I won't have time to update this blog until at least June 2010, so for now I'm calling it a day. I've de-personalised this blog (for personal reasons ) and I've archived all my original posts. It might seem strange to some that I've taken them down but I want to re-launch version 2 of this blog sometime in the future with a blank canvas.

Many thanks to everyone who's visited, commented on or contacted me through this site over the last 5 months (May to Septemer 2009).

I have a new project in mind and hopefully I'll be back to give it a mention here sometime next year.

Bye for now....

Today I changed the options in the Google Chrome Browser to change the location of Google Chrome's downloads. Here's how it's done:

To customise and control Google Chrome, click on the wrench icon in the top right of the Google Chrome Window:

Select "Options" from the drop down menu:

Click on the "Minor Tweaks" tab and browse to the new location where you wish to save the files. You can now set your files to download to a specific location on your PC.

If you want to go a step further there's a check box that allows you to "Ask where to save each file before downloading". I found this handy as it lets you organise any files immediately instead of storing everything in a central location.

I had an email today from Barry (have a look at Barry's personal site to see some of the projects he's involved in) about the caricature image I created for my header. I created the cartoon image of myself using befunky.com. BeFunky.com allows you to transform any image into multiple styles of artwork with the click of a button. There's no need to download any application as everything is done online and it's also done very quickly!

photo credit: Drew and Didi

After I created the cartoon image of myself I edited it in Photoshop to create the desired effects and also split the image into 2 pieces one for my header and one for my hand clasping over my nav bar.

What I've done is by no means brilliant but with a bit more work on Photoshop I'm sure you could come up with something very good. I did follow some youtube tutorials on creating a caricature image of myself but none of the outcomes looked anywhere near what I was able to produce using BeFunky.com in a couple of minutes.

It's great to get someone asking about something relating to something on my blog or indeed get any kind of feedback, as at least I know someone is having a look about on here

You just have to laugh! Another siting of Nessy and this time it's on Google Earth Classic! What Scottish Genius came up with this one to promote tourism?

It was actually spotted by an security guard from Nottingham, England and can be seen on Google Earth under the following co-ordinates: Latitude 57°12'52.13"N, Longitude 4°34'14.16"W. The Sun have a blown up picture of it here and I have to say that assuming this shot is taken from space this looks like a speedboat to me It's all good fun anyway and when I heard it on the radio I had to go and have a look for myself

I installed Google Analytics a while back. When I launched my new blog theme a few days ago, I've since realised that I overwrote all the files for my theme and therefore replaced the Google Analytics code. I don't know if many people have made this mistake before, but it took me a few days to pick up on what I'd done. My Google Analytic stats weren't rising and I knew there was something wrong as I was checking my AWS stats that I installed as part of my hosting plan and this blog actually had it's best day of traffic since I started out. So this is just something to be aware of, if you're updating your WordPress theme. Yeah I know I'm spending lots of time looking at stats but I'll be making more of an effort to boost traffic very soon so it's something I need to be looking at.

photo credit: richardmasoner

It's easiest just to place the Google Analytics code in footer.php as the footer shows up on every page and therefore this tracks all hits on your website. There's a nice article on exactly what to do over at ThemePlayground.com. It cleared things up for me as I previously thought I needed to put the Google Analytics code in a few different files, but it turns out that footer.php is the only place it needs to go! If you're using WordPress, there's lots of other nice tips on ThemePlayground and I'll be checking back there for a few tips and tricks as I continue to update this site.

My custom theme design is near completion, and to compliment it I want to add as much interactivity and tools to increase traffic to this site as possible. The first thing I wanted to do was to add some social bookmarking links to the bottom of my posts. I had a look around and the plugin that I liked best was SocioFluid. Have a look at it in action below this post, I like how the images increase/decrease in size when you hover over them. It's easy to configure that way and you can select from a choice of 4 different image sizes when you configure the sociofluid plugin in the WordPress dashboard.

photo credit: aqhong

SocioFluid allows your site users to save bookmarks to the following sites: Digg, Reddit, DZone, StumbleUpon, del.icio.us, BlinkList, BlogMarks, Furl, NewsVine, Technorati, Magnolia, Google, Myspace, Facebook, Yahoo Buzz, Sphinn, Mixx, TwitThis, Jamespot and Meneame. You can configure the plugin to select any combination of bookmarking sites to add to the bottom of your posts. I think I'll be adding all of them, or at least as many of the more popular one's that I can fit into my new theme design...

This is only the first step, I plan on adding a lot more plugins to this site to increase my chances of getting some traffic and to encourage user activity. Next on the list will be TwitterCounter and Feedburner stat tools and I'll also be upgrading to a new comments plugin to further increase interaction with social networking sites. Admittedly, I'm not a member on all of these sites yet either so that'll be another step in working towards increases my blogs through awareness of these sites. I'll also be upgrading to WordPress 2.8 in the next few days and I'm hoping everything goes smoothly with that and the transition to my new theme..

Earlier in the week I mentioned that I'd installed Google Chrome on my machine to see how my blog looked using the chrome browser. It's nice to have a quick look at any changes you make to your site by installing all of the major browsers, but if you want to have a look at how your site looks across multiple browsers then the easiest solution I've found is browsershots. Here's what browsershots does...

What is Browsershots?
Browsershots makes screenshots of your web design in different browsers. It is a free open-source online service created by Johann C. Rocholl. When you submit your web address, it will be added to the job queue. A number of distributed computers will open your website in their browser. Then they will make screenshots and upload them to the central server here.

I don't have time to track all of the changes I make across multiple browsers. Since the majority of hits on this site come from Firefox, IE, Chrome and Safari, if this site looks good in those four, then I'm pretty happy. However, it's still worth having a look at how your site looks in other browsers just incase there's any majors issues. Browsershots is open source too, so I'm sure you can play about with it yourself and customise it to look at your pages across a preset list of browser/os combinations.

When using browsershots, it's just a matter of selecting whatever combination of operating systems and browsers you like and then waiting on the screenshots. You may need to extend the amount of time that browsershots runs for. The default time limit is thirty minutes, by pressing the extend button you extend to start at 30 minutes again, so just keep an eye on the progress until all screenshots are complete. When eveything finishes, you'll see what the screenshots look like within the browsershots website and they are also available for download as a zip file.

Here's a list of all browsers suported for Linux, Windows, Mac and BSD operating systems:

Linux:
Dillo 0.8, Dillo 2.0, Epiphany 2.22, Firefox 1.0, Firefox 1.5, Firefox 2.0, Firefox 3.0, Firefox 3.1, Firefox 3.5, Flock 1.2, Flock 2.0, Galeon 2.0, Iceape 1.1, Iceweasel 2.0, Iceweasel 3.0, Kazehakase 0.5, Konqueror 3.5, Konqueror 4.2, Minefield 3.2, Minefield 3.6, Navigator 9.0, Opera 10.0, Opera 9.50, Opera 9.62, Opera 9.63, Opera 9.64, SeaMonkey 1.1, SeaMonkey 2.0, Shiretoko 3.1, Shiretoko 3.5

Windows:
Avant 11.7, Chrome 0.2, Chrome 0.3, Chrome 0.4, Chrome 1.0, Chrome 2.0, Firefox 0.8, Firefox 0.9, Firefox 1.0, Firefox 1.5, Firefox 2.0, Firefox 3.0, Firefox 3.1, Firefox 3.5, Flock 1.2, Flock 2.0, Flock 2.5, K-Meleon 1.1, K-Meleon 1.5, Minefield 3.2, Minefield 3.6, MSIE 3.0, MSIE 4.0, MSIE 5.0, MSIE 5.1, MSIE 5.5, MSIE 6.0, MSIE 7.0, MSIE 8.0, Navigator 8.1, Navigator 9.0, Opera 0.27, Opera 10.0, Opera 7.0, Opera 7.11, Opera 7.54, Opera 8.0, Opera 8.53, Opera 8.54, Opera 9.25, Opera 9.26, Opera 9.27, Opera 9.50, Opera 9.51, Opera 9.52, Opera 9.60, Opera 9.61, Opera 9.62, Opera 9.63, Opera 9.64, Safari 3.0, Safari 3.2, Safari 4.0, SeaMonkey 1.1, SeaMonkey 2.0, Shiretoko 3.1, Shiretoko 3.5

Mac:
Firefox 3.0, Safari 3.2, Safari 4.0

BSD
Dillo 2.0, Epiphany 2.22, Firefox 2.0, Firefox 3.0, Flock 1.1, Galeon 2.0, Kazehakase 0.5, SeaMonkey 1.1

Something I wanted to do since I started using photoshop was to create either a chrome effect or some chrome text. I followed this youtube tutorial from and here's the result:

This is also the first image I uploaded to my iliveontheweb flickr account so i'll be using that store my images from now on just to save storage space on my server. It might not seem like a big deal now but when I add more and more sites at a later date it all counts.

I've also been making some progress with updating the default wordpress theme and hope to have something concrete up on this site in the next week. Again, I've been looking at minimising server space and the time it takes for my pages to load and may go with using as little images as possible and try to use background colours only. I haven't made a definite decision on this yet but I'll probably keep the look and feel of the design pretty minimalistic anyway so this is an option.

Eventually got round to downloading and installing the Google Chrome browser today. I'm working on my blog theme and wanted to have a look at it in Chrome to make sure everything was ok. Lucky I did as there was a few problems with the php, that I had to iron out. I normally just check in Firefox, IE and Netscape but Chrome is becomming more and more popular in the browser market and cannot be ignored. I have used Browser Shots to see how a website looks in multiple browsers before, but it nice/essential to just do a quick check with your own eyes when your editing your site layout (at least with the most popular browsers).

photo credit: Randy Zhang

First impressions are that it's almost too clean! That should be a good thing but it just seems a bit bare. I have to say though that I'd probably get used to that if I'm only surfing for fun. One thing I really like is, when you load the browser, screenshots of your most visited sites are displayed. Another is the integated search in the address bar. My default homepage when I use Firefox is normally set to Google.ie so it's great how you dont have to tab to another window and open up google. I know Firefox does this too (as do most browsers) but it just seems better within chrome due to the fact that it's a Google product, it feels more natural to search from the address bar. I also like how you can easily pop open new tabs at the top and each one opens up with your most visited page displayed.

That's just my initial thoughts on it. I haven't used it for more than an hour and I wondering will I start using it more often or stick with Firefox. Time will tell...

I like reading blogs, and one thing I do like when reading/looking at a post is the use of a image/photo that is relevant to the post to capture my attention and break up the article into manageable sections. Using images/photos adds life, colour and content to your site. For me, the largest source of free usable photos and images has to be flickr. One issue with Flickr, is not to infringe the copyright of someone's image and to credit the owner if you wish to use an image. To manually add credits to a photo by copy/pasting links etc. would take all day so I needed to find a way to automate this and speed things up!

For something like this, there's no point trying to reinvent the wheel so I looked at other blogs to see what they used and also did the old trusted google search for "add flickr images to your blog". As a result, I came up with a ready made plugin from photodropper.com. Here's how Photo Dropper works:

It searches for Creative Commons licensed photos - images that are licensed for shared use - and lets you drop them into your posts - right from your dashboard with just 1 click.

That'll do nicely! It's only takes two minutes to set up and is easy to configure. There's a built in search functionality that let's you search for images right from your WordPress dashboard. To center align the images I configured Photo Dropper to wrap my images inside a paragraph and set up the text align as centered, like so:

One thing I did notice is that the keyword search did not match a direct search from the flickr site itself. I posted my first image from flickr yesterday. When I selected the image yesterday I searched for "Twitter" on the flickr main page and that's what I came up with. However, when I searched for "Twitter" from the Photo Dropper keyword search tool I could not find the same image when I went to update the credits. To combat this I went back to flickr and did then search again. I then pulled out some of the tags under the image I choose and searched for the tags in the Photo Dropper keyword searched tool and got a match. This is no biggie and I'm sure there's plenty of images to be found directly from the Photo Dropper search engine but if I can't find anything suitable I know i may be able to use this method again!

Hopefully the inclusion of Photo Shopper can play a small part in adding some of the following attributes to my blog and between this blog and it's readers

photo credit: Mexicanwave

As I mentioned previously, I want to use permalinks to remove index.php from my URLs, and needed to update the .htaccess file in the root of my blog folder to do so. The site I did this for; TopCommentator.com, is hosted on a linux server so the .htaccess file should reside in the /webspace/httpdocs folder.

When I installed WordPress (version 2.7.1), there was no .htaccess file as part of the installation so I got the following warning/error messages when I tried to update your permalinks structure in the WordPress dashboard under Settings >> Permalinks (at the bottom left of your WP dashboard):

If your .htaccess file were writable, we could do this automatically, but it isn’t so these are the mod_rewrite rules you should have in your .htaccess file. Click in the field and press CTRL + a to select all.

What you'll be selecting is the following code which is placed below the message at the bottom of the page:

# BEGIN WordPress
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
# END WordPress

Copy the code into a text editor (I used notepad) and save the file as a.htaccess. Upload a.htaccess to your server, (I use FileZilla ftp client). If you cannot see the .htacces file from within your web space file manager or ftp client, you'll need to make sure that you have selected the show hidden files option (for FileZilla go to : Server >> Force Showing Hidden Files). Rename a.htaccess to .htaccess and change the file permissions so that the file is writable. To do this in FileZilla, right click on the .htaccess file and select File Permissions.... I chose to set the file permissions as chmod 664 (see screenshot below):

Initially when I uploaded the file and changed the permissions as above I still received the error message saying that .htaccess was not writable. I had followed the instructions and was not sure what was wrong. I called my hosting account's support number and many thanks to Jonathan who was able to tell me that I needed to remove some extra characters (  )added to the start of the file (see how this looked below):

# BEGIN WordPress
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
# END WordPress

This happened after copy/pasting the code from the WP dashboard and saving it as a notepad file. The extra characters cannot be seen when opening the file in notepad and Jonathon recommended using notepad2 to view files that I'm uploading to my Linux hosting account (so i'll be doing this form now on). When I removed the characters from the start of the file everything worked fine and I got the nice clean permalinks that I wanted. I use /%postname%/ only in the custom permalink structure as this is what I wanted (see below):

So now instead of http://www.topcommentator.com/index.php/about/ appearing in the browser address bar I now have the clean permalink with index.php removed that I wanted: http://www.topcommentator.com/about/. Something I could not find when trying to solve this problem (although it probably exists somewhere) was a working version of the .htaccess file with the correct permissions set. If you like download an exact copy of my sample .htaccess file here, unzip and upload to your web space and hopefully this works for you to. If your blog resides in a sub folder under your root domain eg. blog, you'll need to place the .htaccess file in folder and update the file to include the sub folder name as below:

# BEGIN WordPress
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /blog/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /blog/index.php [L]
# END WordPress

Hopefully someone gets some value out of this in the future as it took me a while to sort it out

I recently mentioned that I started a new project for TopCommentator.com. This project will take me a while to get off the ground (I'm guessing a bit longer than the week or two I predicted ) but the first decision I made was to use the Darkzen WordPress theme. It's a nice clean theme with ad space integrated into it, and after browsing the free themes directory it's the one that I happiest to go ahead with as a base for this project.

One of the first things I looked at was how to edit the existing ads in the theme. I saw this question asked in the support forums so decided to make a post from it. So here goes:

1. In your root web space locate sidebar.php under root\wp-content\themes\darkzen (see note at bottom if you prefer to do this within WordPress dashboard)

2. Open sidebar.php and search for advertarea. You will then see where the ads are places as below (click on the image to see full size):

3. Change the # in href="#" to the url that you want to point your ad to (shown in red below). Overwrite the images /images/advert1.jpg under root\wp-content\themes\darkzen\images folder in your web space (shown in blue). Alternatively, you can place a new image in your images folder and change the code to point to the name of this new image. Finally update the alternative text field alt="advert1" (shown in green) to something suitable for the description of your ad.

4. If you add or remove some advertisements (the Darkzen theme comes with 6 ads as default) you can add or remove lines of code (shown in pink above) and update the fields to appropriate values as described in steps 1 to 3.

5. To update the banner in the header you'll need to search for the headright class in header.php and follow steps 1 to 3 to update the ad.jpg image and other fields.

Note: You'll need access to your web space to overwrite existing or add new images. To edit files from within WordPress navigate to Appearance >> Editor from within the WordPress dashboard and click on the theme file on the right hand side of the page.

If you found this helpful or have any feedback or questions please feel free to drop me a comment and I'll try to get back asap.