I decided I’m going to send out invites to 3 of my blog readers, all you need to do is drop a comment, post a blog about this post, or link back to my blog. Be very creative about it. I’ll pick the winners this weekend and I’ll email you personally to let you know I chose you.

I haven’t had time to fully dig into Wave but this looks like it will forever change the way we exchange emails.

Tip 1
Clear out the default padding and margin settings before you start working.
Different browsers have different default margin and padding sizes so you want to start with a clean slate, so to speak. Use this command:

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* {
margin: 0; 
padding: 0;
border: 0
}

to clear all default margin and padding settings. Also note the border, which is set to 0. Please note that if you do this, you will also get rid of the pesky purple border round click-able images, although some people argue that the purple border is necessary for accessibility and usability. But lots of people do not like the purple border round images, and this is one way that you can get rid of it in one fell swoop without having to set img border=0 for each image (which is against the strict markup rules in any case).

Tip 2
To center your layout, use a container div to contain all your content
Declare it as follows:

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#container{
margin: 0 auto;
width: xxxpx
}

There are a couple of points here to take note of. DO NOT declare the width to be 100%. This defeats the whole object since you will just have to declare the sub elements within the container and then center THEM using margin : 0 auto. This is VERY BAD since it means that instead of declaring the central layout once, you will have to declare it in multiple places for each element within your container.

Tip 3
Work from the top down
Literally start working on your CSS layout starting from the top most elements in your design, as well as the ‘top’ elements in your HTML, such as the body, as well as your main containers.

Declare your CSS commands on the highest level possible and try and declare something once only and let it cascade throughout. Only override the commands at a lower level when strictly necessary. This prevents a verbose CSS file that is difficult to maintain and understand. For example, if you have { margin : 0 auto} settings on each and every sub div within your container – you are in trouble.

Tip 4
Document what you are doing and use Firebug and the Firefox browser to debug
You are not writing your CSS code just for yourself, some day some poor sod will have to debug it. Make numerous comments inside your CSS file to explain why you are doing things in a specific way.

Fitting in with this, you might find yourself having to fix someone else’s CSS more often than you think (or even your own, for that matter). Use the Firebug add-on for Firefox to debug your CSS. This is a life-saver with regards to giving you an insight into exactly where your design might be broken and why.

The only problem with this is that your design might work perfectly in Firefox, but not in IE5, IE6 or IE7. This brings us to the next tip.

Tip 5
Decide which browsers you are going to build your CSS for and test from the start
Some purists insist on making sure that your website work for all possible browsers, others only make it work for the ‘major’ browsers. How do you know exactly which browsers are used the most? Once again W3 Schools come to the rescue.

On the following page, you can see which browsers are the most popular: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp. From this page you can see that something like IE5 is only used by about 1.1% of browsers. It is up to you whether you consider it worthwhile to build your CSS to be compatible with this browser, or whether you are just going to test your compatibility with IE6, IE7 and Firefox, for example. Whatever you do, when you start building your CSS, start from the top, and test each and every setting in each of the browsers as you go along. There is nothing worse than building a perfect website in Firefox, then finding out right after you have coded a 1000 line css file that it is broken in IE6. To then debug and fix your code after the fact is a nightmare.

Tip 6
Here is an embarrassing little tip for fixing your CSS in IE6 or IE7
Let’s say your design works perfectly in Firefox, but is broken in IE6. You cannot use Firebug to determine where the problem might be since it WORKS in Firefox. You do not have the luxury of using Firebug in IE6, so how do you debug an IE6 or IE7 stylesheet? I often found that it helps to add {border : 1 px solid red} or {border : 1 px solid purple} to the problematic elements. This way you can often see why certain elements do not fit into the space available. It is an embarrassing little tip since it is so primitive and simple, but it works!

Tip 7
Understand floats
Floating of elements is essential to understand, especially in the context of getting your floated elements to work in the different browsers!

Basically elements such as divs are floated to the left or the right (never to the top or the bottom, only sideways). Here are a couple of things to take into consideration with floated elements. Each floated element must have an explicit width specified. If you are making use of floated divs to create a 3 column or a 2 column layout, rather specify the widths in terms of percentages rather than fixed widths, and if you do use percentages, make sure that the percentages do not add up to 100%, this will often cause the right most column to drop below the rest, clearly indicating that you are trying to fit something into the available space that is too wide for it. Rather use percentages that add up to slightly below 100%, such as 25%, 49%, 24% for a left column, middle column and right column.

Floating elements can be extremely complex to understand and it is worth while to spend some time on good sites that provide specific guidelines and tips, such as the Position Is Everything website.

Conclusion
These CSS tips for layout should hopefully save you some time and effort when you next have to panel-beat a table-less design into submission!

Article By: Christine Anderssen
Christine Anderssen is the owner of Tailormade4you, a web design and hosting company in South Africa, catering for small business website owners. Visit our site on www.tm4y.co.za/10-strategies.html to download your free guide on how to make your website really work for you and bring in more customers to your business.

Who is it for?

KPMRS is a perfect SEO tool developed by SEO professionals for fellow SEO professionals, search engine marketers and website owners. We understand how important it is to know where your website ranks in various search engines. We felt the need, we provided the solution!

Features

Get Email Alerts
Receive email notifications whenever your website rankings change. See a sample here.

Identify Social Popularity
Find out how popular is your site on social media websites like twitter, delecious, technorati, stumbleupon, yahoo etc . See a sample here.

Share On Facebook
Share your rankings with your friends and groups on Facebook. See how it will look here.

Get Weekly Report
Receive detailed reports of how your rankings have changed in the last week. See a sample here.

Check Back Links
Know the number of websites linking back to your website. See a sample here.

View Graphical Charts
Trendy Flash Charts to show your search engine rankings between any two dates. See a demo.

Export & Print Rankings
Export & Print your reports in excel or csv formats. See a Sample.

[ Visit the KPMRS blog » ]

While this is a great way to promote your blog posts, the buttons do not serve a purpose if you simply have an announcement to make on a post.

It would be great if we can turn the option on and off as needed, right?. Well by using WordPress’ custom fields and a little bit of PHP coding, we can display or not display these social media icons.

Let’s get to it

Step 1 – Download the SexyBookmarks plugin, upload it into your plugins folder and activate it.

Step 2 – Go into the plugin settings and modify the settings. You can reorder the icons by clicking and dragging. Check mark the ones you want to display.

In the Placement option, select Manually Insert.

Step 3 – Go into your Themes folder and find single.php. Open the file and locate The following code:

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<?php the_title(); ?>

The above code displays the title of your blog post. If you want the social media icons to appear right above title, then copy the code below and place it before the title.

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<?php if(get_post_meta($post->ID, "socialmedia", true)){ 
     if(function_exists('selfserv_sexy')) { selfserv_sexy(); }
} ?>

If you want the plugin to display at the bottom of your post, then paste the above code right after:

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<?php the_content(); ?>

Step 4 – In the Admin panel, open up one of your posts or create a new one. Scroll down to the Custom Fields section, click Enter New, name it socialmedia and give it a value of 1 or yes or whatever value you prefer, it really doesn’t matter as long as you input a value in there. Click the Add Custom field button to save it. You should now see a custom field called social media with a value of 1 or whatever value you chose.

From now on whenever you want to display your social media icons, simply scroll down to the Custom Fields section, click on the name drop-down, select socialmedia and give it any value.

Benefits of Reseller Hosting – Another Middleman?

Yes, a reseller is essentially another middleman, and typically there are more fees when a middleman is involved. Depending on who you ask, you will have varying opinions about the benefits of a reseller. If you are looking to save money, then a reseller would not be in your best interest. If you want to put less effort and just get your site up and running then a reseller would be better. It is fairly easy to go to a hosting company yourself. Today hosting companies make it quite simple to set things up. You can usually select a hosting option when you purchase your domain name. It is also possible that the folks you are getting your hosting from are themselves resellers and you just don’t know it. Many upstart hosting companies are resellers, as it is a common way to break into the business. A reseller is just taking an allotted amount of drive space and bandwidth and redistributing it. It is possible for them to redistribute a smaller portion to individuals or companies that do not need that much space and bandwidth.

Benefits Of Reseller Hosting – Are You Already Working With a Reseller?

If you suspect your current hosting service is a reseller just ask them. It’s possible they are just working on behalf of a web hosting company as well and just getting a cut of whatever business they bring to the hosting company. In any case, you may want to identify which hosting company the reseller works for and find out where the bandwidth is really coming from. You may want to consider approaching the original hosting company to see if there are lower prices available. Also, consider where you will go if there is a problem. Will need to contact the reseller or the web hosting company itself? Does the reseller provide the same support and remedies in the event something goes wrong? Maybe they can provide more support if they are not some large company where you call for support and are on hold for days on end. For those getting into the online business it is certainly worth investigating and keeping in mind when seeking hosting services.

This instruction applies to iPhone firmware 3.0 only:

Step 1 – Go to Settings

Step 2 – Tap Mail, Contacts, Calendars

Step 3 – Tap Add Account

Step 4 – Select Microsoft Exchange

Step 5 – In the Email field, enter your full GMail address (name@gmail.com)

Step 6 – Leave the Domain field blank

Step 7 – Username is your full GMail account

Step 8 – Password is your GMail password….duhhh!

Step 9 – Tap Next at the very top (choose Accept if the Unable to Verify Certificate dialog appears)

Step 10 -  You will see a field called Server, enter m.google.com

Step 11 – Tap Next at the very top

Step 12 – Select the Google services you want to sync. Currently only Contacts and Calendar are supported

Step 13 – Unless you want to delete all the existing Contacts and Calendars on your phone, select the Keep on my iPhone option when prompted. This will also allow you to keep syncing with your computer via iTunes.

Step 14 – REJOICE!!!

Google Sync is now set for your iPhone. Synchronization will begin automatically if you have Push enabled on your phone. You can also open the Calendar or Contacts app and wait a few seconds to start a sync.

With a little help, a vast majority of computer errors can be solved by users . This help includes information and tools that are easily available on the internet today. Once you have the knowledge and necessary software tools, you can easily resolve many such errors.

The objective of this article is to help you resolve a common PC problem known as DLL errors.

The first step in resolving the problem is to understand the nature and function of DLL files. DLL is a short name for Dynamic Link Library. These are important files in your operating system and programs to save codes that can be dynamically called loaded on the system by multiple programs when they need to use them. So, instead of all programs using different files to perform the same task, they can share one DLL file that can perform the task for each of them. This helps your computer achieve optimal performance and puts minimal burden on system resources.

Some of the common DLL files that are known to generate errors for various reasons on your PC are msvcr80.dll, ntdll.dll and xvidcore.dll. The main reasons why these DLL errors occur include:

1. You accidentally remove a DLL file that is critical for other applications.
2. You install a program that includes an invalid DLL file.
3. Your hard disk has problems that may corrupt one or more DLL files.
4. You unknowingly overwrite a good DLL file with another file that is either incompatible with existing computer applications or is corrupt.
5. Your computer is infected with a virus and other malware that are known to make changes in registry and program files to generate DLL and other computer errors.

While you can try to prevent DLL errors from happening by installing anti-malware and taking care of above mentioned reasons, sometimes these errors can be simply unavoidable. So, you must also be aware of the ways to resolve them.

The first method is to search for the file that has developed the error on the web. When you locate the correct file, you must replace the file on your system with this new file. Most of the time, this action should solve your problems.

The second method is to use the utility provided in your operating system – System Restore. This will restore your system to the time prior to when the error occurred. This can be performed in Safe mode in case the DLL error is serious and does not let you start your system.

Lastly, in case the DLL error happens during an installation of a new program, you must immediately uninstall that program and observe if the error vanishes. If it does, you must seek support from the program manufacturer.

The downside of these EXE files is that they are present in large numbers on all PCs. This large quantity of files on a single system increases the chances of one or more of them becoming corrupt, infected, or generating conflict with other files. All these issues then manifest in the form of errors with different symptoms. Out of these, EXE startup issues and errors are quite common.

Before learning how to troubleshoot, let’s see why startup errors occur. Some of the common causes of startup errors are hardware failure, bad driver files, problems with hard disk volumes, incorrect system configuration, and virus infections. You may also encounter slow startup problems if you have a large number of unwanted files running on your computer.

If your computer encounters a hardware failure, bad hard disk volumes, and bad files and drivers, it may fail to even load your operating system. At times, your system may halt, perform a physical memory dump and display a stop error message on a blue screen. This error message may display a code that you can use to search for a solution. However, as your PC may fail to boot, you may need to do this on another computer.

Virus infections may also cause startup issues. Depending on the type of infections, some viruses may enable you to start your PC and load the operating system, and some may prevent it from booting. In this case, you must first try to start your PC in Safe mode. If it starts, you may use an antivirus utility that works in Safe mode and then scan and clean viruses from it. If your PC fails to boot even in Safe mode, then you may start your PC in DOS mode. On Windows XP and above with NTFS partitions, you may need to start the Recovery Console. From here, you may run a DOS-based antivirus tool to scan and clean your PC.

You may encounter slow startup problems by unwanted files, such as osa.exe. These processes load at system startup but are rarely used. To disable osa.exe on startup, you may use the System Configuration Utility that comes built-in with Windows. You may use this utility to disable all programs that you don’t want to load at startup. However, you need to be careful while doing these tasks because some of the processes that load at startup are essential Windows processes and must not be disabled.

Bad drivers may also result in startup problems. For example, a spoolsv.exe problem may occur if your printer driver is corrupt or outdated. To resolve bad driver problems, you may use the Device Manager utility to identify the hardware that is generating the error, uninstall its driver and then reinstall it to replace the damaged files. If the error is caused due to outdated driver files, you may download the latest updates from the driver manufacturer’s website and then install them to repair the error. To prevent driver problems and to ensure that your drivers are always up-to-date, you may use a good driver scanner tool that can do these tasks for you automatically.

In the end, to prevent startup issues, it is imperative for you to manage a compact and error-free registry. These tasks become quite easy with the help of a handy registry cleaner tool.

The Windows registry is similar to the central nervous system of your body. It contains important information related to the settings and configuration of your operating system, software, hardware and user profiles and must be referred to each and every time an action occurs on your Windows PC. This is the reason why, all Windows computers are totally dependent on the registry to perform their normal functions. Extensive data is added and deleted from the registry while your computer is working. This extensive use of the registry causes it to become easily cluttered and vulnerable to computer errors.

Most of the clutter in the registry is caused by outdated, no-longer-required, empty, and invalid registry entries that cause the registry to increase in size at an unwarranted rate. Some of the common causes of unwanted entries in the registry are:

• Installation of buggy programs that may even add malicious spyware and adware related entries.
• System crashes.
• Incorrect program removal or a failed installation/uninstallation.
• Faulty hardware devices and their drivers.
• Virus infections.

Many computer errors, such as the svchost.exe error, werfault.exe error, and hkcmd.exe error are generated when one or more of the required registry entries are damaged or corrupt. To repair these errors, you may need to resolve the issues with related registry entries. For example, you can disable werfault.exe by making changes to the registry entries related to it.

Your Windows PC comes with a built-in Registry Editor (regedit) tool that you can use to perform some amount of registry maintenance. However, this tool is difficult to use and many novice and even expert users try to avoid using the Registry Editor to perform registry maintenance on a regular basis.

However, because it is essential to keep your registry clean in order to prevent computer errors, you need to search for a solution. One of the most commonly used solutions for registry errors is to use a reliable third-party registry cleaner tool.

There are several advantages to using a registry tool to perform registry maintenance. Some of the top ones are listed below.

• Registry cleaners have a simple-to-understand user interface that even novice users can use to perform registry maintenance.
• These tools use complex algorithms to perform a thorough scan and clean up of the registry.
• You can use these tools to remove left-over orphan entries when you uninstall programs to ensure complete removal.
• Registry cleaners can scan and remove manually irremovable embedded spyware entries to ensure complete removal of spyware from your computer.
• With the help of an advanced registry tool, you can defrag the registry database to make it contiguous and compact.
• Registry tools make it easy to maintain registry backups that are quite useful in restoring your PC if the current registry crashes due to some problem.

It was great in the beginning but as it becomes over-saturated with users I’m seeing more and more non-sense Tweets…

For all the Twitter newbies out there, there are just things you should not Tweet about:

1 – You don’t have to tweet about every single second of your boring life.

2 – Most users don’t really care if your dog got hit by a car and lost one of its legs.

3 – Don’t ask what you should eat for breakfast, lunch or dinner.

4 – Leave your depression state of mind out of Twitter.

5 – Don’t ask what you should wear today.

6 – Don’t Twitpic yourself asking if you look OK today.

7 – Don’t send out a link to your favorite porn site.

8 – No more Rick-rolling please…it’s gotten quite old!

9 – Avoid 1, 2, or 3 word Tweets, we have no idea what you mean.

10 – Stop bitchin’ about how slow Twitter has been.

11 – I get it, you’re coffee was too strong, no need to Tweet about it.

Follow me at www.twitter.com/JONxBLAZE.