Friday, December 26, 2008

Web Page Analysis

My poor brother mentioned yesterday that it takes forever for my blog to load. He is still using dial-up. Who knew there were people still doing that?

Anyway, I thought I'd check to see how long it takes for the page to load. I found this free Web Page Analyzer, typed my url in and got these results:

Connection RateDownload Time
14.4K1118.46 seconds
28.8K568.23 seconds
33.6K489.62 seconds
56K300.97 seconds
ISDN 128K104.66 seconds
T1 1.44Mbps25.52 seconds

I'm hoping no one is actually still connecting to the Internet at 14.4K!

Anyway, besides giving me the overall download times, it also listed everything on my page and what size it was. Some of the scripts could supposedly be compressed to save bytes, but I really have no control over those, besides evaluating whether I really need them and perhaps removing them. For now, I'm keeping most of them. What I did notice was that images were the biggest source of the problem. I'm not going to stop adding pictures to my posts, but I did limit the posts on the main page, and I removed some images from the sidebar and some extra unnecessary stuff from the bottom of the page. Now my results look better:

Connection RateDownload Time
14.4K 517.48 seconds
28.8K 265.84 seconds
33.6K 229.89 seconds
56K 143.61 seconds
ISDN 128K 53.83 seconds
T1 1.44Mbps 17.64 seconds


Hopefully that will help a little. If you'd like to know how long your page takes to load, give the free Web Page Analyzer a try.

Thursday, December 25, 2008

More Free Blogger Templates

I've noticed that a lot of people who visit this blog are looking for new Blogger backgrounds and layouts. I'm always on the lookout, too - even when I find one I really like, you never know if an even better one is out there somewhere waiting for me.

I just recently found a new site full of great looking Blogger templates, so of course I had to share. It's called Simply Fabulous Blogger Templates, and I haven't looked at all of them, but the templates I've seen are really nice. There are also some nice tutorials to help you change your template, add and configure your widgets, and add custom text to your header.


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Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Printing My Pages

I've been working on a new blog to share and organize my recipes - bcmom's kitchen. As I started posting recipes there, I realized that people might want to be able to print the recipes. I might even want to print some of these out. Sometimes I just open the recipe on my computer and then go back and forth between the kitchen and the computer - not very efficient. Or I'll scribble the ingredients on an old envelope or something. It works, but still not ideal.

Printing a recipe from a blog isn't very efficient either. For instance, I just did a print preview for my Cinnamon Roll recipe, and I ended up with 4 pages. Only one of them had the actual recipe, so I suppose someone who wanted to print the recipe could print just that page, but why should it be so complicated? I need a separate, simpler, printable page.

I decided to use Google Docs to create my printable recipe pages. It was really easy, too. I simply copied and pasted the recipe, with no extra text or pictures, into a new document in Google Docs, and then I published the page.



Once I published the page, I copied the link Google gave me and used it on my blog to add a link that says Print this recipe.



When someone clicks the link, they get a new page that contains only the recipe. It makes a clean, simple page that is perfect for printing.

I'm planning to create and publish one of these Google Docs for all the recipes I post on my blog. Hopefully that means more people will be trying my recipes, or at least printing them out with the intent to try them.

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

I'm Cleaning Out My Inbox

This is something that I should have done ages ago, something I should do on a regular basis, but I don't. Now I have to. I've been using an email address from AOL that let me pick my own domain. I hadn't really thought about it until now, but they actually registered the domain I chose and allowed me to use it for my email. Well, now they're releasing those domains. They've given me until the end of the month to transfer the domain if I want to continue using it. Otherwise all my email goes away. At least it looks that way. I can't find any way to just convert that email address to a regular AOL or aim.com address.

I really don't need to keep that domain because I've really only given that email out to a couple people. I can easily notify them that it's going to change. The problem I have is that one of those people is a big time email forwarder. Since he's practically the only person who emails me there, I have practically every email he's ever forwarded sitting there in my inbox. Do I just leave it there, let it go, and figure I'll get plenty of forwards in the future? Some people could probably do that, but not me. Luckily, I just found out about a new service called ForwardOn, and I'm forwarding all the emails in my inbox there. At least, as many as I can get to before the end of the month.

ForwardOn is a free and easy alternative to all those email forwards. When you get an email, instead of forwarding it to all your friends, you know you've been guilty of this, simply forward it to ForwardOn. You can send all kinds of attachments, photos, video, Powerpoint, etc. ForwardOn will host the email and send you a link. Then, if you just have to share with all your friends, simply send them the ForwardOn link - like this one. No more cluttered inboxes or email messages that take forever to download. Your friends who still have dial-up will thank you! No more worry about viruses in email attachments.

You earn points when people view your emails, and points can be redeemed for rewards or donated to charity. I haven't really checked into the points and rewards yet. I'm more interested in cleaning out my inbox, and maybe convincing my email forwarding friends to start using ForwardOn so I can keep it cleaned out.

Monday, December 8, 2008

Add a Favicon to Your Site

Are you tired of that bright orange B (if you're using a Blogger blog) in the address bar and on the tab? You can display your own icon on the browser address bar when visitors view or bookmark your web page instead. It's really simple, too.
  • Choose an image you like - ideally it will be very simple because a favicon (short for favorites icon) is pretty small, and complicated pictures don't translate well. It should be an image you want people to associate with your blog.
  • Upload your image to this Free Favicon Generator, and it will create your favicon for you.
  • Then you can either download it so you can upload it somewhere else, or just host it there. They even give you the code to copy.
  • Once you've copied the code simply go to your Blogger Dashboard, select Layout, and edit HTML. Paste the code into the head of your page, right before the < /head> tag and save it.
  • Now, you should have your very own, personal favicon.
I actually used this Favicons from Pics generator to make the favicon for this blog. If you use this one, you will have to download and unzip the file and then find somewhere to upload it so that you can link to it and use it. Since you can't directly upload the favicon to Blogger, and many photo hosting sites don't accept .ico files, it's a little more complicated.

Here's a great tutorial on adding a favicon to your Blogger blog.

Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Microsoft Keyboard Shortcuts

I use some keyboard shortcuts, but there are plenty I don't - some I didn't even know about. Here's a handy list of the keyboard shortcuts for Microsoft Windows. I think some of these could save me some time, once I figure out which ones I need, and then remember them.