Blogging Sueblimely

The impetus to blog gradually disapppeared and I posted less frequently. I stopped keeping up with current happenings in the blogging world, which would normally have fuelled me with ideas for topics to write about.  The longer I left it the harder it became to start up again.  The blog came to a halt.

It seems now that it is tentatively raising up from its sick bed to say a weak hello. Why now? I just had an email from CMF Ads who informed me that apart from not blogging since last June I had masses of spam comments.  On checking I was horrified to see how many there were.  Something I had spent much time and effort on was being slowly destroyed through my neglect.

I know this happens to many bloggers and I probably kept going at a reasonable pace for longer than many.  Why the lack of enthusiasm?  There were a number of reasons.  My health was suffering from sitting on my behind on the computer chair for so many hours.  The days when many new social networking sites were starting up are over and it is now a while since I have seen anything new to interest me.  When I started blogging Facebook was for the college crowd, Twitter had not yet uttered its first tweet and Stumbleupon had not yet tripped over anything.  I revelled in trying out new and different appplications and reporting on them.

To begin with it was  exciting being able to connect with so many new people and I  established a small network of bloggers who I now consider close friends and a wider network of blogging acquaintances.  It was the rest that wore me down; those who would take advantage of my public profile on sites to badger me for diggs and  stumbles; the sort of thing I would do gladly for friends whose work I respected but not for all and sundry.

Many of the bloggers who started out at the same time as me have given up and my comments began to come from strangers who strangely enough often had names associated with whatever they were trying to sell. Are we going back to the old days I wonder, when people  were named after their trades; as in Cooper, Gardner, Ward.  Will Usedtires or Seo  become commonplace surnames? Judging by my comments they already are. Will all the sons of the many Real Estates that comment  become MacReals or, given the times, PcReals?  Apologies, I digress.

What have I been doing instead of blogging? The many hours that were freed up have not been as productive as I would have liked mainly because I got sucked in to Facebook and its games – plowing harvesting and seeding my fields, building towns, cooking up a storm in my virtual cafe.  I had avoided these for years, knowing my propensity to get hooked on such things.  My health is back on track though and I proudly purchased a size 8 pair of jeans  last week, for myself. I have continued to build web sites for small businesses and non profits and have  got behind the hood of the Thesis theme and created a CMS site from that. I decided life was too short to keep putting things off and my long planned overseas trip is happening this year – a whole 12 weeks in Asia and Europe, staying in 13 countries.

I will be back here, although not as often as I once was.  I will again be sharing what I have learned about blogs and their building and design.

Comments are switched off for now but only until I remove the spam that got through the net. I would love to hear from  those of you who were regular followers and you can always drop me a line via my contact form.

Popularity: 6% [?]

Collections are a newly introduced Firefox site feature that allow you to save lists of your favorite add-ons (extensions, toolbars, Greasemonkey scripts) to your Firefox profile.

A subscribe option allows you to add the collections of others to your favorites and track when these are updated. These user created collections are ranked by the amount of subscribers they have attracted.

The Firefox Collections page allows you to view lists of Editor’s Picks (so far only Firefox Created Collections), Popular Collections, your own and your favorite Collections. The lists are searchable by most popular all time, most popular this week or month and newest. A keyword search box is also provided.

Social networking aspects are involved here.

• You are able to keep up to date with new extensions added by those whose knowledge you respect. I first heard of collections via the blog post Best Of Breed Firefox Collection For SEO, Bloggers & Internet Marketers, by Andy Beard, whose collection I subscribed to immediately.
• You can subscribe to the collections of current friends and develop more contacts.
• By publicizing and gaining subscribers for your own collections, the higher your own profile will reach in the collection rankings.
• For bloggers this could lead to more visitors and regular readers.

It has taken me a while to get back into the swing of blogging after being away on holiday but life is now back to it’s normal routine. As usual I have tried out the tools I review so here are my own Firefox Collections: These are based on those I use and those I have found useful but have had to delete from my default Firefox profile to keep the number of add-ins down. The more you have the slower the browser.

• Social Networking Firefox extensions and toolbars that help you interact with your social networks and communicate with your contacts. I keep my most used in my default profile but have a social networking profile for times when I wish to do nothing else but catch up with my network contacts.
• Blogging- blog writers, web design and image tools for blogging.
• Sueblimely Using Add-ons- the add-ins I use with my default Firefox profile.

For an explanation of why and how to use different profiles please checkout my post Speed Up Your Firefox Browsing

Popularity: 57% [?]

Work with WordPress MU (multi user) is the reason from my recent absence from blogging. The East Coast area of a UK charity, the National Coastwatch Institution, needed a rebuild of one its website to go along with an extension of it’s activities.

Although you may not have the same needs as this organization you may consider using WordPress MU if you want to develop more than one blog.

I had originally created the coastwatch site using the Joomla CMS system but, as the interface was complicated for them, WordPress was my obvious choice. After working with WordPress on various sites for a year or so, I know how flexible it can be. I was pleased to see that immediately after the new site was up and running Keef, who will be a co-author, had written a post and just needed me to tell him to hit the media button to add images. So much simpler.

As NCI East Coast now comprises of two coastwatch stations, managed by two separate committes, each needed their own unique identity, I decided on using WordPress MU to make administration simpler. Both stations now have their own unique pages and blogs on their own virtual subdomains.

The blog and some pages on the main East Coast site are being used as a private member only area for both of the coastwatch volunteer teams. Plugins turn this section into a true community site.

The other East Coast pages are public and contain information common to both stations. By using WordPress MU, the three blogs and three sets of static pages (NCI Eastcoast, NCI Skegness and NCI Mablethorpe) can all be managed from one admin dashboard.

I am hoping to see lots of posts written on the site to gain it speedy search engine page ranking and to raise awareness, more volunteer watchers and, hopefully more funds, for this worthy charity organization. Their volunteers man the coastwatch stations daily, making sure beach and sea goers are safe.

You may like to go along and leave a comment, joining me in congratulating them on their hard work and efforts in getting their second station up and running.

I will expand upon the advantages of and uses for MU in an upcoming post. For those of you interested in setting up an MU site I will also be talking of how to I set the East Coast site up, the plugins I used and where to find futher information.

I will also be discussing how you can use WordPress, including an existing installation, or WordPress MU to create a community site. As with the NCI Eastcoast example, you do not have to run your whole site as a community site – you can just have it as an add-on to a normal WP site.

Popularity: 55% [?]

The reports of Sheila’s whereabouts are quite right, she has been visiting me in Melbourne.

Sheila in Melbourne – Source Flickr – poetic licence by Photoshop

She was a little shy at first, tentatively peeping around the front door when she first entered.

Once she found aspects of the house that she could relate to she soon started to feel at home:

More mug shots – Feeling at home among the other cups

Family members were impressed by her warmth and soon got close to her:

Popularity: 52% [?]

Do you come across web and blog templates or themes that are ideal layout wise but the colors do not suit you or your site’s purpose. These are relatively easy to change via a templates CSS style sheet but you may need some help choosing the correct color combinations. There are numerous free online tools to help in your decision, so many that it can take time just choosing which tool to choose. Rather than creating a long list of what is available I have chosen a selection of a variety of the more comprehensive but easy to use free tools:

Mimicry is the highest form of flattery

If you are short on ideas, or are just unsure what other colors you can add to those you already like, browsing other websites can be useful but time consuming. Screenalicious, which showcases websites, also displays the color palettes off each featured site, along with the corresponding hexadecimal numbers.

If you have seen a website whose colors you like but are having trouble reproducing them I Like Your Colors will tell you exactly what they are. Simply type in the site URL and you will be given a graphical representation of the colors and their numbers. Here are the results from the Mashable site:

The Firefox Addin Colorzilla not only provides an eye dropper and a color picker tool but allows you to analyze and save a color palette of any webpage.

DOM Color Analysis Results

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/

Color Palette Generators

Then there are the many color palette generators. A few stand out from the crowd with regard to features and ease of use:

Adobe Kuler allows you to explore and vote on color schemes created by others as well as create, save and share your own. You can generate a color theme from scratch or use colors from an uploaded image or from Flickr. If you are not feeling creative you can choose from the gallery of user created schemes.Your swatches can be downloaded as Adobe Swatch Exchange (.ase) files for use in Adobe CS (2,3 and 4) programs. Kuler is integrated into CS4. If you do not have these Adobe products an Adobe Air application, Color Browser, allows you to import and save downloaded .ase files to.organize your favorite color palettes locally.

Color Lovers offers simple and more advanced color palette creation tools; although I find the simple tool harder as it offers no suggestions as to color combinations. As with Kuler you can browse and search for user contributed color palettes and use these yourself. Color lovers provides a whole host of other features to help you with your creations. Vote on the user created palettes and patterns and submit your own. View a showcase of websites to keep up with color trends. Connect with others via forums and groups. Follow their colorful blog. Proclaim your love of Color Llovers to the world by purchasing their T shirts.

Aviary Toucan allows you to create a color palette from scratch or choose colors from imported images (from Flickr, Facebook, Picassa, by URL or from your computer). A “color deficiency preview” shows you how a color palette will appear to those with various different kinds of color blindness.

Color Jack has two tools, Color Sphere and Color Studio, providing you with plenty of ideas and suggestions as well as catering for your own creativity. Export your creations to a bookmark, delicious, illustrator, photoshop or to a URL.

Colors On The Web has 3 basic color tools and mixers as well as articles covering color theory, color terms, combining colors and contrast..

Absolute Color Picker is a free downloadable program that lets you select and pick colors using various color models. It also features a color picker, color scheme generator, color history builder, color scheme management system, screen color grabber (eyedropper)

If you just prefer to choose from existing color palettes rather than create your own there are a number of sites, in addition to those mentioned above, that offer listings with search capabilities including:

• ColorCombos – they also have a tool to “grab” colors other websites.
• Colors on the Web.
• Color Schemer Gallery The Color Schemer products are not free but you can use their gallery and forums without buying..
• Color Hunter is different in that its user created palettes come from uploaded images and its tags are based on the type of image as well as colors.

Yet more tools

Your header image needs to be in line with the other colors on your site. You may have an image already chosen and then base your other colors on this. If not, Idea Labs clever MultiColr Search Lab can help you choose images using colors you have already decided on or just give you ideas for an overall color palette This tool searches through 10 million Flickr Creative Commons images based on your choice of up to 10 colors. They also provide other tools which search the Alamy stock photo site.

Google have very recently integrated color search tools into their Image Search. You are able to filter Google images by the predominant color. Click on “All colors” above the search results and you can choose one of the 12 available colors based on your search terms. For example this was a result of a search for beach sunset filtered by the color pink:

To ensure accessibility for those who cannot distinguish colors easily there are tools to check for legibility and contrast on your site. In addition to the Color Deficiency Preview tool in Toucan, ColorSelector is free desktop software from Fujitsu for judging the legibility of background and text colors. The online tool, Color Accessibility Wheel, shows you how a background and a foreground color will look to those with three types of color blindness, based on colors you choose.

You may not be interested in whole palettes of colors but just want to know the details of one particular color you see online. Eyedropper tools are the simplest way to accomplish this.

• Instant Color Picker is free to use on one machine, with nag screens, or to buy. More than a basic color picker, this tool allows you to zoom in on websites, save up to 20 colors and copy color swatches as bitmap and paste it to other applications. You can also test color combinations using various layouts.
• My trusty favorite program MWSnap is a screen capture tool which includes a color grabber and measuring tool.
• If these are more than you need try the more color grab only ColorSelector for PC or Mac from Fujitsu or ColorPic

Finally, for WordPress users the Theme Tweaker plugin displays the existing colors from your current theme, and gives you a color picker to replace them. You can also change colors in bulk by for example inverting them, converting them to greyscale.. Once you have chosen your colors, you can preview or activate the new theme. You can save your new stylesheet locally and then upload to your blog server to replace your current theme or create a child theme.

There are a whole host of Firefox addins that will help you with your site colors which I will cover in my next post.

You now have the tools at your disposal to choose your site colors but may not have the know how to implement them into your theme. In upcoming posts I will provide you with instructions and details of tutorials and tools you can use to help you with your CSS stylesheet coding.

Popularity: 53% [?]