Online Text Fixer Tool

I’ve got another goody coming out of my grab bag! I found this very cool site that will fix your text– called Text Fixer. It will fix all sorts of things:

• Put text in alphabetical order
• Capitalize sentences
• Remove line breaks and whitespace
• Create Javascript pop-up windows
• And more…

I love the alphabetical order and remove line spaces features. I am fussy about my formatting– when I want a line break after the phrase “pet beds” or whatever, I don’t want a line break after the phrase! And I do a lot of alphabetizing, too. This makes it sooo easy.

Another handy site to bookmark!

The HTML Tag Super List

Wonder what all that babbling HTML nonsense is all about? I found a terrific websit that lists what those HTML tags are. And it’s in plain English! This is a very good site to bookmark and have handy when you are doing any kind of coding writing or reading (or are just strangely curious about how to read HTML, like me!). The website is called HTML Tags. It’s free to peruse. But if you want something like a handy chart– one that you can actually handle and refer to physically, the site offers foldable charts in various sizes, font sizes, and colors. It’s neat, like your own little HTML personalized books! Check out the site and bookmark it when you need it. A great tool!

Hotlinking Protection Messes With Htaccess File

Live and learn. And I usually learn the hard way, lol. Nothing like experience to aid a little lesson along.

I’ve discovered that toggling on and off the hotlinking features in my cPanel (where I host my blogs) messes with my blogs’ permalinks. This seems to be a common problem. What happens is that the hotlinking changes the coding to the .htaccess file of your blog.

For your information: “hotlinking” is the term we use for the stealing of bandwidth. Let’s say you upload a photo of your weight loss pills to your web host’s server, in your image folder. You then post the photo onto your blog. That photo is being hosted by your web host, at your expense. (Sites like Flickr and Photobucket host your photos for free). Hotlinking is when a person takes the url of your photo from your web host, and puts it on their website. The “energy draw” for the photo at your site and at the thief’s site is coming from your web host and thus using up your bandwidth– a service you are paying for. You are being robbed. You can prevent hotlinking by turning the feature on at your web host’s cPanel, but you risk changing your .htaccesss file, and ruining your permalinks. (Basically what toggling the hotlinking feature does is it deletes the line “RewriteEngine on” line from your .htaccess file. Adding this back in to your .htaccess file will restore your permalinks.

But you DO want to stop the hotlinking of your images. So I found some sites with information about it. Mind you, I am still learning about the process! But so far, preventing hotlinking is working for me for one of my blogs. I just have to get around to adding the code to the rest of my blogs’ .htaccess files.

Using .htaccess to Stop Content Theft
Protect Your Images with .htaccess

Remeber– ALWAYS ALWAYS ALWAYS back up your files before changing them. Your .htaccess file is crucial to the functionality of your blog. Don’t mess with it unless you know what you’re doing and until you’ve backed it up.

How to Hide the Blogger NavBar

Many Blogger blogs have the Blogger NavBar– that horizontal bar at the very top of Blogger blogs. It’s not changed in many years– it’s either black, blue, silver, or tan, and gives you the ability to browse other Blogger blogs (NOT a recommended habit, by the way) or to search the current blog. I believe its usefulness has passed.

Most new blogs now have their own search feature, and I do not recommend surfing Blogger blogs (too risky for malware). And besides, the old Blogger NavBar looks soooo tacky. It’s the same old bar that’s been up there for more than five years.

If you want to hide the NavBar, it’s as easy as putting in a “do not display” command in your HTML code. Here’s a great tutorial video I found at Blogger Templates:

Remove Blogger Navbar - video powered by Metacafe

Hope this helps! Let’s make the blogosphere a prettier place!

WordPress: How To Make Sidebar Load Last

A big problem for me is using Wordpress templates with the sidebars on the left side. Oftentimes, the left sidebar loads before the main content of my blogs. This is extremely annoying. If, for some reason, my buttons, badges, or blogrolls in my sidebar are taking too long (which usually happens), the main content will never load!

Here’s a little tweak I have learned to force the main content of the blog to load before the sidebar. Please be aware that NOT all themes are alike, so your experience may vary. ALWAYS BACK UP YOUR BLOG before changing the coding. You should always back up your blog, anyway! But if you are going to attempt to do my fix, please back it up. Rest assured, this fix is simple and quick and painless. But you should always back up your existing information, just in case.

Notice in your Wordpress php files that you have varying files, like footer.php, index.php, single.php, and etc. My own theme had the basic php files without any extras. Some more complex themes may have additional php files to do the jobs that your theme requires. You may have to play everything by ear, here. The nice thing is that my fix does not delete anything or alter anything major: all it does is tell the computer what part of the theme to load first.

OK, enough of all the preliminaries. In my theme, these are the php files that we’re going to alter. We’ll go over them individually.

index.php
page.php
single.php

The index.php is the information for the “face” (or homepage) of your blog. It tells the blog how to operate and when. Open the file now. You’ll see a lot of coding. What concerns us is the “get header,” “get sidebar,” and “get footer” stuff at the very top and the very bottom. So at the top, you’ll see this:

<?php get_header(); ?>
<?php get_sidebar(); ?>
<div id=”content”>

then you’ll see a lot of coding after that, and then at the bottom of the file, you’ll see this:

<?php endif; ?>
</div>
<?php get_footer();?>

These two sections are telling the computer to load the main homepage of your blog in this order:

1. Header
2. Sidebar
3. Content
4. Footer

We want to change that. We want to switch the “Sidebar” and “Content.” And that is what you do. Copy this section in that file, that says:

<?php get_sidebar(); ?>

and then delete it. Now, scroll down to the bottom of the file. See where the file says:

</div>
<?php get_footer();?>

Place your copied “get sidebar” code right before the “get footer” code. You may have to make a new line (by pressing ENTER on your keyboard) if there is no space. I did have to.

So now, the very top of this index.php file says:

<?php get_header(); ?>

<div id=”content”>

And the very bottom of it now says:

</div>
<?php get_sidebar(); ?>
<?php get_footer();?>

Save the document and upload it to your FTP or, if you are working within Wordpress in your browser, press SAVE.

You have to go back and do this same thing for each of the other php files I listed: the single.php, page.php. Some themes have archives.php, and different templates for different Pages on their blogs. If so, just go through those and do the same thing. This will make the loading of your blog consistent, whether people visit your homepage, a single post, an archived post, or a page post.

When you are done and everything is saved, your blog should now load in this order:

1. Header
2. Content
3. Sidebar
4. Footer

Remember, if you find that you don’t like the fix, or something goes screwy, you can always revert back to what you have as your back up. You DID back up your blog, right?

InLine Comments for Blogger

Blogger, the most popular free blogging platform, has really been making leaps and bounds lately. I’m glad to see the newer developments with the software (better functionality, more user-friendly, etc). (I’m still waiting for some better templates… I guess I shouldn’t hold my breath about that, it’s been– what? 10 years with the same templates? Blogger dudes: lay off the excessive promotional products and get some new templates, eh?)

The main beef with Blogger, still, is their laborious and outdated comment form system. I just hate the popup comment boxes, and what’s worse is the “page” comment form that takes you away from the blog post. Oftentimes, I completely forget what I am going to say in my comment because the comments are so distanced from the post. WordPress has a much better comment system.

With that said, there’s a little tweak I’ve recently learned about, to give your Blogger blog an “inline comment form.” That is, at the bottom of your post is a little box where you can type in your comment text. Add name email, and URL, and you’re done! It’s a fine tutorial done by Blogger Buster, and you can see it here. I highly recommend it. Inline comment forms are far, far superior to Bloggers dumb old popup windows. Try it out and see if you suddenly have more comments to your posts!

Usint Drop Caps for Blog Articles

Here’s a terrific tutorial I found for using drop caps for your blog posts. I have been wanting to do this on one of my blogs for quite a while! It’s for Blogger blogs, but saavy bloggers could figure out how to do this with Wordpress. I am going to tinker with it! Drop Caps look so classy.

Notepad Pro+

I’ve been using Notepad Pro+ for a few weeks now. I have been hesitant to give it my thumbs up here, because I was unsure about the program, whether it would self-destruct after a day like some other open source Notepad replacements do. But I think I really, really like Notepad Pro+! It’s a free download here.

Notepad Pro+ is far superior to that boring old Windows notepad. Notepad Pro+ has the typical word wrap and font style options, but it also has a tabbed interface! It also has a word count! And it counts “lines” for html coding! I think I love it!

If you are dissatisfied with Windows Notepad, and are looking for something better but not too overblown or buggy, maybe you want to check out Notepad Pro+. It’s working well for me. It gets 5 stars from Cnet, too.

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