use Blogger and do not really do anything to clean up the code (beyond adding Alt-tags to the images I embed) I wasn’t surprised at all to find that my blog contained lots of errors - [...]
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Software and Widgets

Wordpress Plug-ins

If you blog using Wordpress and can’t do something that you want done like adding Sphere-related content at the end of your blog posts you might be surprised to find out that there are already plug-ins available that make it happen.
To find good Wordpress plug-ins all you need to do is search for “wordpress [...]
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A Friend In Need

I’m helping out my friends from the UA&P - IShareHappiness Blog Team.
Whenever you feel pessimistic, angry, troubled, frustrated, and depressed – what have you – you need someone to talk to. Someone who could help you be more optimistic and help make you feel that there is hope. Sometimes it’s hard to talk to someone [...]
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Monetization

Making Money Through Consumer Generated Ads

As I mentioned in my previous post today I will be suggesting some ways you can still profit by joining programs such as Pay Per Post and yet ensure that your readers don’t get turned off.
In my opinion the only way to really do this is by making sure that your blog entries stay [...]
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Marketing and Search Optimization

Building your blog brand step by step

Building your blog’s brand does not need to be difficult. However, when it comes to branding you should always remember to exert effort to be consistent with the image you wish to portray or you’ll end up with confused, turned-off, and/or skeptical readers. Branding inconsistencies will make it obvious that the image you’re putting up [...]
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