The Yoboo: Yoboo related

Showing posts with label Yoboo related. Show all posts

Oct 14, 2009

How to really remove the Blogspot Navbar

The Blogspot Navbar is meant to provide some functionality to the Blogspot users, but let's face it: we don't want it there. It was probably placed at the top of all these blogs for people that don't want to read something in particular and are just browsing. And even if it can bring new users to your blog (very few indeed), it can also take users away. That, added with the fact that it just looks bad, forces many Blogspot blogs to remove it. And here are the ways you can do that.

The "hidden" way

Using this method you are not really removing the Navbar, but you are hiding it so people visiting your blog won't see it. What this involves is adding a CSS rule at the top of your CSS. Here's how to do it: on your blog's Dashboard, go to "Layout" and then to "Edit HTML". Scroll to the beginning of your CSS and on a new line, immediately after

 <b:skin><![CDATA[

write the following:

#navbar{display: none;}

The Navbar will still be loaded, but it will not be displayed. If you look at the source of your page you will notice that it is still there. I didn't like that so fortunately there is another way.

The better way

I believe this method to be a little better because the code for the Navbar is not loaded anymore. Using this little hack, the template engine will understand that you want to remove it, and will even ask for confirmation. Here's what you need to do: go to Layout and Edit HTML again. Scroll down to your closing

</head>

tag and just before that, on a new line paste the following:

<!-- </head><body> -->

When you click "Save Template" you will be asked to confirm if you want to remove the "Navbar1" widget. Click on the orange "Confirm & Save" button and that's it. If you look at the source of your page now, you will notice that the Navbar is really gone, not just hidden. Well actually something still remains, but it's just a comment line that is completely harmless. This is the line that actually tells the template engine to display the Navbar. The reason you don't see it when you edit your layout is because it gets added later and this way you "trick" it into getting loaded into an HTML comment. Because of that it won't be parsed, hence it won't be loaded.

And that was my quick "how to" for removing the Blogspot Navbar. I hope someone finds this useful.

Jan 6, 2009

Something to fill a gap

Yet again after a long pause, I return to my Yoboo. For no particular reason, I decided to trow another useless post on the web. Just to pass the time. It's been a while since I've written something other than code. That probably one of the reasons I've ignored this blog for so long. And now, at the dawn of a new year, I promise myself yet again that "I shall not let it die". Yeah right!

It's been so long since I used Blogger's editing interface that I get a little confused at the way it does things. I see it still doesn't format the text right, the one thing that always got me frustrated. In Compose mode, hitting Return/Enter should create a new paragraph, not putting me on a new line. Every word processor does that. It's the natural way of things. That's why I'm always forced to use the Edit HTML mode. I have a lot more control over the layout. But formating it in HTML and switching to Compose messes thing up again. But here I go again, blaming Blogger for the way they do things. I'll probably just find another way to make my life easier. Probably using a Greasemonkey script would do the job. I'll look into that some other time.

What have I been doing in the meantime? Nothing much really. Work, home, work and so on, with a little short vacation for the holidays that ended, too abruptly I might say, this Monday. Awful way to start the year. Anything else? I've completely stopped using Windows at home, that's one of my great achievement. I'm now using Ubuntu on my home computer. I found a replacement or a Linux version for most of my commonly used applications. And it runs a lot smoother. There still are a few things that I miss from Windows, but I get by.

I'm playing Erepublik for a few months now. And I'm starting to get bored with it. Monotony I guess. And that pretty much raps things up. Nothing interesting to report. I came with a few ideas to write about since my last post, but I didn't have the time and now I forgot all of them. I think I'll use one of writing ideas lists you can find on the Internet. The kind where you pick a line and start writing and improving on that without a specific purpose. And that's all I guess.

Jul 17, 2008

Validating a Blogspot template

The Yoboo valid XHTML A couple of days ago I saw one of Garry Conn's posts related to tips about image positioning in a post. One issue that I expressed my opinion on was the fact that the ID attribute of an element needs to be unique on a web page. This is due to the fact that the page will not validate otherwise. Garry replied that he is not at all worried about validation issues, because they are irrelevant to SEO (Search Engine Optimization). What this means is that no matter how many errors a web page has, it will still be indexed and displayed in Search Engines as long as the bots can crawl it's content. I'm sure he's right about this and it's every webmasters choice if he should care about validation or not.

But that's not the reason behind this post. Garry also pointed out that this blog, my beloved "The Yoboo", was also not validating according to the W3C validator. In fact, the homepage had more than 400 errors. That disturbed a little because I'm one of those guys that do care about validation. And with that in mind I set off to fix things.

The first issue I encountered was the fact that this template used a XHTML Strict DOCTYPE. As stated on A List Apart: "a DOCTYPE (short for "document type declaration") informs the validator which version of (X)HTML you're using, and must appear at the very top of every web page. DOCTYPEs are a key component of compliant web pages: your markup and CSS won’t validate without them." Many of the errors were triggered by the fact that the template used an Strict DOCTYPE, rather than a Transitional one. Another way to say this would be: is was formatted as a Transitional XHTML, but declared a Strict DOCTYPE. No problem. This was easily fixed replacing the original declaration with:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

That apparently solved a lot of the validation errors. Now I was down to about 70 remaining. I started to fix the ones that repeated the most. One of them was "document type does not allow element 'p' here". This was caused by the fact that the body of a single post was defined by a P element(paragraph). And inside this paragraph there were several others which represented the header of the post, the content of the post and it's footer. According to the W3C standards, this was an error, so for a easy fix I replaced inside the template the paragraph elements with DIVs. I replaced the sections of the post also because I plan to use standard formatting in the future, rather that the way Blogger does things (I'm talking about the <BR> tags for separating paragraphs). So I also went to Settings in the Blogger Dashboard and under Formatting I've set the "Convert line breaks" option to "No". This of course means that I will need now to reedit all the posts and split them up in paragraphs. I'll do that some day.

After these modification there were only about 30 errors remaining. The problem with these is the fact that they're caused by the Blogspot engine itself. Due to some bad and reckless coding I had a lot of unescaped &'s. Most of them were caused by the blog Pager, the little thing that helps you get back and forward through posts. Because I wanted to get rid of all the errors, at least the ones on the front page, I commented the pager so it will not appear anymore. I'll decide if I'll place it back on the blog. Maybe by the time I do that, it will be valid XHTML.

A few more errors were caused by the fact that the Blog Achive was displayed using Hierarchy style. Switching that to "Flat List" solved the remaining of the errors so the homepage was validating. But I rather liked the Hierarchy style of displaying the archive so I hope that will be fixed as well.

After seeing the beautiful green bar I tried a few more things to make sure there are no more errors, but there were. Another issue arises with the fact that I've opted for inline comments. This creates an IFRAME element which again trows unescaped characters errors. But since I find this feature very useful, I'll let it pass.

And that's the way I managed to validate most of "The Yoboo". Who would have thought that a Blogger/Blogspot template would have so many problems? Of course there are other people that are complaining about these issues, but it seems there is no one there to listen to them. Oh well, at least my blog has the green light to some extent.

Jun 29, 2008

This is getting stupid!

Image by bunnyandcoco

My last post stated that The Yoboo will be reborn and that I will dedicate more time to keeping it alive. Or something like that. That was a lot of bull. I've said that so long ago and I realize now that I've made nothing to accomplish that goal. The Yoboo is still alone and ignored in his forgotten corner of the Internet.

Besides the fact that this ashames me (I'm almost sure that's not the way you spell ashamed at first person, but I was never very good with English grammar or spelling), it also irritates me. I hate when I say one thing and for one reason or another, or simply because of the lack of the necessary mood, I fail to accomplish what I plan.

The fact is that I have not forgotten about The Yoboo. In fact I kept on visiting the front page over and over again and there were times when I was almost ready to write something. But either I lacked the necessary mood, either something else came up (boss came with an "urgent" matter to attend to, a nice movie was on the TV, a friend wanted to hang out, and other stuff like that). But if I were to make up excuses, it would take you about 3 days to finish reading this :). And the only thing I would accomplish would be to make myself look like a jackass.

But still, something still remains. I recall I've said it before: I have no idea what The Yoboo is about. In it's early stages I was very sure The Yoboo would be a blog where I write about all sorts of graphics (drawing methods, nice tutorials and effects, cool photography, special drawing methods, and other things that would involve a visual graphical result). Soon after I've realized that there are other things I want to write about. Stuff like making money online, which I was (and still am) a beginner at, so I was to write about my experience. Soon after that, although the subject is very attracting and interests me very much, I guess I got bored or maybe realized that the expression "make money online" is in most cases associated with viral networking pages. I say in most cases because there are websites/blogs out there that really help you on the matter and offer really helpful tips.

After noticing that making money online is not what I want to be associated with, I can't even remember what I started to write about. It's been so long ago. The main idea though is that I almost figured out what I want to do with The Yoboo: nothing in particular. That's wright. Absolutely nothing in particular. It's not that I will abandon it. It's just that unlike most other blogs, The Yoboo will not have one theme of interest. As I remember saying before (maybe here, I'm not sure), I don't have only one hobby or area of interest. With that in mind, if you subscribe to the RSS feed or keep on visiting this blog often (although I doubt it) expect to see here anything from web design, Photoshop tutorials, CSS tips and tricks, PHP scripts, electronic gadgets, thoughts of the day to online or offline games and probably a lot more.

Basically, with these being said, I now declare The Yoboo a 100% pure personal blog, a mash of everything and anything that crosses my mind, a place of "pointless ramblings in the pursuit of something that is always just out of reach".

Mar 11, 2008

The new Yoboo

It's been a while since I posted here. It feels like I'm starting all over again. And I am, to some extent. One of the things that I have decided to change was the old design. I think this is the fourth time that I've done this since I gave birth to The Yoboo. Some might say that it's little too often seeing as this blog barely has 6 months. But I was just not happy with it's overall look and feel. So I decided to go for a design that someone else created. And this is it.

Aside from the layout, other things have been changed as well. Most of them involve removal of a lot of elements the former Yoboo had. Here's a list of the changes:

First of all, the design change. I looked around for a nice looking Blogger template, but I couldn't find one that would be as pleasing as this one. It's called Minyx and you can get it here. I like the fact that it's clean, not overcrowded. At least that's my opinion.
Removal of a lot of the elements that were present on the old blog:
- Kontera In-Text Advertising - it just didn't work for me. I didn't earn a single dollar from that. I guess it's aimed at high traffic web sites. Hence, useless for The Yoboo. On top of that, even I find it intrusive.
- BlogRush - I don't think I've received any visitors that would be interested in anything that's posted on this blog. Maybe I don't know how to make use of link-baiting. Or maybe people are just too used to seeing that widget and don't pay attention to it anymore.
- Sphere - "connects your current articles to contextually relevant content from your archives as well as from Blog Posts, Media Articles, Video, Photos, and Ads from across the Web" - that may be so, but I never used it on other blogs. I didn't even see it on that many web sites. The idea behind it is nice and I might even go back to it some day.
- Entrecard - I guess I don't have to tell you what this is. As I already said in an older post, the bounce rate is indeed huge from this. You might even get a visitor that's not in such a hurry to "drop and go" once in a while. But that wouldn't happen very often. It seems it has worked out for others, but you have to put a lot of effort into promoting yourself through their system. And I just don't have the time to do that. So I decided to quit and removed the widget.
- Statcounter - a nice analytics tool. One of the first ones I've tried and it works out great. Unfortunately, I'm addicted to Google and I'll stick to Google Analytics. For a while I had both of them running at the same time. Pointless, I know.
Change in ad positions - I decided to do a little more research, but I didn't overdo it. I found out that the highest paying AdSense are the 300x250 boxes so I changed the one I had with one that can fit this new template. I have also added a big bottom banner, so it wouldn't bother anyone. And a post footer via FeedBurner, just to cover the maximum of 3 ad boxes possible on a single page.

These changes were made because of several reasons. One of them is the fact that The Yoboo is my first project that I tried to make it work this hard. So I guess I owe it to myself to keep going. Another reason was the fact that I ran the old layout through a test at websiteoptimization.com and I was not at all happy with the result. Even in this time of high speed Internet connections, we still need to consider the optimization of a web site. And with this new template, I'm happy to say that things are looking better. They're far from perfect but we still need to consider looks. But at least I've noticed a drop in the amount of requests needed to display the page, the size and number of the scripts and the total page size the user needs to download. I'm sure I can tweak those a little more if I try, without affecting quality. But it's pretty good for now.

I said in the beginning on this post that it feels for me that it's a new start. It could be because it's spring. But I decided to grant this project a little more attention. That's going to be a little harder since I already started another blog, Fresh IT News. But I hope I'll manage to keep both of them as active as I possibly can.

That's about it for now. I'm going to make sure I haven't messed up tot many thing when I changed the template. See you soon.

Jan 30, 2008

FeedBurner doesn't always count right

I planned to write about this early this week, but I honestly forgot about it. It's related to a post I've read on one of Martin's blogs just last week I think. The post in question gives a link to a list of feed directories that you can use to submit your RSS feed to.

RSS So I've done that and the very next day I watched the stats on FeedBurner. I noticed right away that an increase in subscribers took place the day before, but when you look at the agents that grabbed the feed, thing tend to fall into place. You probably already now that if you click the link right under your subscribers count, the one that says, "See more about your subscribers", you get more information about what agents have accessed your feed. For example, in my case, the subscribers count was 21. What can I say, I'm not a very popular guy. If you add up numbers in the "Feed Readers and Aggregators" table you get that total. But that is not the number of real persons that have grabbed your feed, because if you look lower, there is another table that shows the "Web Browsers". In my case the total of the browsers was 8: 7 with Internet Explorer and only one Firefox. In my opinion, even that number is wrong, As certain bots might disguise themselves as browsers. But I could be wrong. And speaking of bots, the last table on the page shows the bots that have accessed your feed. So if you add these with the number of browsers that have been registered, you get the exact number of subscribers that FeedBurner states you have. Witch is wrong from my point of view. It's like saying that Google Bot is my number one reader.

I was at the peek of exaltation thinking that I've found a huge gap in the way FeedBurner shows stats. But before shouting my knowledge to the world, I decided to do another comparison, using another day as example. I numbered the total of web browsers and the number of bots and then added them together and then ... my whole theory collapsed. I got a number larger that the one that FeedBurner showed to me. So what's up with that? Seeing as I can get no real facts out of this I decided to read the official help pages. Maybe I should have done that earlier.

Here's what I got from the first shot: "Subscribers is an approximate measure of the number of individuals currently subscribed to your feed." Ohhh, why didn't you say that it's approximate. That makes a lot more sense. Reading on: "Subscribers is not computed for browsers and bots that access your feed." There goes all my mathematical operations. And the last but not least: "Subscribers counts are calculated by matching IP address and feed reader combinations."

So that's how I managed to waste a whole hour of my day. The lesson to be learned here? There's a reason for those question mark icons: if you don't know something, all you have to do is click them.

Jan 27, 2008

The new and hopefully the final layout

As I said in a previous post, I plan to re-organize things, one of the things I wanted to change was the layout or design of the blog. Although it's a free blog hosted by Blogger, it doesn't have to look like all the others. I wanted it to stand out, if not by anything else, at least by the way it looks. So here it is. The new and improved Yoboo. How do you like it?

Please take into consideration that this is far from finished. I still haven't tweaked all the HTML elements and many of them are just looking the way they do just by chance. If you see anything that looks absolutely awkward, please let me now. I'm too tired to scan for errors. Also, if you use Internet Explorer and things look horrible, get used to it. I won't even bother to fix things to look pretty for IE. If you plan to use a crappy browser, get used to a crappy web experience. If you want to learn more things about my opinion regarding IE, take a look at one of my older posts: Browser stuff - compatibility.

I hope that this design will satisfy me so I won't have to change thing again. A good thing about this experience is that I learned a few more things about how a XML Blogger template is structured. I suppose the next time I'll try to create a template thing will be a lot easier but I'm not looking forward to do it any time soon. Some of the major changes to the theme is the fact that the main column is now fluid and the two sidebar columns are 200px in width, aligned to the right. I've removed the default pager that showed links for older and newer posts at the bottom and the "status" notification that appeared on top when you were only viewing the posts with a certain label. I have also removed a few of the default wrappers that were in the layout. I guess they're not required any more. If anyone thinks that there's something missing that a blog should have, please leave a comment. Another thing I did was remove a few of the Adsense ads. I just kept one big one on one side and one from Bidvertiser.

And that's about it I think. If I see anything that still needs to be changed it will be just a small fix. The rest I'll just do it as I go.

Jan 24, 2008

I plan to re-organize things

There's something I just don't like about this blog. It's too impersonal, I don't like the colors, the layout or something else. I just can't put my finger on it. So I'll try to change thing around until I'm happy with the outcome. Or until I get bored and leave it just the way it is, which ever comes first.

The things I decided to change first is the labels that I've given each post. It's a complete chaos and I thing I'd better take care of it now that later when there will be more (or too many) posts. I was thinking through this to try to focus my attention on certain areas of interest and just keep a category of ramblings just in care some things don't fit anywhere else. So the labels that I was thinking about are as follows:

Personal favorites - stuff like hobbies, things I've been up to, personal opinions, all the other boring things you wouldn't like to read about
Monetization - will include everything that's related to the infamous "make money on line" topic. What I tried and what I'll try next, what others have to say and anything that's related to this
Off the Web - all sort of things that I might have found interesting at some point and decided to write about them. There won't be necessarily new thing
Yoboo related - the things that this wonderful blog is going through and the changes in it's beautiful life
Random Ramblings - I think this is a pleonasm, but I'll keep it that way. As I said, this is where anything that doesn't fit anywhere else will go. Simple, no?

That's pretty much everything I summed up so far. If I see that there are things that need a label of there own, I'll add it later of course. Another thing I was planning to do was to change the layout of the blog (yet again). I'm not happy with it this way and I'll do something about it. I just don't know what or when. That XML code scares me pretty good, but I'll do it sooner or later.

As I said, I won't have rest until I'm happy with the way this blog will look and feel. OK now, back to work. Labels first and then I'll be able to organize things a little bit easier.

Dec 13, 2007

A little more tinkering with the layout

After I realized that the way the template is not as complicated as I initially thought, I decided to do a few more modifications. I added two more compartments that spread for two columns. One above the current sidebars, and one below. I'll populate them as soon as I figure out with what. This is what I did in just a few minutes, so it's probably not going to work the way it's supposed to.

There are other things I did last night, but I was to tired to post anything. Here's the list so you can see I was a busy bee:

added the sphere.com widget. You can find it at the bottom of every post and it's very useful if you want to find related posts from other people's blogs or related articles to the post at hand. It's a very useful widget in my opinion, as it provides you with content relevant to a certain post, unlike a search engine, where you are more and more spammed with irrelevant search results
this is more like something I wanted to do, I actually did it, and then changed my mind. I wanted to see how much better it would be without the default Blogger Navbar so I removed it. But when I wanted to access my account to modify the layout, I realized that the Navbar was rather useful, so I placed it back. If anyone finds it absolutely useless or wants to remove it for whatever reason here's the code you need to place inside the CSS of your template: #navbar-iframe {display: none !important;}
I've also added a few more banners just trying to increase the color spots here and there, add a little life, you know? But that didn't work. I'll have to try different formats so there are not so intrusive, otherwise you won't click them :)

There are a lot of thing that are still unresolved but I have a lot of time to take care of them. There's no rush. Oh, speaking of rush. I've also signed up to Blog Rush , added the widget and now I'm waiting for approval. And that's pretty much all there is. The weekend is here and I'll be terribly busy yet again. Not with work but with having fun. So I'll come back around Monday, or maybe sooner if I have the time, who knows.

I had to mess with it - from 2 to 3 columns

With what you ask? With the layout of this blog. Check it out. It now has 3 columns. Isn't it great? I was sure you would feel the same way. But I never want to do that again. It took me about 3 hours to make heads and tails of the standard XML template and I started messing with it, without to much knowledge of it's inner workings. That was a big mistake. I was lucky I previously saved a back-up of the existing layout. That sort of got me out of banging my head against the walls. Some of the widgets could not be saved in the layout though, so I had to reintroduce them. I tried a few 3-col templates that I've found on the Internet but none of them really felt right. Plus I kinda like this color scheme. And modifying on of those it would have taken me as much time as it would have if I were to start a new template from scratch. So taking a better look at the code of the template, I've realized that all I had to do was to increase the width of the outer wrapper, which is a div. I increased it so it would fit one more column (about 200px, depending on the layout). After that I had to introduce the following code right after the current sidebar:

<div id="sidebar-wrapper1"> <b:section class="sidebar" id="sidebar2" preferred="yes"> </b:section> </div>

That just inserts a new sidebar. It messes up the way things look like in the standard template editor of Blogger, but I don't really mind. I just wanted more space and I think it looks a lot better this way. The problem is you still have to scroll down a lot and that personally annoys me. It reminds me of those pages where you're offered the secret to wealth and fortune totally free. And you start reading and reading and reading and you're like "Wow! This stuff is awesome!" And by the time you reach the end of the page you're hooked. Then you see the line "Just fill in your e-mail address now (... so I can spam you to death of course)!" and you realize you've just wasted 20-30 minutes of your life. But that's another story.

Nov 27, 2007

I am (not) one of a kind?

After all those religious ads that showed up in the AdSense boxes (which I managed to get rid of eventually) , now I am faced with yet another problem. Not ad related though.

Let me tell you how I picked up the name "The Yoboo". I wanted to create a thing that was mine, something where I can put anything I want, my own corner of the Internet. And I ended up with this crappy thing :). Just kidding. At first I thought I should pick a name that was very descriptive, that would say what my project is about right from the start. I soon realized that I was unable to do such a thing. Not because all the good names out there are taken. It's because I didn't know what I was to write about, what was my main target audience, my strong point. You see, I have very many things that I consider interesting, such as graphics (any kind of graphics: drawing, painting, spray-painting, computer generated, body painting, and any other form of graphical interpretation), sculpture (although I don't practice it, I like the idea that you can create something so beautiful out of raw material), pottery, electronics (I like playing with all sorts of gadgets, commercial or home-made), programming, and probably others that I can't remember right now. I will surely place at least an entry here about them, as I stumble into them. So, as you can see, I have relatively many hobbies. It would have been impossible to choose just one of them and use it as a main focus point for the title. So I had a real dilemma.

A few days I said that I won't start anything until I find an appropriate name. Then I changed my mind and I decided to focus on graphics, that being one of my favorites. And I picked a corny name, "Talk About Graphics". As I said, corny. I posted a few entries (not more that 5 I believe) then I got bored with it. I believe it's because I don't like doing something for too long. It gets monotonous and thats one of the things I hate more. So I decided to change things. I started with the name. I thought about it for a few days but I came up with nothing. Then , in a moment of despair, I used one of those word generators you can find online. I gave it a few letters and it spit out about 100 results. It is there where me and The Yoboo first met. It was love at first sight. Isn't that a beautiful love story?

But back to my problem. A few days ago I did a Google search for "The Yoboo" to see whether or not it's indexed by the search engine. I don't care about the others, like Yahoo or MSN Live. I especially don't care about MSN, but that's another story. Anyway, after that I did a search in Google's Blog Search - BETA. I was surprised to see something I saw a few times before, but didn't bother to give it some importance. It appears that 'yoboo' is actually a real word and from the types of results I'm getting when searching for it, at appears to be Chinese. OK then, off to the dictionary I went. And I had no luck. Then I found that there is a registered domain, http://www.yoboo.cn. But I don't know Chinese and that didn't gave any helpful informations. All in all, I think I'll just pretend that The Yoboo is unique and that there isn't anything that even remotely resembles it. But if anyone can find out, please let me know what the hell does yoboo mean?

The Yoboo