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Archive for May, 2009

Computer Tips – A Few Common Computer Errors

May 9th, 2009 No comments

Computer errors can pop up when least expected, they can cause the entire system to suddenly shut down, and they can inadvertently corrupt data to the point where it can’t be deciphered. Although they can’t always be avoided, it’s important to remember that computer errors can be corrected. The key is to understand what computer errors are, understand what they mean when they show up, and understand how to minimize their occurrence in the first place.

Basically, computer errors are the result of a number of things that may or may not have anything to do with the way the computer is used. They “operate” whenever there’s a conflict among commands. Remember that computers essentially run off of a series of commands and it’s usually a smooth process. But when one command conflicts with another command – or when one command asks for a process or information that isn’t available, the computer returns results that aren’t useable. That’s an error.

A budding e.g. of this kind of blunder is when users try to make use of module which isn’t germane for their system. Almost all modules accompanies a list of complement mandate which dictates what a mechanism needs to have in sequence for a module to work properly. To minimize errors of this sort, regularly determine which your mechanism has a compulsory components. A plan government module which you’re meddlesome in might need a specific handling system, similar to Windows XP for example. And nonetheless this module might implement usually excellent upon a Windows 98 machine, it will beget a crowd of errors once a started.

Insufficient memory will cause errors as well. That’s why software programs include minimum memory requirements. A program that needs 14MB of memory will generate errors on a computer that only has 4MB of memory if it runs at all. The same goes for disk space, monitor color depth and resolution. In these situations, problems occur the moment that a piece of software attempts to access the things (hardware, memory, space, resolution, etc.) that it cannot find.

Because some programs share common files, errors can also occur when these shared files are not up to date. For instance, let’s say that Program A is already installed on a computer and it’s working just fine. Then let’s say that the user of that computer downloads and installs Program B. Program B uses a file that Program A installed much earlier, but when Program B is run, errors popup. Those errors are the result of Program B attempting to use an outdated (shared) file that was installed by Program A. In order to fix that problem, the user would have to download an updated version of the shared file (which to say the least – is not an easy thing to find or do).

Sometimes, errors occur because a system doesn’t have the required drivers or the drivers that are on the system are the incorrect version. Both errors in these cases can be resolved by updating the computer on a regular basis. Microsoft provides a section on its website that can automatically update a computer online and it does this at no cost in an effort to reduce errors like this. Always try to keep your computer updated so that should a program share a file, it will share a file that has been updated on hundreds of thousands of computers, like yours.

This article doesn’t even begin to cover the entire gamut of computer errors – but additional information regarding how to get help with a computer issue (including computer errors) can be found in our article titled, “Computer Help” no matter what the problem is.

Using Dreamweaver To Add JavaScript To Your Web Pages

May 9th, 2009 No comments

JavaScript is a simple, client-side scripting language which enables you to add exciting and interesting functionality to your HTML pages. It is built in to most web browsers and, although it can be deactivated, most people will have it enabled within their browser. JavaScript’s uses includes the validation of entries within an HTML form and the detection of browser versions and presence or absence of plug-ins. Dreamweaver’s implementation of JavaScript centres on the use of what it calls “behaviors”.

A behavior is simply a pre-written JavaScript function which can be triggered by a given event. To make the Behaviors window visible, choose Behaviors from the Window menu. Next select the element to which you want to attach the JavaScript. Finally, choose one of the available behaviors from the menu in Behaviors window. (The behaviors which are available will depend on the item you have highlighted.)

Dreamweaver attempts to guess the event that you would like to trigger the behavior such as an onMouseOver, onClick or OnDoubleClick. If it guesses the wrong event, simply choose the correct event from the drop-down menu next to the name of the event.

Dreamweaver has a wide selection of behaviors. However, they fall into four main categories: images, windows and alerts, forms and form fields and CSS. To see how behaviors work, let us look at some examples of some behaviors in each of those categories.

The classic example of an image manipulation behavior would be the “swapImage” behavior. This venerable JavaScript function causes the source of a given image to change when the mouse passes over the image and back to the original when the mouse leaves the image. This behavior can either be explicitly applied to an image or can be generated automatically by inserting a rollover image.

In the alerts and windows category, we have Dreamweaver’s “Open Browser Window” behavior. This creates the ever-popular pop-up window. When you assign the behavior, Dreamweaver asks you to choose the HTML page you would like displayed in the window as well as the attributes you would like to add or suppress, such as scroll bars or the ability to resize the window.

The key behavior relating to forms is called “Validate Form”. It performs simple checks on any text field within a given form. (It ignores any fields other than text fields.) To use it, select a field (the validation will then occur when the user leaves the field) or select the entire form (the validation will then occur when the form is submitted). Choose “Validate Form” form the Behaviors panel menu and specify the type of validation you wish to perform, for example, ensuring that a field has not been left blank.

An example of a behavior which manipulates CSS attributes is “Show/Hide Elements”. This enables you to control the visibility of the content inside an HTML element, such as a DIV, heading or paragraph, based on user action. So, for example, when if you have a picture of a product, you can create DIVs with information on various aspects of the product and have the appropriate DIV content become visible as the user mouses over various parts of the product image.

Naturally, there is some overhead involved in using Dreamweaver’s behavior in terms of the code generated within your web page. To make your pages accessible and search engine friendly, it is recommended that you transfer JavaScript code into an external .js file and then link each of your web pages to the external JavaScript file. In Dreamweaver’s code view, highlight all of the JavaScript code between the opening and closing SCRIPT tags, then choose Cut from the Edit menu. Create an empty text file, paste in all the code and save the file with a .js file extension. Finally, in the opening SCRIPT tag on your web page type src=”myscript.js”, replacing “myscript” with the name of your file.

Categories: Programming Tags: ,

Highest Paying Keywords for Google Adsense

May 9th, 2009 No comments

In people’s search for higher incomes from Google AdSense a lot of AdSense publishers are looking to find those keywords that really bring the best income possible. The higher an advertiser pays for a keyword, they more the advertiser receives when they click on a link.

But how can you find such words for your site? Well, the answer to that question depends a little on who you are and what you’re prepared to do to get those keywords. But the general good news is that you can indeed find such words if you need them.

Of course, if you can afford such a solution, one of the best ways of getting your hands on those words would be to pay for them. There are specialized companies that do business by finding people good keywords, not only for the purpose of more AdSense revenue but for search engine optimization as well.

Such a service can be found on “Top Paying Keywords”  to getting relevant content on your site and increasing your revenue by a whole bunch quickly.

Of course, if such a solution does not work for you, you can ultimately resort to a method of personal investigation. That means you try out keywords by yourself and see which ones work better or worse for yourself.

While you might also be doing this for the first method (paying someone else to get the keywords) it would probably be better then this because you’d at least be narrowing down search to certain items.

While you’re trying this make sure to keep using AdSense’s ‘channels’ feature along the way as it can be a very good way of letting you know which sections of your site are generating income and which aren’t.

Of course, you can also yield a great amount of help from AdSense’s arch enemy Overture. Overture gives you the possibility of entering keywords and finding out not only how much advertisers are paying to get them on your page, but how much people are clicking on the words as well. This service can be found at:

You can also try out a tool called Word Tracker What this tool can do is tell you how many sites are already using the same keywords. Learn from this lesson and don’t try to use the words that a lot of people are already using.

Also, a great aid may very well be found in Google itself. Search Google for any keywords you may wish to include in your pages and look at the results. The results on the left will probably be your competitors (and if they have Google AdSense ads on their page you can bet then are) while the links on the right display ads relevant to your search.

If your search doesn’t yield any AdSense results then you might want to reconsider including those keywords in your site.

Make sure you don’t use any dead words (words that don’t get any links on AdSense other then public ads. That is probably the most important thing you should be doing.

Of course these are only a few methods of getting out of the dead zone and starting to make serious money with AdSense. If you’ve seen a lot of people with “not so hot” websites generating a lot of AdSense revenue, using these tips can get you right behind them (or in front if you’re really smart) very fast. Although this is the case it is also very important to remember that having the highest paying words does not mean that you make the most money. You have to also consider how many times the advert is clicked on

GridView Plugin For JQuery

May 7th, 2009 No comments

There are many times when I am writing an application I need to display data in a table. Most of the time a simple HTML table styled with CSS is all that I need but occasionally I want a bit more. Today we’ll look at designing a plugin for jQuery that will add some advanced features such as row selection and sorting.

Design Goals

Starting out we are going to keep this pretty simple and as it progresses we’ll add more features.

For now we are going to start with a hand coded HTML table and CSS. In a later post we’ll look at populating the grid from a data source.

In this post today we’ll apply the CSS to the table but will expand this to a skinning system later on.

We’ll also be applying the row selection feature today.

Starting Point

Let’s use a simple table as out starting point.

<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="easygrid">
    <tr>
        <th>Name</th>
        <th>Title</th>
        <th>Age</th>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td>Bill</td>
        <td>CEO</td>
        <td>53</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td>Jason</td>
        <td>Developer</td>
        <td>29</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td>Sue</td>
        <td>Accountant</td>
        <td>37</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td>Frank</td>
        <td>HR Manager</td>
        <td>42</td>
    </tr>
    <tr>
        <td>Jill</td>
        <td>Graphic Artist</td>
        <td>31</td>
    </tr>
</table>
Basic Style

Next we will apply some basic CSS to make our grid look nice.

body, table {
     font-family: verdana, arial, sans-serif;
}

table.easygrid {
     font-size: 11px;
     width: 600px;
     border-top: 1px solid #b8b8b8;
     border-left: 1px solid #b8b8b8;
}

table.easygrid th {
     text-align: left;
     padding: 5px;
     background: #424242;
     color: white;
     border-bottom: 1px solid #b8b8b8;
     border-right: 1px solid #b8b8b8;
}

table.easygrid td {
     padding: 5px;
     border-bottom: 1px solid #b8b8b8;
     border-right: 1px solid #b8b8b8;
}

table.easygrid td.alt {
     background: #f6f3f6;
}

table.easygrid td.selected {
     background: navy;
     color: white;
     font-weight: bold;
}
Building The Plugin

Here is the basic layout of our plugin. We’ll look at implementing those functions in a minute.

This is pretty simple so far. We have our default values, we merge the user passed options with the defaults, and then call two methods on each jQuery instance.

(function($) {
     $.fn.easygrid = function(options) {
         var defaults = {
             alternateBackground: true,
             allowRowSelect: true
         };

         options = $.extend(defaults, options);

         return this.each(function(index, table) {
             setAlternateBackground($('tr:odd td', table), options.alternateBackground);
             rowSelection(table, options.allowRowSelect, options.alternateBackground);
         });
     };
})(jQuery)

Here is our setAlternateBackground method. Note we are passing all the odd rows found in the current table.

function setAlternateBackground(rows, alt) {
     if(alt == true) {
         rows.attr('class', this.className + ' alt');
     }
}

This function appends the alt CSS class to each row if alternate row backgrounds is enabled.

The next function adds a click handler to each row to implement the row selection functionality.

function rowSelection(table, allowSelect, alt) {
     if(allowSelect == true) {
         $('tr', table).click(function() {
            //reset all rows
            $('tr', table).each(function() {
                $('td', this).each(function(index, cell) {
                    $(cell).attr('class', cell.className.replace(' selected'));
                });
            });

            //restore alt backgrounds
            setAlternateBackground($('tr:odd td', table), alt);

            //select this row
            $('td', this).attr('class', this.className + ' selected');
        });
    }
}

There is a little more involved with this function. If this feature is enabled we are adding a click handler to all the rows in the table.

First the click handler will clear any selected rows and reapply the alternate background colors. I am not sure why this gets lost.

Then, finally, the row that was clicked is selected by applying the selected CSS class to each cell of the row.

Categories: Programming Tags: , ,

Fancy Form Styling and Advanced Form Functionality

May 7th, 2009 No comments

CSSTricks has created a Website Change Request Form, in order to show off some fancy form styling and advanced form functionality. The form is fully functional, submission can only happen when the required fields are filled out properly. Submission is handled via AJAX, no page refresh needed.

jqTransform is used to help with the styling of the form elements. It completely replaces radio buttons and check boxes with custom graphics, and wraps textareas and text-based inputs in nice styling as well. The submission of all the form elements is SERIALIZED, via jQuery Form Plugin, so adding and changing form elements is easy.

 

wedsite

Categories: Tips and Tutorials Tags: ,

Email Marketing Software

May 6th, 2009 No comments

Sponsored review:

When trying to reach a large audience for the least expensive method, nothing beats the Internet. One key to successful marketing on the web is through email. It is one of the most cost effective methods of marketing. The downside is managing the campaigns.

Managing several email campaigns can be a royal pain for business owners and webmasters. However, there is a solution to that problem. There is email marketing software called 1-2 All that handles all these things for you. This software runs directly from your own server with an easy to load script. You can personalize it with your own branding to make it fit all your email marketing needs.

This software will be installed on your server for free by the company and comes with three months of full support. They even offer a 30 day trial to see if it meets your needs. There are no monthly fees and once you own the software, it is yours to use forever. There are no limits on mailing list or subscribers.

1-2 All offers many benefits and can handle several campaigns at once. The program includes a number of tools to track reports and analyze your email mailing campaigns to see what is working and what needs to be changed. This software offers one of the best all in one system I have seen.

The only drawback to this software for some may be the price. The prices range from $229 for a lite version to $329 for a full license. There are also other add-ons that could increase that price. There is three months of free updates and tech support that comes with the purchase. Anything beyond that is an additional fee.

Though the price may deter some, it is really not that bad compared to other similar types of programs. The ability to manage all your campaigns with the reports and extra features makes the price seem low. It is also a legit business expense that can be charged against your profit margin.

If you are looking for a way to improve your email marketing or you just want to get started, I suggest you check out this program. You have nothing t9o lose with the free trial and they even have a 100% refund within sixty days with no questions asked if you are not satisfied.

If you have used the program or try it after reading this, please share your experience by leaving a comment or two.

Page Rank Update ?

May 6th, 2009 No comments

Page Rank is far from the most important thing in internet marketing, it definitely has it’s place in marketing strategies

I see some sites have a revised PageRank , do I know about the PageRank update?

more info you can check from  Digital point forums  and Webmaster World  two big webmaster forum

Digital point forums members are reporting PR updates on their websites. 

Webmaster World members also noted changes in page rank,

my site not change but i will wait google  update.

Simplicity in web design

May 6th, 2009 No comments

When browsing the web on a daily basis you may come across a website or two that is extremely functional, easy to use, to the point, and visually appealing. Why are there only a few of these sites out there? Because the people that create them understand the key to web design and the key to customers, or viewers. Simplicity is the key. Yes, web design allows us to express ourselves through code and graphics. However, being over expressive and going far beyond what the web site needs actually hurts the web site in general.

An elite graphic designer may ask – How so? More graphics = longer load time is how. Ever sit and wait for a web page to load? We want them to be on our screen fast! Your viewers don’t have time to sit there waiting and waiting for your site to load. So make it easy on them so they keep coming back. Optimize the amount of graphic detail you need. This includes flash and even scripts too. Go through your HTML code, and make sure you aren’t cluttering it up with things that are unnecessary.

Once your site it optimized for easy viewing and browsing, think about the content that you are presenting. Is your site user friendly? Does it encourage feedback, interaction, etc? An easy way to keep traffic interested in your site is by adding a simple poll or perhaps a comment box. Something that makes the viewer feel as if they are important. Make your written content easy to read and understand. A confused customer is a lost customer

Browser compatibility is a big issue nowadays, with so many new free browsers available to download. What you want to keep in mind however are the big name browsers. If your site is compatible with internet explorer and mozilla firefox, you should be OK. Two other big name browsers that are used by a lot of people however are Opera and Netscape. You may want to take those browsers into account when making your site compatible and easy to access from a variety of platforms.

Last but not least one of the often overlooked parts of a web site is the mission statement, or detail of what the company or website provides. Often I look at company websites and the mission statements, or greetings are stale and boring. I lose interest in the web site even before I reach the second page of content. That’s not a good sign. In order for your viewers to understand your website and your ideas you have to communicate with them. Your goals should be explicit and easy to comprehend. They should be simple and appealing. This is really the part of the website that hooks the user and lets them know that your website is legit, as are your intentions.

Categories: Website Design Tags: ,

Announcement: Warm Forest Aspen Flash Template Winners

May 6th, 2009 No comments

Last week, Warm Forest and Six Revisions asked you what you thought the best Flash portfolio website was. To make things fun, Warm Forest kindly donated two Aspen Flash templates (worth $89.00 dollars each) to give away to a couple of randomly selected commenters.

30-01_warm_forest_leading

Today, we are happy to announce the two lucky winners!

The winners are…
  • chris
  • grishy

Congratulations to the winners! We will contact you soon regarding details on how to claim your wonderful prize.

The screenshot

In case you were wondering how the selection process was administered, you can check out the screenshot below to see the MySQL query that was used to pick out the contestants. The contact information of the contestants (email address) was removed to protect their privacy.

30-02_warm_forest_results

Categories: Others, Webmasters Resources Tags:

New Amazon Kindle DX Reading Device

May 6th, 2009 No comments

kindle

Both Amazon’s original Kindle and the Kindle 2 have gained tremendous popularity as leading Reading devices, and for the real enthusiasts, a new Kindle DX model is being released to provide a little more.

This new Kindle model has taken the cool and practical features of the previous Kindles and added a larger, thus better screen. This new screen measures at 9.7? diagonally, but is aimed to provide the ability to view 8.5×11? papers easily.

The overall presentation is better, since it looks like a true Reading device, as if you have a digital page. On the other hand, this makes the new Kindle weigh almost twice as much (from 10 – 18 oz), so some may complain. Another problem that may occur is the refreshing times of the page, will it be as responsive?

Most of the rest measures out like the Kindle 2, and the actual specs are:

Slim:  Just over 1/3 of an inch, as thin as most magazines
Carry Your Library: Holds up to 3,500 books, periodicals, and documents
Beautiful Large Display: 9.7? diagonal e-ink screen reads like real paper; boasts 16 shades of gray for clear text and sharp images
Auto-Rotating Screen: Display auto-rotates from portrait to landscape as you turn the device so you can view full-width maps, graphs, tables, and Web pages
Built-In PDF Reader: Native PDF supportallows you to carry and read all of your personal and professional documents on the go
Wireless: 3G wireless lets you download books right from your Kindle DX, anytime, anywhere; no monthly fees, no annual contracts, and no hunting for Wi-Fi hotspots
Books In Under 60 Seconds: You get free wireless delivery of books in less than 60 seconds; no PC required
Long Battery Life: Read for days without recharging
Read-to-Me: With the text-to-speech feature, Kindle DX can read newspapers, magazines, blogs, and books out loud to you, unless the book’s rights holder made the feature unavailable

Categories: Others, Webmasters Resources Tags: