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<p> Paragraph Tag

Submitted by shabam on Tue, 12/22/2009 - 15:38

Paragraphs in HTML are just like paragraphs in other written pieces. To denote a paragraph break in HTML you simply use <p>. In HTML the closing </p> is optional, however, it is required in XHTML.

The align= parameter to mark something as justified or left, right or center aligned, was deprecated with HTML 4.0.

Cure for Sporadic Posting

Submitted by shabam on Fri, 12/18/2009 - 15:38
in

As anyone who has followed my blogs for any time knows, I am a sporadic blogger. This has bothered me. I want to be able to post more. I like to write. I like the social aspects of blogging. There are a lot of things I like about it, but my other life does not allow me to post much during the school year. There are options, though.

I sometimes manage to post for periods just fine. I have created posts that would post at a future date, allowing me to go a while without posting. Other times, I just can't seem to get much out. I suppose that I could post more short meaningless posts, but I don't like to do that much. I've considered closing my blogs, but that just won't do either. I have decided to just like with the fact that they are never going to have very regular postings.

Are their alternatives out there for those of us who love to write, but don't have the time for a regular blog?

Yes. If you find yourself, like me, wanting to write, but not having the time to make frequent blog posts here are some options:

1. Go with it. Yes, the search engines will smile more if you post more. Other will visit more, if you have frequent updates. There are many reasons for frequent updates, but if your purpose in writing is just to write, forget about those and just write. Who cares how sporadic it is.

2. Write for others. There are many other sites out there that you can write for. They already have a regular readership who will get to see your writings. Some examples are:

eHow: In the last year I've written 10 articles here and make between $1 and $3 a month off of them. Every time it reaches $10, I get a check at the end of the month. Not much, but dollar for article, I make more there than I do here.

Demand Studios: Demand Studios owns eHow and other sites. Here you can browse through hundreds of titles. You choose a title and write about it. You get paid between $5 and $20 per article. It is not much, but with the 33 titles I've written, I've made $305.

Squidoo: I've not really gotten into Squidoo, but some people love it. It is kinda cool. You make a single page and promote it. You get paid based on visitors and clicks and other stuff. I think it is the "promote it" part that turns me off. On Demand Studios, there is no promoting to do. With eHow, I can promote, but people find me, even though I don't. I've only written one article on Squidoo and it has made a huge $.03, which I gave to charity.

3. Hire writers. You can hire writers to write for your sites and then, when you have time, you add in your own comments.

oDesk and Text Broker are two options. With each one, you get to look at the copy and ask for revisions. Textbroker has a price set for the quality of the writer. The higher quality a writer, the more that you pay. oDesk, you negotiate directly with the writer. These are also both options for writers to make money on, but textbroker pays very little until you get to level 5 (hard to do) and oDesk requires the writer to install some spyware that I don't wanna use (they can watch you work through your web cam).

Addicted to Facebook

Submitted by shabam on Wed, 11/11/2009 - 12:40
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I've not really been a fan of social media. I like some things, but have never really gotten into the hype. I enjoy posting on YouTube and watching what others post, but I don't comment much and I don't go out of my way to make friends there. Perhaps I should, it might make the service that much more entertaining, but I've not really done it. I tweet some, but not much, I've only got 29 friends on my list. I never got into MySpace and didn't sign up for FaceBook, because I thought it would be just like MySpace, and I didn't care.

Well, I finally signed up on FaceBook because of peer pressure. I signed up three days ago and immediately found a lot of family on there, including my mother and several cousins. I also found some people I've gone to school with, worked with, and others I volunteer with. I then found some people from High School who I've not seen since High School. But, I thought "hey, that's cool. I'll chat with them once or twice and then we will loose connection again." I'm not particularly good at keeping up the connections. I'd like to be, but I guess I'm just too caught up in my own affairs to spend much time thinking about yours. I'm a little selfish, what can I say. One of my biggest faults and they thing I like least about myself, but hey, it's just part of who I am.

They make it easy to keep up by having a list of posts by others for me to read. I don't have to go to my friends sites to keep up with them, there is stuff posted right there for me to read and respond to. And to top it off, after less than three whole days I've already connected with 46 people. The problem with that though is that now there is so much stuff people doing, that I can't keep up. And all the games they are playing!

I have started to play some games on the site. When you play the games, your friends in the games can help you. When you have neighbors in FishVille, they can stop by your tank and clean it for you, or adjust the temperature. You can look at their tanks, send them gifts. It makes keeping in touch very fun, albeit superficial.

I still prefer the personal touch of face to face interactions, but FaceBook makes me respect social media a lot more. I know, I'm a geek, I'm supposed to really be into these geeky things. Maybe this will open some doors for me and make me an even bigger geek. :)

Blog Advertising Store: Get Paid to Blog

Submitted by shabam on Thu, 11/05/2009 - 15:32
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Pay for post adverting is a simple way for many bloggers to make a little extra income. It also allows advertisers to gain links back to their website and get buzz about their products. There are a lot of sites out there that match bloggers and advertisers together.

One such blog advertising agency is the Blog Advertising Store. This site started small, but has grown over time. My site has a low page rank and not a lot of visitors, yet I still find several options that I can write about. Most are not things I'd want to write about though, or have no relation to this site, so I won't.

They also have a blog, which while it is not regularly update, has some great articles on it that are well thought out and thorough. One such article that does not even have much to do with their main tool, pay to post, is on how to use viral marketing to increase profits.

While this is a decent site, they require you to have $100 in the account before they will release funds to you. When you rarely find anything that you will write about on them, and the pay is low, it can take a long time to make the $100 minimum payout. For those that will write about anything, or those that get paid a lot to write, it will not take as long, but I'm picky and don't spend enough time building my blog in order to make the real money on it.

<font> Font Tag

Submitted by shabam on Thu, 11/05/2009 - 14:12

The tag allows you to manipulate the display of the text on the page. While the font tag has been deprecated and has not been valid since HTML 3.1, it is still recognized by most browsers on most web pages. If you are trying to write valid, strict HTML, then you should use CSS to alter fonts and not the tag.

On it's own, does nothing. only does something when the properties of the tag are used. Valid properties include face, color and size.

Face tells the browser what font to use. In CSS we use font-family.

Color tells the browser what color to make the font. This can be a valid color name, such as red, green, aqua, etc or it can be an HTML RGB reference such as #090909 or #4E0.

Size tells the browser how big to make the font. You can use a +/- size, ie +1, -2. You can also use a static size of between 1 and 7.

While is a good quick and dirty way to manipulate the text, using CSS allows for a lot more control.

OpenACircle: Social Networking for Business Groups

Submitted by shabam on Thu, 11/05/2009 - 12:32
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There are a ton of social networking sites. In order for a social site to make it, they need a niche that is different from the others out there, or they need to be a lot better. YouTube has the video social networking tied up, Flickr has pictures, FaceBook and MySpace have the "lets be friends" category tied down. We also have LinkedIn for those looking for work, or people, or wanting to network for business reasons. There are so many other that I'd be here all day just naming them all.

A new player on the market seems to have brought things to a new level. OpenACircle is social networking for groups. You create a circle in which you can share a wall that reminds one of a white board, a meeting calendar, documents and more. This is a great site that allows for great sharing that is private to the group, but allows you to meet others as well.

Is this a new idea though? Not really. Yahoo Groups allows for a lot of this kind of sharing and other sites have attempted it. IBM and Microsoft have products that allow for sharing with businesses. But many of these products are expensive or cumbersome to use. OpenACircle is easier to use and free. This makes it a great competitor.

A couple of problems with the site exist though. For one, they use Java. This limits who can use it. Java is not supported on some older browser and many people turn off Java support. Java also takes a while to load, so is a little slower than some other languages. The second major problem is that they have written the site in a way that does not allow for support of some browsers and operating systems. Currently they support IE and Firefox in Windows only. They are working on support for Mac. They do not support Chrome or Linux and do not seem to have plans to support them. This is too bad as my main browser is Chrome and I like to use Linux.

Like any good site, OpenACircle has some great benefits, and some major drawbacks. I recommend checking it out and seeing if it is something that you can find useful, but keep in mind that it may not be supported on your platform.

<a> Anchor Tag

Submitted by shabam on Wed, 10/28/2009 - 20:45

All versions of HTML and XHTML use anchor tags. All browsers support anchor tags.

The <a>, or anchor tag, is the most important tag in HTML. This tag allows links to work. When text is surrounded by an anchor tag it becomes a link so that when it is clicked, the user is taken to a different page. It does this using the href, or hypertext reference, attribute.

An anchor tag can surround text, an image and line breaks. Be careful about any other tags or style sheets as these can cause unforeseen issues. Anchor tags cannot be nested. The closing tag is required.

Valid attributes include:

  • href - this attribute makes the portion between the open and close tag into a link
  • target - causes the link to open in a window of the target name. Some special names have special meaning
    • _blank - causes the link to open in a new window with no name
    • _parent - causes the link to open in the parent frameset. ie the frame that the current frame is in.
    • _self - causes the link to open in the current frame or window.
    • _top - causes the link to open in the current window, over the top of all the frames.
    • name - anything other than the special names above will open the link in the frame or window with the given name. If no frame exists, a new window will be created with that name.
  • name - The name attribute gives the tag a name. It can then be called using a URL and the page is user is brought to that spot on the page. This is useful for a table of contents.

Example

<a href="http://w3c.org" target="_blank">Visit the World Wide Web Consortium</a>

<a href="#thetop" name="here">Name this spot "here" and link to the top, where there is a spot named "thetop".</a>

Directory Of Tags

Submitted by shabam on Mon, 10/26/2009 - 10:48

HTML is a scripting language that consists of many tags. These tags are words surrounded by angle brackets, such as <tag>. Tags are used to mark a region that properties are applied to, such as changing the color of the font. To end these section a similar tag is used, with a / before the tag name, such as </tag>. Each tag has a specific meaning. The list below includes the tags. To learn how to use each tag, click on the name.

Tags have properties. These properties set how the tag will be displayed. For instance the <font> tag says that we will be changing the display of the font, but it does not state how. We add properties so that we can change how the font tag will display such as <font color="red">. When you look at each tag below, the properties are included.

Paid Blog Posts

Submitted by shabam on Tue, 10/20/2009 - 07:33

Paid blog posts are an easy way for advertisers to get their name out there and build back links to their sites. Bloggers like them because they pay reasonably well and allow them to add some content to their blog, without thinking. There is a lot of controversy as to whether they are good or bad. Google thinks they are bad and your PageRank can be damaged if you do not use them properly. Some people ignore them when they are browsing, others will not read sites that include paid blog posts. Most people don't care and if they are done properly, they can add value to a site.

There are two types of paid posts on a site, the ones that add value and the ones that are blatant advertisements. The "This product is cool check it out" posts that are blatant advertisements are not very useful, but they pay the bills. However, if the blogger is good, they don't use that type of blog, they will make the paid blog also be useful and will do so honestly. "This is what I like about this product, and this is what I don't;" honest reviews are useful. You can also write blog entries that tell about something that happened, but has an embedded advertisement. If a blogger is creative, paid blogs can both pay the bills and entertain the readers.

Entertaining the readers should be the first priority. If the readers are entertained, they are more likely to come back and read more. If you get more readers, you can make more money on your advertisements. From a advertiser prospective, if the entry is entertaining, more people will look at it and possible click the link to your site. When choosing a site to advertise on, look for one that entertains the readers. The more useful the site is, the more readers is can maintain.

Advertising Agencies

Submitted by shabam on Fri, 10/16/2009 - 07:41

There are many advertising agencies on the web. This list will show you many of the agencies and the types of advertising they use. Some use only one type of advertising, other use many. Some have limitations on the publishers, others are open to anyone with a website. The more exclusive programs charge more for the advertising and pay their publishers more, but the less exclusive organizations are a great way to start out making a few dollars, or spending very little on your advertising campaign.