Brucified

The Flat Duo Jets

2008-10-26T08:46:00.004-06:00

Punk-a-billy at it’s absolute finest. This clip is from a longer documentary film about the rock music scene around Athens, Georgia circa the mid 1980’s.

And now, Dexter and Crow, the Flat Duo Jets…

Dexter Romweber's website is here. You can download free music and watch more videos there.

Get More Flat Duo Jets at Amazon.com

CSS Menus and Liquid Layouts

2008-10-19T11:02:00.005-06:00

Almost everything I know about CSS based web design, page layouts and CSS roll-over menus I learned from Max Design, an Australian web design and development business. Although I don’t usually use these techniques on my blogs, you can see examples of some of these techniques on my other web sites like donnapix.com, solamande.com and my main site brucekelly.com.

Max Design offers a series of simple, easy to understand, step-by-step tutorials on creating menus and page layouts. Here are a couple of links that I think you’ll find as useful as I have.

Sample CSS Page Layouts - Free to use and abuse as needed
Listamatic - The power of CSS when applied to a simple list

Creating a High-Traffic Blog

2008-10-09T11:04:00.006-06:00

I found a great article on building a high-traffic blog over at ProBlogger. It’s more of a macro (big picture) look at achieving mass traffic than a tutorial. It was written by Skellie of Skelliewag.org, another blog I’ll be adding to my favorite links.

...very highly trafficked single-author blogs are knocking the ball out of the park in at least two of the following three core areas:

* Search
* Social media
* Evangelism

The last one is a must. Waves of social media traffic come and go and search engine traffic can disappear with the next Google algorithm update. If readers evangelize your content, as they do for Steve Pavlina, Leo Babauta, Yaro Starak, and you have probably done for Darren Rowse (by recommending him to a friend, or linking to one of his articles with a glowing recommendation) you will find it difficult to receive anything but huge traffic.

You Can Read The Rest Here…

Paul Newman Dies

2008-09-27T21:20:00.003-06:00

As an actor, Newman got his start in theater and on television during the 1950s, and went on to become one of the world's most enduring and popular film stars, a legend held in awe by his peers. He was nominated for Academy Awards 10 times, winning one Oscar and two honorary ones, and had major roles in more than 50 motion pictures, including "Exodus," "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid," "The Verdict," "The Sting" and "Absence of Malice."

Newman worked with some of the greatest directors of the past half century, from Alfred Hitchcock and John Huston to Robert Altman, Martin Scorsese and the Coen brothers. His co-stars included Elizabeth Taylor, Lauren Bacall, Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks and, most famously, Robert Redford, his sidekick in "Butch Cassidy" and "The Sting."

"There is a point where feelings go beyond words," Redford said Saturday. "I have lost a real friend. My life — and this country — is better for his being in it."

Here's The Full Story and a Photo Gallery.

Happy Birthday Google!

2008-09-27T05:50:00.005-06:00

Happy Tenth Birthday Google! Thanks for making the internet a better and more profitable place for us little guys. And your even working on your birthday, there's a pagerank update going on right now. Here's to the next ten you crazy little... thing. Cheers!

Blog Search Engines

2008-09-25T21:02:00.006-06:00

I found an excellent post on Breaking Free about building website traffic. I'm not going to do everything Brian suggests but he did have an extensive list of blog search engines that I'll be submitting to over the course of the next several days. You can follow my progress by watching the little buttons appear at the bottom of the right hand column.

Update: There's a lot of dead wood in that list (note to self, make a new list).
Update: Here's another list I'll check out later.

Tweaking Windows Vista

2008-09-23T10:55:00.002-06:00

I've been using Windows Vista for about three months now. It came pre-installed on my Dell Inspiron 1525 laptop and to tell you the truth, in spite of all I've heard, I haven't had any problems with it. In fact I like it quite a bit, it's a nice looking OS if nothing else.

The only thing I can find against Vista is that uses a lot of memory, and the solution to that is more memory. I also found and highly recommend this excellent tutorial on tweaking Vista from TweakHound. Tweaking Windows Vista. TweakHound is "My Favorites" link three.

A Word to the Wise... Backup.

Smashing Magazine Bookmarks

2008-09-21T18:35:00.001-06:00

Smashing Magazine is the second link I'll add to my Favorites and to give you an example of why. Here's my current collection of SM bookmarks.

Freebies Round-Up: Icons, Buttons and Templates.
40 Creative Design Layouts: Getting Out Of The Box.
7 Principles Of Clean And Optimized CSS Code.
A Small Design Study Of Big Blogs Part 1 and Part 2.
How To Communicate Design Decisions To Clients.

And finally; 12 Classic Gary Busey Moments. I know, it's not Smashing Magazine, but I was digging around in my Bookmarks and I just couldn't help myself.

Optimizing Blogger's CSS

2008-09-19T19:11:00.001-06:00

If moving the CSS from your Blogger template to a seperate file is not an option here's another solution that may work for you. You can copy the CSS, compress it using an Online CSS Optimizer, and then paste the optimized CSS back into the template.

I got this idea from Amanda Fazani of Blogger Buster. For more details on this technique go to her site and subscribe to the feed. Within the feed you'll find a link to download her eBook. Fazani's "The Blogger Template Book" is an excellent resource for anyone wanting to customize a Blogger blog.

And with that Blogger Buster is going to be the first link I add to the New Brucified.

Relocating Blogger's CSS

2008-09-17T07:49:00.007-06:00

The first two things I do when starting a new, or modifying an existing Blogger blog is backup the original template and relocate the CSS (Cascading Style Sheet).

So lets backup. Go to your template and right click, select all, right click again and copy. Now open up a text editor like notepad and paste in the original template and save. Mine is named "originaltemplatebackup.txt." I create a folder on my computer named after my blog and use it to store important files like this.

I chose Minima as my template because both it and the accompanying CSS are the simplest and easiest to modify.

After you've saved a copy of the original go back to your template and at the top you'll see the start of the 'style' statement. It starts with this…

<style type="text/css">

And ends with this…

</style>

In between those two statements is an awful lot of CSS. We are going to rip it all out of there and relocate it into its own, separate file.

Why? I'll tell you in a minute, I'm on a roll.

Highlight everything between these two 'style' statements including the statements themselves, then right click, copy and then paste it all into your trusty text editor. Name this new text file "blogstitle.css." Mine is named "brucified.css."

Before you close your new blogstitle.css file be sure and remove the now useless <style type="text/css"> at the top and the closing </style> at the bottom of the text file. Save it in the folder on your computer named after your blog. You did create a folder on your computer named after your blog didn't you?

Now you may be asking, "What are we going to do with this shiny new CSS file?" In my case, because I host my blog on my own domain, I'm going to upload it into the root directory of Brucified via FTP using that most excellent Firefox extension FireFTP. If you don't have your own domain and you're using blogspot then you're going to have to find an alternative remote host. There are free hosts available where you can upload your CSS file and your blog can have access to it. Try here or here.

You can now delete all of the style information out of your blog template including those now useless <style> statements. Now you must tell your blog where it can find the style sheet information by putting this...

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://www.where-eva.com/ blogtitle.css" />

right after the <title> tags. Be sure and change the href location to point to your CSS file. Mine looks like this…

<head>
<title> <$BlogPageTitle$> </title>
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://www.brucified.com/brucified.css" />
<$BlogMetaData$>
</head>

And that's it, almost. During this process we removed Mr. Bowman's credit from the blog's template and it now resides in our CSS file. That's not a good thing for us or Mr. Bowman.

We can solve our problem by simply deleting the following from our "blogtitle.css" file…

/*
-----------------------------------------------
Blogger Template Style
Name: Minima
Designer: Douglas Bowman
URL: www.stopdesign.com
Date: 26 Feb 2004
----------------------------------------------- */

We have two choices for crediting Mr. Bowman for his work, and we should. We can re-include the credit in the head section of the template like this…



Or, as I like to do, give the guy a link in the footer like this…

Original Minima Blogger Template Design by <a href="http://www.stopdesign.com">Douglas Bowman</a> and soon to be heavily modified by Me.

Please notice that if you re-include the credit in the template (the first option) that you'll need to change the style comment identifiers from /* */ to markup language comment identifiers 

Now, back to the question "why?" Relocating the CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) information does two very important things for us. First, it makes your pages smaller and therefore faster. The CSS file will be cached on the client side (your visitor's browser cache) so it will be readily available if they decide to click around your blog, the information will not need to be downloaded from the server again.

The second and most important reason is that it reduces the code to content ratio of your blog's pages. The code is the necessary markup the user's browser needs to properly display your page. The content is the all important writing you want your visitors to see and the search engine spiders to index. A low code to content ratio will improve your search engine placement.

If you have problems pulling this off leave me comment and I'll try to help you out. Be sure to post your blogs URL (Uniform Resource Locator).

If this technique doesn't work for you because your blog is hosted on Google's Blogspot or you just can't find a place to host your CSS file, fear not. In my next post I'll have an alternative way to optimize Blogger's CSS that will work for you.

Welcome to The New Brucified

2008-09-17T04:21:00.000-06:00

Welcome to the new Brucified. I have decided to transform this blog from it's formerly political self into something a little more personal. Since I am, for the most part, a webmaster I’ll be blogging mostly about being a webmaster. No big surprise there, but I also hope to include an occasional little something on what it really means to be, as I am, Brucified.

Along the way I will provide you with some tips that will make your website or blog better, faster and more fun. I’ll be writing about modifying Google’s Blogger, search engine optimization, getting traffic, building websites, making money, computers and some of the techniques I've learned in my over 10 years as a webmaster plus whatever else I think will be informative or at least entertaining.

And I’m going to start right now by explaining...

Why I Chose Google’s Blogger.

1. Blogger is simple. Most people can get the hang of Google’s blog platform quickly. The downside to this simplicity is that Blogger is often accused of not being as customizable or robust as some of the other blogging platforms. That’s a problem I think I can solve.

2. It’s Google (dammit!). Today Google is the most popular search engine in the world. That may and probably will change, but today is today and to get traffic to our sites we have to respect Google’s dominance in search. I use Blogger because I believe it helps me get into Google’s SERPs (search engine results pages). Although I have absolutely no proof of this, I am sure that using Blogger will not hurt my efforts to get my blog noticed.

3. I’m familiar with Blogger. While that’s not a good reason for you to use Blogger it may be a good reason to stay with whatever blogging platform you are most familiar with if you already have a blog. My posts specifically about Blogger may not be relevant in your case, but I do have something to say on the many other issues you’ll encounter running a website or blog.

So hang out, and hang on because the next post is coming right up.