Helpful House Blogger Sites Round-up
Over the past few months as we’ve spun up OPC, we’ve run across numerous challenges working with the stylesheet, moving old posts from Blogger to WordPress, dealing with spam comments, etc.
We’ve found many sites (dozens) on our journey that have been helpful and thought we would pass along a few of them here. Hopefully they’ll help you solve similar problems on your site or provide some additional inspiration. Feel free to weigh in with other pages you’ve found helpful. We’re always looking for more!
Site Design w/ Cascading Stylesheets: By far the most helpful tool in designing with stylesheets has been Mozilla’s Web Developer toolbar extension for Firefox. This extension allows you to dynamically modify the CSS. The page look actually changes as you type – it’s incredible. The toolbar installs in less than a minute. Once installed, the feature you’re looking for is called Edit CSS.
Once you’ve got the toolbar installed, W3C Schools makes available a searchable CSS reference manual for free. This manual explains tags like padding, margin, float, and more than are essential for page design.
Disabling Related Videos in YouTube: If you embed a YouTube video in your site, the default player will show related videos at the end. More often than not, these videos aren’t actually related. And in the case of Ethan’s shower plumbing fix video, some were downright inappropriate. Fabio over at Varesano.net has a great tutorial on how to disable related videos on YouTube embedded content.
Finding Out How People Are Finding Your Site: We’re a big fan of two ways to help you analyze the traffic coming to your site: Google Analytics, which provides comprehensive end-to-end tracking of web traffic, and SiteMeter, a simple counter that gives real time feedback on the number of visitors and how they’re getting to your site.
I hope these help! Look for more helpful blogging tips in the future on One Project Closer.
What do you think? Weigh in below and let us know the most useful sites you’ve found!
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One Response to Helpful House Blogger Sites Round-up
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August 9th, 2008 7:56 am
Fred,
You forgot to mention that you are a huge resource as well!! Thanks again for helping me out with the site last night. I’m sure it would have taken me a long time to find that corrupt code!!