Quick Hitters Two
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Mar 1, 2011
Wow! Almost a year to the day I wrote a post called Some Quick Hitters For A Sunday. That was before I started my weekly Sunday Question series. In that post, which turned out to be more than 1,100 words and thus not very quick, I tackled Olympic hockey, Syracuse University Basketball, a Commission Junction affiliate that never paid me, people stealing my posts, and snow; it’s always about snow in central New York. This post will be on different topics as well, but I expect it to be much shorter than last year’s post. Then again, it should be, right?
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Let’s start by talking about your mouse. Yes, the mouse you use on your computer. Does it have a scroll button on it? If so, did you know that, while looking at your browser, if you hold down the Ctrl-key and scroll either up or down that you can increase or decrease the size of the window you’re looking at? up, works for both fonts and images. There are some things that won’t get larger, though, but 98% of everything you try it on it will work. And it doesn’t matter the browser, although someone who has a Mac will have to tell me if it works there.
Second, you notice how the code on this blog is set up to do what’s called “justifying”? That means that the right side is always even; the blog does it automatically. Thing is, this was the only one of my blogs that did it; none of the others did, and none of my websites did it either. I decided I needed to change that so I went into the Stylesheet CSS of each of my other blogs, looked for something that said .postContent, then added this line of code: text-align: justify;. That’s it; and yes, you have to add the semicolon as well. Saved it and everything worked like a charm. In general I’d want to slap myself for teaching those who aren’t all that familiar with coding something like this, but it’s simple and your blog will look fantastic. And yes, there might already be another “text-align” in there, but that’s okay.
And, just to mention this, you can use this same code, only in a slightly different way, to get your websites looking smooth as well. At the very beginning of your wording, add this tag, without the little stars: [div align="justify"], but obviously instead of the brackets use < and >. I had to put the bracket in there to keep the post from making the code disappear. Then at the end of all your wording, add this: [/div], again using < and > instead.
One more justification tip, this time with Word or Publisher. You probably know already about left, center and right justify. If you’re like me, you’ve never clicked on the last one next to right justify. Well, click on that, and your entire paragraph will justify; freaky! I haven’t been able to find it in Excelyet, but I’m going to keep looking.
Next, have you ever wanted to add the year of copyright to your blog? My friend Keith wrote a post titled Dynamically Add A Copyright Year To A Website. Basically there’s this bit of code you add to your footer and viola, somehow it knows what year it is and it’ll add that code to every blog page. Neat, right?
Then I decided I wanted more. I wanted something like that for all my websites, because I always forget to update that and don’t want to always have to do it every year. I came upon this blog by a lady named Cathy Stucker, who wrote code on this post titled Update The Copyright Date On Your Blog Or Website. The code she has works great, and I’m now using it on all my websites, although I have so many pages that I haven’t added to all the pages yet. I did change one thing, though; instead of having the word ‘copyright’, I use this HTML code instead to give me this © symbol; remove the stars, and make sure to add the semi-colon: &*#*1*6*9*;
You probably think we’re done, but I have one last thing for you. If you’re like me, every once in awhile you copy something that you want to paste somewhere else. Sometimes it’s in all caps, and what that usually means is that you have to re-type it. Not anymore! Copy it and pop it into Word. Highlight it, then hit Shift – F3. That will change everything to small letters. Hit it again and it’ll capitalize only the first letter of each word. Hit it one more time to go back to all caps; course, why would you want to do that? Neat little trick, right?
And there you go; some quick hitters, this time something useful. And it is shorter than the last post, though not by much. 
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2011 Mitch Mitchell
The Client’s Finished Product
Posted by Mitch Mitchell on Jun 25, 2008
So, here’s the follow up to my post on having to try to fix a client’s website when he created it from Microsoft Publisher.
I did indeed have the beginnings of a workable template. However, the menu was problematic. MS Publisher had created the menu as an image also, and the client had put both a heading at the top of the menu, then this little picture under that, followed by the menu. He had told me he wasn’t crazy about the menu because he’d wanted this blend of colors, but the menu broke them all out so that everything looked choppy, plus he couldn’t get the same size and effect on every page. By the way, I hate WYSIWYG products because they throw so much code in on their own and don’t ever quite allow people to get everything balanced properly.
The first thing I tried was just cropping the picture out of there, then typing his heading and adding the picture, then the menu. It looked okay, but all the links suddenly wouldn’t work. That wasn’t going to do, so I decided to eliminate the menu he had and fill each area with a color that was in the middle of all the colors he’d chosen, and then darken the menu headings so that he’d have all his menu items and all would be great with the world once again. That way, I could make everything uniform, which would look smoother, and it’s what he really wanted in the end.
After that, I tried typing in his little heading and adding his image, but for some reason everything wouldn’t stay aligned the way it was before. The image kept wanting to go to the top; that wasn’t going to do. I’d tried to separate the heading and the picture by using the < tr> and < td > tags, but instead I decided to put them in the same tag, and use < br > to drop the picture lower. That worked perfectly; whew!
The final big piece was that he’d created all his pages with generic names; well, he didn’t, Publisher did. So, after the index page it was page2.html, page3.html, etc. I changed all the page titles to what each page was supposed to be about, within reason of course, so that it would at least give me a change to optimize the pages. So, each page has its own wording in the links that comes close to matching the title; that was good stuff, but I have to admit that I thought about it last minute. I was looking to just get done after all the trouble with the first page, then realized that wouldn’t help me any.
After that, I went back to each page, changed the title headings, put in a different description and meta tags, then formatted his bottom menu so it was centered, and decided to make his email address a link that will open up a person’s email client; hey, that’s not a bad way to go. The only minor problem I felt I had was that, since he’d written all the copy and wanted it that way, I found it hard to optimize so that it would help him in the search engines. It’s not a traditional business model, but I did what I could with it. He had already bolded certain phrases, so I went with those.
At this point, the job is done; the only thing left is for him to tell me which hosting package he’s purchased and where I can upload it so that he’ll be good to go. For testing, I uploaded it all onto one of my sites, obviously having to change the link for his index page because I have my own index page on that site, but it was only for testing anyway.
I’m proud of myself for figuring it all out, and keeping it at 10 hours, which was my goal. He’s happy also; whew! There is one page where I didn’t change any of the coding, because he wanted everything in a particular format, and I just wasn’t interested in trying to figure out how to change it all; plus, it was only text, so it was smarter to leave it alone. It’s ugly, but it works just fine.
As a plug, the work was done under one of my other business names, SEO Xcellence; just thought I deserved to give myself a little love.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Mitch Mitchell
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