Cool thing of the day - Hyperwords

This firefox plugin allows you to do all kids of cool stuff straight from the browser right click. Translate, convert, look up. Definitely worth installing. Here is the link to hyperwords - Do useful things with all the words on the web, not just links!

Changing the top bar

I want to have a slightly different feel to my blog, and have decided to try to change the appearance. I don't want to do to much development in this blog, but I think a bit of blogger pimping is OK, and not too technical.

I have not, yet, looked up how to do this, so I have started by pasting the template code into a text editor.

Here is the html code that shows the header

And here is the CSS code

All the changes are going to be done in the CSS.

To start I will copy the existing text to a new document and save it so I can go back.

I want a background image, so first I need to create one in photoshop.

I have saved the image onto flickr (If you don't know what flickr is, I will explain it in a post tomorrow) and then started fiddling with the code.

First thing to do was to insert the image.

in the header CSS code I looked for the div tags

@media all {
#header {
background: #EEEECC url("http://www.blogblog.com/rounders3/corners_cap_bot.gif") no-repeat left bottom;
margin:0 0 0;
padding:0 0 8px;
color:#000;
}
#header div {
background:url("http://www.blogblog.com/rounders3/corners_cap_top.gif") no-repeat left top;
padding:8px 15px 0;
}
}
@media handheld {
#header {
background:#EEEECC;
}
#header div {
background:none;
}

The bits in bold needed changing to refer to the new image.

Here is the code after changing:

@media all {
#header {
background:#EEEECC url("http://static.flickr.com/106/271691934_0eafcbf414_o.gif") no-repeat; {new image ref
margin:0 0 0; {no margin
padding:0 0 0px;
height:100px; {made the box a static height so that the image can be seen completely
color:#000; {change text to black
}
#header div {
/* background:url("http://www.blogblog.com/rounders3/corners_cap_top.gif") no-repeat left top;*/ {top corners commented out
padding:8px 15px 0;
}
}

As you can see I am no developer, but it wasn't too difficult to unpick this. I will continue to pimp little bits, and may even buy a book on CSS!

The difference can be seen here:

Before:

After:

Blogged with Flock

Worth reading web 2.0 in UK and other intresting stuff

An article in today's guardian has a few interesting points about web 2.0 in the UK. It is mostly about funding, and the sites it points too are largely average, but it is still worth a read. Read it here.

Another interesting article, but one I haven't found any background on (please post a comment if you can) is the Generation Blogger story. It has breakdowns on internet usage that are promising for those of us who are not tweens or teens! I haven't been able to track down the figures, but I will as the guardian if they can supply.

For a proper definition on Web 2.0 read Tim O'reilly's article What is web 2.0?

I am thinking about changing my top banner to a flash jpeg. If I do I will post the before and after shots, along with how I did it.

Blogged with Flock

How to show del.icio.us links in your blog

I have been wanting to set up links that can be added to this blog easily. I read ages ago a way of doing this with the rss feeds in del.icio.us and this is it...

I found this entry on the del.icio.us site: http://del.icio.us/help/linkrolls

and this should update the blog as I update delicious.

Blogged with Flock

The world wide web has grown - you need a new browser

Long gone are the days when the web was just used to read information, it is now used for interacting with others, finding things out and developing communities.

To join in this web of activity, you need a few free bits of software, and a little bit of knowledge. This blog aims to give you the first few bits of information, and then will facilitate discussion of what works, what doesn't, and how to do things.

The first thing you need is a browser. There are a few big browsers available that will do te job, and I think it is worth trying out a few different ones, and not committing yourself to one. For instance I am writing this post in Flock, but I also have firefox and safari (mac user) open at the same time for different pages.

To decide which browser to use you need to ask youself a few questions:

• Do you want to share your favourites?
• Do you want to reed rss feeds?
  
• Do you want to blog?
• Do you want to share photos?

If you say yes to any of the questions above then you would be best advised to choose Flock or Firefox (Internet explorer 7 may have some of these featurse, but I haven't used it much yet).

Flock

I prefer Flock, as it allows me to publish blog posts quickly from within the browser, and collect images and text from the web, for later use. you can download it here http://flock.com/download/

When you have downloaded it and opened it you can do all kinds of clever things with it. The first thing to do, is to get a del.icio.us account and set up favourite sharing. Favourite sharing is when you let others see the pages you add to your favourites, it is useful as your account lives on the internet and not on your computer, which means you ca access it from anywhere. I use mine at work and at home, so whenever I see anything for me or my job, I add it and can see it where I need it. You can look at my favourites here http://del.icio.us/harrrydavies it is a bit of a mess at the moment, but I will be tidying it up in the next few weeks.

Flock lets you add favourites to de.icio.us quickly and easily whilst staying within the browser. If you are using firefox, IE, safari, opera there are easy ways to add buttons to your browser, but for me, flock is the most elegant.

The next post will be on using flock for RSS and I will let you know how I got on tidying my favourites. Hopefully I will have added some favourites to this blog by then too.

Blogged with Flock

I will use this blog to explain how to surf the net, and use some of the new technologies available, to get the most out of the net.