e-tips feed

Caution. Non-discoverable and irretrieveable Tags with Yola blogs

March 26, 2010

Despite the fact that Yola denies this is a problem and it doesn't occur I can guarantee that it does.

There are a couple of aspects of this:

Misstyped ' or " in a Tag will be added as typed and will be displayed in the Tag list. Similarly non-Roman Characters will be added and displayed. An expample would be the +, the - and the / characters. They cannot be searched for.

Subsequently doing a search on Tags containing these characters will not produce a result. The displayed results will simply state there are no Tags with "". It seems as if the accepted characters are invalid within the ability of the Yola blog recovery process. This is not highlighted in any note or instruction anywhere. In fact Yola state that it is not a problem and that these can be recovered as any normal Tag.

These characters until recently were valid.

The next issue is removing these characters. You have to go through each record one by one to find these invalid tags, and manually remove them. Quite a tedious process for 600 or more records.

Posted by Kroocrew. Posted In : Tags

Issues with Anchors in Yola blog posts.

January 18, 2010

Setting multiple anchors in a blog post may show a problem.

The problem apparent is that it seems to jump out of the current post and out to the route page of the blog. There it sits…. Forever!

Contact with Kershnee at Yola Support resulted in a solution. It appears that the blog setup uses a "base ref" tag. Thus

<base href="http://{www.example.com}/{app}.php" />

An article reference that Kershnee gave me explained the effect of this:
Ref: http://www.ilikespam.com/blog/using-base-href-with-anc...
Continue reading...

Posted by Santhawat Srikhamthae. Posted In : Functional issue

Adding a banner to Yola blog posts

November 18, 2009

The addition of images to blog posts is a great way of enhancing noticeability and particularly if you are using your blog to market and advertise products. A picture.......
The RSS facility associated with yola blogs transmits images faithfully and completely without degradation. It's a great feature.

There is another way also to add images to blog posts. This method allows automatic insertion in every post. It is only seen if someone clicks the post so there is no "fatigue" aspect of monotony...
Continue reading...

Posted by Santhawat Srikhamthae. Posted In : blog banner

Talking about duplicate content on my website.

November 4, 2009

Is this a formal definition? Does duplication harm my site noticeability? Should I do something about it?

The same material published two or more times on the one website is at least duplication. A single small paragraph, statement or diagram is not considered a problem but entire articles, lists, extracts of tables are. Duplication hinders categorising websites for the sake of various indexation , ranking etc.

At the moment duplication is not doing any harm to your site. The strategies are bei...
Continue reading...

Posted by Santhawat Srikhamthae. Posted In : Duplicate content

Subscribing to the "feeds" on this site

November 4, 2009

RSS has been promoted as the hands off method for subscribing to all feeds. It's a once only process and thereafter you don't need to do anyhting to keep it functioning. RSS subscription has been advocated for the last few years with the knowledge that it will become part of the status quo very quickly.

But there's a hold-up. People are not subscribing through RSS as much as presumed. The reason given is that it is too complex to set up. Many have tried to simplify the process and give good e...
Continue reading...

Posted by Santhawat Srikhamthae. Posted In : Subscribing

A clear process for adding attribution to images

October 15, 2009

With the generosity of subscribers to Flickr for example who allow others to use their images free of charge, we users have a huge resource of excellent images at our finger tips.
The only requirement is compliance with the conditions of the CC license and attribution or referencing the creators work back to them somehow.

It maybe easiest to show the information that is associated with each CC licensed image and work from there.

This image has been taken from Flickr. I simply searched on "Japan...
Continue reading...

Posted by Kroocrew. Posted In : Licensed images

Adding Creative Commons images to your Yola blog.

October 5, 2009

The variety and quality of images on Flickr is amazing. The search to find a topic or a specific field is now very accurate which is great for the person who wishes to use licensed copies for their own website.

I have found in many cases the quality of the images on Flickr is superior to the commercial royalty free sources. The images have a look of spontaneity and freshness. Generally there are at least a few to choose from and the selection of Creative Commons images is easy.

This really is ...
Continue reading...

Posted by Kroocrew. Posted In : Licensed images

Installing a customised RSS feedbutton (RSS chicklet) onto your site.

September 18, 2009

Yola for example have an RSS chicklet available on any "blog" page and simply by clicking and dragging this chicklet onto your page, the RSS subscription button or chicklet is installed, configured and ready to go as soon as you re-publish (update) your site.

The chicklet supplied is a recommended standard RSS chicklet and is instantly recognisable. Fortunately the concentric three wave lines have been adopted by many RSS chicklet designers as the central theme for the myriad of cutomised icon...

Posted by Kroocrew. Posted In : Setting up a subscription

Support the new user subscribing to your RSS feed.

September 9, 2009

For the initiated it almost seems intuitive and a funny question t ask. For the vast majority of new users, subscribing to an RSS feed is confusing,frustrating and difficult to understand.

It really is a round about process and poorly designed. Questions from a potential subscriber usually hit in two waves. "What is this RSS? "and "when I click the RSS button I get redirected back to the page" or "I can see a lot of unformatted text."

The process is not about to change in the immediate future ...
Continue reading...

Posted by Kroocrew. Posted In : Subscribing

Spreading the message: Tweetmeme

August 2, 2009

Casey STUBBS has suggested that I add the Re-Tweet function as an option into the Comments section of the blog posts. It is a very wise and "on the mark" recommendation and I thank him for this.

So now we have a method for doing this also. The process is following on from the previous post and simply adding a couple of lines of script into the Settings section of the DISQUS enabled section.

The reference for the script is here: Tweetmeme Help.