Tutorial/How-To, Useful Tools »

While thinking about the article I wrote yesterday (Content Theft: Die Splog Die), I came across an interesting article about how to deter image theft, or hotlinking. Hotlinking is when a website links directly to the images stored on your server. Not only is this stealing your image, but it is stealing bandwidth that you are paying for.

Spam websites that are stealing your content are usually also stealing your images. So in addition to the copyright notice that I’ve placed in the RSS and email feeds, I’ve decided to deter image hotlinking as well. This is done by editing your site’s .htaccess file to only load images when referred from your website (or other websites…

Tutorial/How-To »

WordPress users commonly use the built-in permalink redirection. This means that rather then having your new blog article’s URL look like “http://myblog.com/?p=78″, you make it look like this: “http://myblog.com/articles/my-article-title.” This feature means WordPress interprets the URL query of your blog and outputs the corresponding article.

This is great for readability and SEO, but what if you want to add a non-WordPress subfolder to your website with, say, a forum in it? If you make your forum address “http://myblog.com/forum/”, WordPress will try to interpret this URL. Not being able to find anything, you will get your blog’s 404 error page. Luckily, fixing this is easy.

If you are running on an Apache server, using a simple .htaccess file is…

Tutorial/How-To, Useful Tools »

Typically, I’m not a huge image gallery fan. However, when they’re presented right they can truly show off one’s photo album in an artistic way. There are plenty of scripts out there that that use javascript or ajax to create spectacular image gallery effects. CSS Image Gallery from Dynamic Drive, however, uses purely CSS to achieve similar effects. What’s the big deal? By using only CSS, the image gallery is much more versatile in its usage and isn’t effected by users who beef up the security of their browser by disabling javascript. Even more, the gallery looks darn good, too.

CSS Image Gallery

Tutorial presented by Simply-Basic.com
Coded by Dynamic Drive
URL/Demo: http://www.dynamicdrive.com/style/csslibrary/item/css-image-gallery/

This code lets you create a gallery of thumbnailed images that…

Tutorial/How-To, Useful Tools »

At the start of this year, I stated that one of my goals for 2008 was to create a mobile friendly version of Simply-Basic.com. Well, January isn’t even over, and I’m proud to say I’ve fulfilled my goal! Simply-Basic is now mobile device friendly. When you point your mobile device to the blog, it recognizes it automatically and displays a simpler, mobile friendly version.

Why make a mobile version? With the growth of mobile devices that are Wi-Fi enabled, it is becoming more and more essential to have your website accessible to mobile users. I often read blogs on my phone that runs Windows Mobile 6. Sites like Gmail and CNN automatically redirect the browser to a…

Announcements, Tutorial/How-To »

The past few days I’ve been debating on the best way to have a mini-feed in the sidebar of my blog. Really, I’ve been looking for a way to better let you guys keep track of what I’m doing, interesting things I’ve found, and things like that. Well, I’ve finally come up with a plan! I signed up for a Twitter account today. I’ve never used Twitter before. Actually, I’ve been pretty skeptical about it’s value in the past. But after looking at some of the alternatives, it seems like an easy way up have a short area in the sidebar that I can use to post short snippets. You can see my updates in the…

Tutorial/How-To »

Edit: While switching hosts the subdomain I created for the test of the following script didn’t transfer. I’ll try and get them back in the next few days so that you can see a live example of this script.

Something that my regular readers have come to learn is that I am not a professional coder. Everything that I do is because I’ve set out and learned it on my own. I don’t do it for a job, just for my own education. My latest “educational” dabble was using Iframes. Iframes have lost a lot of appeal and are deprecated in XHTML Strict. Nevertheless, there are still many people who use them.

For those who aren’t familiar,…