One Tip A Day » dailyblogtips

Where To Find Images For Your Blog

Tony Williams — Sun, 01 Jul 2007 20:22:39 +0000

Finding images for a blog post can be quite hard. First of all you need to know where to look, and secondly you really should try and make sure you are only using images you have the right to use.

Daily Blog Tips (not a sister blog!) has pulled together a good list of sources you could try all of which are loyalty free. Some charge a small fee of around a $1, which is fine I think as paying a dollar for the perfect image is worth it as the alternative could be spending a lot of time, which is valuable to me, looking for the perfect image.

More: Online Image Sources

One For The Bloggers

Tony Williams — Tue, 29 May 2007 21:49:00 +0000

If you’re an avid blogger, then you really should check out the Bloggers Face-Off series from DailyBlogTips.

Every Tuesday Daniel features a weekly short interview with top bloggers, which provides useful insights into how they’ve become successful bloggers, and more importantly for some people, how they’ve managed to generate money.

The series was kicked off in style with Darren Rowse of Problogger Vs Jeremy Shoemoney. This week’s Face-Off features my good buddy Everton Blair Vs JohnTP, and previous Face-Offs include:

Some big names from the blogging community in there, and lots of useful insights can be gleaned from the interviews.

Speed Up Your Site: Use Height And Width Tags

Tony Williams — Sat, 31 Mar 2007 19:28:20 +0000

It’s amazing what a difference a few small changes can make. Daniel from Daily Blog Tips (No, not a sister site!) has explained how when images or tables on your webpages don’t use height and width tags then browsers have to figure out the size of the image, then load the image and then load the rest of the page. All of this extra work can make your pages load slower.

By adding the height and width tags the browser will automatically know the size of the image, which will not only speedup apages but will also allow readers to start reading whilst the image is loading.

Control Which Areas Of Your Site Are Indexed With A Robots.txt File

Tony Williams — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 20:10:03 +0000

Sometimes there are areas of your site that you don’t want indexing by search engines – e.g. admin files or images. By creating a robots.txt file, you can tell search engine robots about what pages on your website should be crawled and consequently indexed.

A robots.txt can be created quickly with Notepad. If you are using WordPress a sample robots.txt file would be:

User-agent: * Disallow: /wp- Disallow: /feed/ Disallow: /trackback/

“User-agent: *” means that all the search bots (from Google, Yahoo, MSN and so on) should use those instructions to crawl your website. Unless your website is complex you will not need to set different instructions for different spiders.

“Disallow: /wp-” will make sure that the search engines will not crawl the WordPress files. This line will exclude all files and foldes starting with “wp-” from the indexation, avoiding duplicated content and admin files.

If you are not using WordPress just substitute the Disallow lines with files or folders on your website that should not be crawled, for instance:
User-agent: * Disallow: /images/ Disallow: /cgi-bin/ Disallow: /any other folder to be excluded/

After you created the robots.txt file just upload it to your root directory and you are done!

Thanks to DailyBlogTips for today’s tip

How To Control Text Inside Search Forms

Tony Williams — Thu, 08 Feb 2007 20:26:05 +0000

I discovered a new site today that has a very similar to approach to www.onetipady.com. Daily Blog Tips does what it says on the tin. Everyday a useful tip is given for bloggers.

I found the site while I was looking for a solution to something on this site that has been bothering me. I wanted to customise my search entry forms so that text would be displayed giving helpful instructions to users, that would disappear when they clicked in the box, without them having to delete it.

Luckily Daniel has given some very clear instructions on how to do this.

First off you need to find the code that controls your searchform. It should look something like this:

< input name="s" id="s" size="20" type="text" />

Now you will need to add three new arguments inside that line:

* value=”Text to be displayed here”
* onfocus=”if(this.value==this.defaultValue)this.value=’’;”
* onblur=”if(this.value==’’)this.value=this.defaultValue;”

The last two arguments are the two magical ones that make sure that the text you inserted will disappear once the user clicks on the input area, and also that it will reappear if the user clicks somewhere else.

By adding these two lines of code to your search form you will get the desired result, and your final line of code will look like this:

< input type="text" name="s" id="s" value="Text to be displayed here" onfocus="if(this.value==this.defaultValue)this.value='';" onblur="if(this.value=='')this.value=this.defaultValue;"/>