Donate Now Buttons

The website should be one of the places where visitors can easily donate to the charities. So there should be a “donate now”-button somewhere on the homepage. Obvious, but not too obtrusive. Some designs have the buttons inside the menu, making them to stand out by giving them another colour. Other sites have the buttons under the first paragraph, or somewhere in the side bar. Every way is good. As long as the buttons stand out and call for action.

Flash for showing Photographs

A lot of flash is used in charity websites. For showing the photographs Flash is indeed a good choice and I saw some nice examples in the websites I reviewed. I think photographs really work when it comes to generating sympathy for the people that need to be helped. Using nice photographs in the webdesign is therefore a good choice and a good presentation with flash makes it even better.

Conclusion

The average website of a charity organisation is really good. These organisations spend a lot of time on good websites, which is also expactable, because the internet is so popular nowadays, that a lot of money can be gain with good use of it.

Let this blogging action day be a day to start the conversation about poverty and do something about it!

He who is not contented with what he has, would not be contented with what he would like to have.
- Socrates

Try to be satisfied with what you’ve achieved with your blog. If you are focusing too much on your goals, you forget to enjoy blogging. And we’re all blogging because we like it, don’t we?

Pay attention to the young and make them just as good as possible
- Socrates

If you have a lot of experience, share it. Once you were the newbie and you really appreciated the help of the guru’s. It was your time to learn then, now it’s your time to teach. Do not feel afraid to share your (secret) techniques. Show them to the world and let others learn from it.

As the builders say, the larger stones do not lie well without the lesser
- Plato

Don’t feel discouraged if you don’t have 100,000 visits a day on your blog. Maybe your niche is just less popular than others. Not being the best doesn’t mean that you’re not good.

No one is a friend to his friend who does not love in return.
- Plato

You don’t have to expect that everyone will link to your blog if you don’t do anything in return. If you are afraid of linking to other sites, don’t expect people to do otherwise. On the other hand, if you show link love, people will do something in return.

One man cannot practice many arts with success.
- Plato

If you want your blog to be successful, you have to know where you’re going. You just can’t write about anything. Choose a niche and try to become the best in that niche.

The beginning is the chiefest part of any work.
- Plato

Starting with something new is always difficult. If you have just started with your blog, don’t expect 10,000 visitors every day. But don’t give up and keep writing good articles. Good content will always be found.

Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.
- Aristotle

If you really enjoy blogging and you put a lot of effort in it, it will show. You can’t be a successful blogger if you don’t like blogging in the first place.

Conclusion

Despite the fact that these philosophers lived more than 2000 years ago, their wisdom can be still be a lesson for us. The one-liners can remind you of the reasons for you to blog. If you know other words of wisdom, leave a comment and share it!

Step 1: Validate

Lots of bugs are caused by invalid (X)HTML or CSS. If you have your site validated, it will be a lot easier to make it cross browser compatible. Validate your (X)HTML code with the W3C validator and your CSS file with the W3C CSS validator.

Step 2: Check your Website

Now you have to check your website in all browsers. I always check my site in the browsers, I’ve installed on my computer (Opera, Safari, Internet Explorer and Firefox). Do it and make a note of the bugs.

Of course, checking your website in the browsers installed on your computer is not enough. You have to check the website in different browser versions on different operating systems. The solution is Browsershots.org. With this website you can take full-length screen shots of your website in a lot of browsers. Just type in your url, bookmark the page and come back 20 minutes later to view the screen shots.

Analyse the screen shots and look for bugs. Be sure to write them down.

Step 3: Is it worth my time?

If you notice bugs in very old or uncommon used browsers, ask yourself if it’s worth your time to fix the problems. Look at the browser statistics of w3schools.com, but don’t forget to look to your own stats (I recommend AWstats). If you have one or two visitors every month still browsing with IE5.5, you should really ask yourself if it’s necessary to make the changes.

Step 4: Search the cause

Now you know about the bugs, you’ll have to look for the CSS attribute or HTML code that is causing this problem. This is often obvious. A good reference can be found on westciv.com. There is a complete list of css attributes with their support in different browsers. Too bad Firefox isn’t in the tables.

If you still cannot find the cause of the issue, search for topics on webmaster forums or post a topic yourself, with a screen shot and (a part of) your CSS and HTML code. A forum I visit often is Ozzu.

Step 5: Fix the issues

Now we’re at the essential part of making your website cross browser compatible: fixing the issues. If you know the code that is causing the trouble, find a way to rewrite the code for the specific browser. There are loads of CSS hacks to do that, but I recommend the use of conditional comments. There is an article on 456 Berea St. explaining why you should use conditional comments instead of CSS hacks.

Conditional Comments.
With conditional comments you can link to separate style sheets for all versions of Internet Explorer. A complete reference can be found on quirksmode. For example:
<!--[if IE 6]>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="ie6style.css" />
<![endif]-->

CSS hacks In-CSS
If you don’t want to edit your HTML file with conditional comments, see my article about CSS hacks inside your CSS file.

Transparency of Images in IE6 and lower
Internet Explorer 6 and lower will not display your transparent PNG’s correctly, there is however a simple solution using Java script. It can be found here.

And of course there are loads of other CSS hacks. There is a complete list on centricle.com, also viewing the browsers that will apply the rules.

Conclusion

Making your site cross browser compatible will cost you some time, but it’s not impossible. The is very good documentation on the web, which can help you in this process. If you use other ways to make your site cross browser compatible, please leave a comment and share it. If you liked this article don’t forget to digg or float it.

1. Gmail aliases

In Gmail, there are a lot of aliases that you can use. Most people know that example@googlemail.com will work the same as example@gmail.com, but there is more. You can make as much aliases as you want.

Adding a + to the adress is the best way to create your own Gmail alias. Instead of example@gmail.com you can use example+blog@gmail.com, you can make hundreds of aliases for just one Gmail account. But what’s the point?

Making the filters
Are you also tired that all the subscription e-mails of blogs and forums pop up in your mailbox? Create a filter to stop it! For example, every time you subsribe to a RSS feed via e-mail, you give example+blog@gmail.com as your adress. Now go to your Gmail and click on Settings>Filters>Create a New Filter.

Fill in example+blog@gmail.com in the To: form and click Next Step. Fill in the form. I did it like this:

If you do this too for the forums and other automatic generated mail, your mailbox will only contain real mail. You can find the other mail by clicking on the labels where the mail is moved to:

2. Advanced Search Queries

One of the best features of Gmail is the search function. But if you have been using Gmail for some time, there are so much conversations that almost every search will have lots of results. Fortunately there is a Advanced Search Function. An overview can be found here.

What tricks do you use to improve your Gmail account?

(Click on the images for a larger view.)

The edited pictures:

Icons

There are a lot of different icon sets available at IconGalore. Some of them are:

For each icon there are six formats (including .ico, .gif and .png) and five different sizes (16×16, 24×24, 32×32, 48×48 and 64×64) included. All icons are also in active, inactive and over states. There are 150 files included per icon.

Custom Icons

I you want an icon that’s not in one of the packages you can let IconGalore make your custom icon for just $35. There is also live chat available, so you can make clear what kind of icon you want to be made. The custom icons come in four sizes, three formats and two different color depts.

Free Icons

There is also a set of free icons available. This set contains 12 icons and over 900 files. Download the .zip file here. This set of icons can be used on your website, in software or just on your desktop.

Why?

There are a couple of reasons for using .htaccess redirects instead of PHP or even Javascript. First of all, it’s very simple. There is no need to edit any files, you just need to change the .htaccess file. Imagine you need to redirect a whole directory of your site, with hundreds of pages. If you would use Javascript, you had to change every file, or at least use some search and replace commands to get the javascript on every page. With .htaccess you can easily redirect a whole directory.

It’s easy, but it’s also better for SEO to use .htaccess redirects. You can specify the type of your redirect, either temporarily (302) or permanent (301). You can’t do that with Javascript.

So now you know why you should use .htaccess redirects, now let’s take a look to how you use it.

How?

If you haven’t made a .htaccess file yet, make one. See the previous tutorial for details.

This is the basic syntax of a .htaccess redirect:
Redirect /olddirectory http://www.newdomain.com/newdirectory

But if you want to redirect that directory permanent, don’t forget to add 301 or permanent:
Redirect 301 /olddirectory http://www.newdomain.com/newdirectory
Redirect permanent /olddirectory http://www.newdomain.com/newdirectory

Redirecting a whole site
You can use this code to redirect a whole site to a new domain:
Redirect 301 / http://www.newdomain.com/

RedirectMatch

You can use redirectmatch for some more complicated redirects. Let’s take a look at the previous example, where I used Redirect 301 to move a whole site. I you would go to http://www.olddomain.com/contact you would be redirect to http://www.newdomain.com/. So it doesn’t matter what you incoming page is, you would always be redirected to the homepage of the new domain. If you don’t want that to happen then you can use Redirectmatch to redirect your whole site. This code will redirect a visitor (or search engine) to the same file at the new domain:

RedirectMatch 301 ^(.*)$ http://www.newdomain.com/

Did this tutorial helped you? Please leave a comment and tell how this tutorial helped you.

How to make a .htaccess file

A .htaccess file is very easy to make. I always use Notepad to modify it. But you have to pay attention when you save the file. .htaccess is the extension of the file, not the name. The file must no be for example .htaccess.txt but just .htaccess . The .htaccess file must be uploaded to your root folder to make everything work.

Custom 404-error page

It is not hard to make you own custom 404-error page with .htaccess. First make a new file. This will be your error page. For example call it 404.html and place it in your root directory. There are loads of articles about “the perfect 404-page”. Some things include: adding a search box so people can search the site for what they were looking for, adding a e-mail adress to contact the webmaster, etc. There are nice articles about this on A List Apart and Coding Horror. This is what you have to place in your .htaccess file in our example:

ErrorDocument 404 /404.html

This is only the 404 error, but there are loads of errors that you can make custom pages for. A list:

• 302 – Redirect
• 400 – Bad Request
• 401 – Authorization Required
• 402 – Payment Required
• 403 – Forbidden
• 404 – File Not Found
• 405 – Method Not Allowed
• 406 – Not Acceptable
• 407 – Proxy Authentication Required
• 408 – Request Time-out
• 409 – Conflict
• 410 – Gone
• 411 – Length Required
• 412 – Precondition Failed
• 413 – Request Entity Too Large
• 414 – Request-URI Too Large
• 415 – Unsupported Media Type
• 500 – Internal Server Error
• 501 – Method Not Implemented
• 502 – Bad Gateway
• 503 – Service Temporarily Unavailable
• 504 – Gateway Time-out
• 505 – HTTP Version Not Supported

I’ll write more .htaccess tutorials soon.

The old version of this website was getting larger and larger and it was costing more and more of my time to edit and update it. So I decided to make a new start, this time with a CMS behind the scenes. This whole website is driven by wordpress. I keep wondering about all the functions and I bet a still have to discover a lot of them. Another benefit of Wordpress is that you can now respond and discuss about everything I post. I will be more interactive and I hope that will be a reason for more people to visit this site.

I also thought that a new start might need a new design, so I picked a nice Wordpress theme, HiddenBeauty from Zinruss Studio. I modified it for a time and here’s the result; the Onyx Wordpress Theme. I am still working on it, but I am getting somewhere.

Feel free to reply.

Edit 24 february 2008

A lot happened to this website in the last few weeks. I’ve added much more content (new articles, new pages) and features (like the shortcuts for social bookmarking websites). I also ended the bèta version of Onyx Design v.2. You will come to this site now when you go to www.onyx-design.net and the old version in now only viewable via: www.onyx-design.net/v1/

If you experience any problems with visiting this site, please let me know.