Net Covered Blog

General Blogging by admin

This is the first part of my ultimate blogging guide. Get ready for another four continuations! We will start with some basic information about blogs and blogging.

A blog is an online journal or weblog wherein people would be able to write their day to day sentiments, adventures, or whatever other things that they may want to express on the internet. Blogging used to be more of a somewhat personal commentary on one’s own life, beliefs and events; however it has now been revolutionized and is also used for various business and personal agendas alike.

Because of the rapid progression of the online business industry, blogs have quickly become the most effective and yet inexpensive form of advertising. Business blogs are basically used to advertise the products or services of a web site or an online store in order to help increase their online sales. Below are some reasons why you should include blogging in your online marketing strategy.

Blogging is non-technical and is very straightforward. It is like you have your own virtual piece of paper wherein you could write your experiences, ideas, products and services and let them be known to the world. Since there is no proper format to be followed, bloggers will have the freedom to creatively express their feelings and use whatever writing style they may feel comfortable with. This would allow almost anyone who has a computer and has access to the Internet become a blogger.

Blogging is not only personal but is authentic as well. Blogging is about real people sharing real life experiences without getting paid for advertising. Reading about products and services on an online blog has a somewhat more personal appeal. By reading a blog it will sometimes feel like talking to a person face to face.

Blogging is free. Most blog sites have minimal restrictions and offer free services. After registering your account which would take less than ten minutes, you will be able to start blogging already. For new businesses, any opportunity for more free advertising on the web is always a plus. Paid blog sites have even fewer restrictions and are most ideal to use if you want to grow your business or generate more income.

Blogging will help build credibility. By consistently posting quality materials on you blog site, people will view you as an expert and will think that your business is a leader in your field.

Webdesign by admin

I doubt many of you remember how did the old Internet look like. By “old” I mean a period from cca 1990 to 2000. I’m 19 years old so I have only foggy flashbacks from that era. There were no big online communities, just few people knew about something like instant messengers. Most of the websites looked the same (ugly) and consisted of few static pages. That was the old Internet. But times have changed to a great extent.

World Wide Web 2.0 or just Web 2.0 is a term that refers to a supposed second-generation of Internet-based services - such as social networking sites, wikis, communication tools, and folksonomies - that encourage people to share information online in ways previously unavailable.

Let’s take a look at few examples of Web 1.0 → Web 2.0 transformation:

DoubleClick → Google AdSense

Akamai → BitTorrent

mp3.com → Napster

Ofoto → Flickr

Britannica Online → Wikipedia

personal websites → blogs

domain name speculation → SEO

Finally, let’s have a look at Tim O’Reilly’s (one of the creators of the term) definition of Web 2.0:

Web 2.0 is the network as platform, spanning all connected devices; Web 2.0 applications are those that make the most of the intrinsic advantages of that platform: delivering software as a continually-updated service that gets better the more people use it, consuming and remixing data from multiple sources, including individual users, while providing their own data and services in a form that allows remixing by others, creating network effects through an “architecture of participation,” and going beyond the page metaphor of Web 1.0 to deliver rich user experiences.

I’m sure that by now you already have pretty solid idea about what Web 2.0 means. It isn’t technically different from the old Internet. The main difference lays in the concept of how the online information is shared and how the users collaborate together to make the online experience better.

Four years passed since the first appearance of the term Web 2.0 in 2004 and it seems it won’t just go away. Web developers have adopted the new concept very fast and it is evolving and gaining new ground each day.

Free webmaster resources, Webdesign by admin

This isn’t really an article. Just a link to very nice RSS icon set.

Grunge RSS feed icons

Hope you like it.

Miscellaneous by admin

When you want to display a text, you just write it into the source code. But what if you need to display some special characters like < or >? For instance, you are writing a tutorial about HTML. You will certainly need to display html tags for educational purposes. But when you just put <div> into the source code, you won’t see a thing - and it might mess up your site. I’m sure many people had to face this problem at least once.

That’s exactly a situation where HTML entities come handy. Entity is a sequence of special characters. It begins with & and ends with ;. In betwen there is a text or acronym that represents the special character / entity. The most important entity is &nbsp; which represents no-break space. It is the only way how to display more spaces on the website.

Here are some examples of entities that are used quite often:

There is an alternative way of insering HTML entites into the code - you can use numbers from the ASCII character set (every special character is represented by exactly one number in the ASCII table). The syntax is as follows where you substitute “number” with an actual number from the ASCII table: &#number;. For example:

I got one more useful thing for you - HTML character entities cheat sheet. It contains all basic characters used in Latin-1 (ISO-8859-1) character set.

Free webmaster resources by admin

Ok. Check out this pure CSS solution for horizontal dropdown menu. It’s almost five years old but I still consider it the best and the most reliable one. It works in all major browsers and with few easy tweaks you can change the look and the colors of the menu to fit your site perfectly. Enjoy.