Sometimes, it’ll be fun to mystify your friends by appearing as “blank” in MSN. By doing a space or alt+0160, it will not appear your MSN nickname as “blank”.
Here is what you can do…
1. Download the file below
2. Open the notepad, and copy the “square”. If you cannot see anything, press “Ctrl+A” then copy.
3. Paste the “square” over your existing nick.
You are done! To make it look real, just leave your personal message empty. Your friends won’t even know you were there.
Downloading videos from Youtube is never difficult anymore. No more streaming online for your videos! All you need to do is to install Firefox, and you can now save these videos into your harddisk in just a few clicks.
If you have installed firefox, you need to have 3 programs:
1. VideoDownloader
VideoDownload is a popular extension for Firefox, it allows you to download any videos from any site such as Youtube, Google, Metacafe, iFilm, Dailymotion. With just a few click, you will be able to download the video.
2. FlashGot
Flashgot allows single or multiple downloads using any external download manager for Windows, Mac OS X, Linux and many more.
3. Flashget
Flashget is the popular download manager and has the most users using it.
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Here is how you can tweak Firefox with VideoDownloader plugin to download youtube video.
1. Browse to your favourite Youtube clip and click on the VideoDownloader icon shown below. A pop-up window will appear with the link for download.
2. Click on the “download link” and you will be prompt to save the file. Check Flashgot and select your internet download manager.
3. Finally, you just change the setting in your internet download manager accordingly. And you’re done!
Having difficulties accessing website that are blocked by school/workplace? For example, when you are surfing the internet, you find something interesting and click it. Before you see the content, you will land on a page “Forbidden”. Your next step is to curse whoever blocked this site. It is very typical for every school and workplace to block such sites related to Pornography, Crimes, Warez and etc. This is to prevent any damages to the environment.
Sometimes, the site doesn’t infringe the law but it’s still blocked. How?
1. Use Google Cache.
Google stored the page when the spider last visited the website. The problem is when the spider visited the site. If the spider visited the site 3 weeks ago, the information will be outdated by 3 weeks.
2. Use Proxy Site/Proxy Server to surf
There are plenty of proxy sites that allow you to surf anonymous but they don’t last. As for proxy server list, you can change to one of the free proxy server to access the blocked website but users are normally blocked from visiting the list.
3. Making use of Google Cache and Proxy list
If the proxy list is blocked, what you can do is to make good use of Google Cache. Type “Free Proxy”, you probably get Proxy 4 free as the first result. If Proxy 4 free is blocked, use the Google Cache to access the list. The spider visits the site daily and their cache is also daily-updated.
For firefox users, you can download the SwitchProxy extension and add the proxy ips to the list or you can simply go to Tools -> Options -> Advanced -> Network tab -> Connection Settings button and manually add the IP to the setting.
Once you are done, you are ready to surf blocked site. This is not a fool-proof method to bypass the blocked site because the Proxy Server may expire or down or the connection is unstable. Well, it’s better than nothing and use it discreetly
I thought that SEO is easy, but not anymore. Recently, I entered “Tweakast” in Google and guess what, Google returned me 60 results! I was thrilled, Google indexed me! But something looks strange here. The results weren’t what I expected.
See the two different results
The first result was alright, it gave me relevant information unlike the second one. Skip to Main | Skip to sidebar? It doesn’t seem to tell me anything at all except for one thing, my SEO skill sucked.
I went to investigate further by typing “site:tweakast.blogspot.com” in Google to see how many pages are indexed. To my horror… things are out of control! Not Google’s fault. It’s my SEO mistakes!
My grave mistake
From the pictures, my google results are totally nonsensical. It showed my title following by date, names, label, and finally content. I was quite disappointed with myself for being such a noob, and told myself to change the way it is by this weekend. I also did some research on SEO with the term “SEO” in Google, it is the best way to know how SEO works!
What makes a good SEO in my opinion?
1. Good natural keywords – because Search Engines’ Algorithm always change from time to time.
2. Keywords must contain in < title >, < meta >, < h > tags, and content
3. Make sure that keywords are always at the top of the HTML source because spider scan from the top of the HTMLFor now, I will change tweakast again until I see beautiful SEO on Search Engine. How about you?
Now that you’re familiar with fonts and its terminologies in part 1, we will be discussing how you can tweak fonts in your design using CSS and Photoshop.
Text Tweaks – The power of Em
In CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), there are a few ways that you can measure font-sizes, and other elements. The most common ways are to use pixels (px), ems and percentages.
Ems are widely used in adjusting font sizes as they work on the default size fonts of the parent elements they are used in and thus produce consistent results across many popular browsers.
Here’s how Em works on your codes:
When used in other areas, its calculations are based on the font-size property of the element. (For. e.g. if your table cell’s font size is 12 px and your line-height is 1.2em, then your line height will be 20% greater than the font size of your table cell.)
If applied to the font-size property itself, it will take reference the font size of the parent element of where your child element resides in: If i have a div tag in the “body” HTML element, the latter will be the parent element of the “div” tag.
Ems vs. Pixels (px)
Pixels measure by taking relevance to the viewing device of the user. This simply means that your text gets scaled accordingly to the size of your monitor or PDA etc. Even though it may seemed like pixels are the way to go in the world CSS tweaking, but font sizes is not possible on IE. Despite this flaw, pixels still provide a good control over your codes with its ease of use.
And the verdict?
A fair mix of Ems and px will be ideal for CSS design. However in the world of fonts, it will be better to go with Ems as they are cross browser compliant with font resizing when used properly.
Text Tweaks
Here are some tweaks that you can use to play around with. You can refer to these sites and see how the gurus do it:
1. Font-size Tweaks with Em
Suppose you have a table and a div tag in your HTML body tag. As mention from above, the body tag is the parent element of the div tag.
In order to tweak your font size using Em, you should first set the font size of your parent element, the tag as follows:
“Body {font-size:62.5%}” (ignore the ” “)
The above is assuming that all browsers have their default font size set to 16x and thus reduce it to 10px. The DIV tag element will reference the font size of the “body” element, setting 1 em to 10 px; 1.2em to 12 px and so on.
You might have to make some adjustments to your margins to prevent elements from overlapping when fonts are resized.
2. Line-height tweaks with Em
Now that your font sizes are all tweaked up, you may want to enhance your line height (or line spacing) to boost legibility. The general rule is the longer your sentences are, the more line spacing is needed.
3. Font-family
Never estrange your font types for you’d never know whether the user have it or not. If you’re using a non-standard Microsoft/Mac font type, then all the more you should include the font-family in your CSS. What’s the use of a website when one can’t read anything from it?
Font Art
Though there isn’t much you can tweak for body text, but you can go all out and unleash all your creative juices in the designing of titles and headers for your website. There isn’t really any hard and fast rule, just make sure that the font and design layout is coherent with the theme that you’re trying to portray.
Here’s a few tricks that you can use to liven up your website with font art:
1. Let yourself loose and let your creativity flow! Experiment with letter spacings and breath new life into your fonts!
2. You don’t need to be a photoshop pro to be a font guru! Brighten up your fonts with complementing colours!
3. Another photoshop trick
You can also hop onto netdiver and immerse yourself with all the excellent designs and font arts there. Enjoy!
What is Blog Explosion?
Blog Explosion is a traffic generating website which allows users to generator visitors to their site. What it does is for users to use Blog Explosion’s Auto-Surf system to surf other members’ website and earn credits and in turn, these credits can be converted to visitors.
My review
Blog Explosion can be useful when a new website is set-up. It’s amazing as it can generate traffic to your website in a short period of time. I personally used Blog Explosion to exploit new websites and it gave me 25% of the vistors coming from Blog Explosion.
Blog Explosion mainly uses their credits to convert to traffic, buy banners and directory Occasionally, you may win the mystery prizes (additional credits). Apart from earning credits, their games, lottery and referrals are another form of earning traffic. They also offer forums, shoutbox, competition for users to interact with one another. To me, Blog Explosion is packed with a lot of fun stuff awaiting for users to use.
Blog Explosion is not for everyone. I repeat, it’s not for everyone unless your website doesn’t have any CPC ads such as Google Adsense. Initially, I thought that Blog Explosion would give me a few visitors to my site to create awareness, I thought a little visitors from them won’t hurt. But I was wrong. After converting some credits to traffic, my traffic shot up and mainly came from Blog Explosion. I was worried that it will hurt my Adsense account. Google doesn’t like artificial traffic coming from Auto-Surf system and it’s against their TOS. Since then, I stopped using their auto-surf system.
The good
1. Many ways to generate traffic to your site
2. You can list your site to their directory. After all, it has pr 6.
3. You may stumble upon some new ideas while surfing members’ site.
4. You can interact with members
5. You can kill time by playing their games, lottery to gain traffic at the same time
The bad 1. Need to spare some time to surf members’ website to earn credits.
2. You won’t have a lot of loyal readers (most of them come and go because of auto-surf)
2. If you are running Adsense, it can hurt you. (This point is bad enough)
Conclusion
Blog Explosion can be useful for startup but it can do damage to your Adsense. Do use it wisely. As for me, I will prefer to refer people to Blog Explosion and receive little visitors from them.
Online collaboration can be easier with Google Docs & Spreadsheets, you can write your document as a team, talk with people you are working with, and publish it for public view. Here are some reasons why you should use it.
7 reasons to use Google Docs & Spreadsheet
1. Sharing document is easier You can invite viewers or collaborator with work with you via email.
2. Everyone has a chance to view your document After you have published your work online, you will be given a unique link for your document to share it with your family, friends, and colleagues.
3. You can blog at the same time! Google Docs & Spreadsheets allows you to blog your document too. Either You can post on Blogger, Wordpress, Livejournal and etc or you can use your own server blog with the API.
4. Toolbar is almost the same as Microsoft Office and Blogger
With Google Docs & Spreadsheets, you will see some familiar tools from Microsoft Office and Blogger.
5. It allows you to tag the document
Tagging the document is useful when authors are searching for documents that fall under the same tag.
6. Common file formats Google Docs and Spreadsheets can save the document as word, excel, pdf, csv, rtf, html, txt, openoffice format.
7. Real-time chat
While working on your documents with other authors, Discussion can be conducted in the small chat dialog
With all these benefits above and another free tool from Google, things can be done much faster and easier to the next level with Google Docs & Spreadsheets.
Looking at the statistics available on W3Schools, Microsoft Internet Explorer, that comes with Windows system, was dominating no 1. web browser back in 2002, they beat all other competitors (Netscape, Opera and etc) badly. When Firefox creeped in, the game of web browsers had changed drastically and slowly, it began to take on Internet Explorer. Now, it’s evolved into a war between these 2 browsers.
I have used IE, Netscape, Opera and of course, Firefox. Firefox is my favourite browser followed by Opera.
6 reasons on why you should use Firefox
1. Tabbed browsing Talking about tabbing browsing, Firefox has tabbed browsing which is similar to Internet Explorer 7 and Opera. Tabbing browsing is extremely useful as it doesn’t flood up your taskbar with a lot of windows. One browser, Many webpages. If you accidentally closed the the tab, you can always undo the closed tab with a few mouse clicks. Regarding to this, I feel that they should integrate shortcut to this function. Opera can undo the closed tab with just Ctrl+Z.
2. Spell Check
This function is very useful for someone like me who often misspells. It wokrs works.
3. Pop-up blocker
Unwanted Ads can be annoying at times. Firefox can control your webpage viewing with minimal disturbance from annoying ads. When Ads are blocked, Firefox will notify you via their information bar.
4. Open Source Rules
The concept behind open source is equaled to more secure because when there are bugs, there will be thousands of experienced and passionate developer to solve them together. With thousands of brainpower, these bugs can be killed within seconds.
5. Automated Update
When bugs are solved, Firefox will update itself automatically. No joke, it’s real when you enable the feature.
6. Extensive Extensions
I love these extensions! You can install extensions on top of the basic functions of Firefox. These extensions are additional tools for you to use such as Adsense Notifiter, Del.icio.us, Stumbleupon, Ads blocker, Google Toolbar and much more. It’s really more than meet the eye. They are available on Firefox Add-ons
Here it’s a video on how to tweak your Internet Explorer and Firefox to make them surf faster and better. In just a few steps, you will be able to experience the difference. Go, try it!
Understanding the importance on flexibility in Adsense placement
Adsense placement in Blogspot in general is relatively easy and straightforward, but the concern is Adsense ads only allow you to place them at the sidebar section or top/bottom section of the post. Placement of ads are needed to be highly optimized in order to achieve best result and of course good source of income. From all the researches I have done, I figure out that you need to blend your ads well into your contents, and it also means that the ad cannot look like an ad. Neither placing Adsense Ads above/below the post is going to tell people “Hey, I’m not an advertisment. Don’t shy away from me”, or placing at the sidebar will help.
Example: Absense Ads above the post
Overcoming the barrier
Step 1. Save your precious template
Before attempting to change the coding, please save your template.
Step 2. Copy and paste on your trusty notepad
Copy and paste your Adsense Code (Customized for your template) onto the notepad.
Step 3. Use replace all function
Now replace all the < to <lt and > to >gt using the replace function (Ctrl+H).
Replace All function
Step 4. Create a #post-left class in CSS
Back to Blogger, go to Template > Edit HTML and make sure to check the box next to Expand widget templates. Under the ‘Posts’ classes, you need to add the new CSS class and name it according to where your Adsense Ads will be placed (either left or right). In this example, I used #post-left, floated the ads on the left and gave it a right margin of 5px. The margin is to allow spacing between the the ads and the posting. If you float your Adsense ads on the right, you need to change the margin to margin-left: 5px;
Step 5. Insert the newly-created class into the post
To insert the adsense into your post, you need to find and change the code accordingly to the below image. Copy your Adsense Code (Step 3) and paste it after “”.
id=’post-left’ is referring to the CSS code created (Step 4)
Step 6. You are done!
This is what you see after editing the code. Happy tweaking!
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