So I have just received my new toy. It is a electric monitor buy CurrentCost, I selected this monitor over the others on the market as it out puts an XML data stream. I am hopping to capture this data and publish it to the web.

First impressions of the monitor and the packaging it comes in are very good. It looks like a nice piece of kit. In the box you have the clamp, transmitter, monitor unit and power pack. I also got an extra clamp and a USB data cable.

This video by current cost will give you a better idea of the product (note this is the first generation I have the new cc128):-

So I will be setting up the unit and plugin into my CP with the hope of getting all that lovely data. I will update you to how it goes.

I have given the blog a new look, working on wordpress.com is quite limiting with regards to design. But I have not got the time at the moment to design a wordpress.org blog (no point in using templates if you are using .org). So for now I am still on wordpress.com and have gone for the ‘ChaosTheory’ template.

Let me know your thoughts on this template, I think it is cleaner than the old one. Also I big plus is the extra width of the main column.

blogcatalog1

I have added Smellypunks.wordpress.com to blogCatalog so you can find and follow there if you like.

Technology Blogs - BlogCatalog Blog Directory

So every time I start a new development I grab the standard templates and resets and get going. Now the other day I was out and about without my flashdrive and so had to hunt around for some templates rather then code up from scratch. In the end it took me 15 minutes to find what I was looking for and so saved me every little time if any.

So I thought for future reference I would add some basic templates to my blog so I can find them easily if I am caught short in the future. Hope you can make some good use of them.

Generic XHTML template

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en"> <head> <title></title> <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8" /> <link rel="stylesheet" href="styles.css" type="text/css" media="screen" /> <script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script> <!-- google hosted --> <script type="text/javascript" src="common.js"></script> </head> <body> <div id="container"> <div id="header"> </div> <div id="wrapper"> <div id="main"> </div> </div> <div id="footer"> </div> </div> </body> </html>

CSS template with Eric Meyer’s Reset

/* index -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- */ /* * Filename: style.css * Description: global CSS (master) * Version: 1.0.0 (YYYY-MM-DD) * Website: website-url * Author: authorname == STRUCTURE ============================================================================ * Page width: 990 px * Number of columns: 1 */ /* colorscheme --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- */ /* white (bg): #fff grey (intro text): #333 grey (h3 headlines +contact bg) #a3a3a3 black (text): #000 red (link active): #670001 dark red (link hover + visited): #431611 */ /* Browser CSS-Reset --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- */ /* Eric Meyer's Reset Reloaded */ /* http://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2007/05/01/reset-reloaded/ */ html, body, div, span, applet, object, iframe, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, p, blockquote, pre, a, abbr, acronym, address, big, cite, code, del, dfn, em, font, img, ins, kbd, q, s, samp, small, strike, strong, sub, sup, tt, var, dl, dt, dd, ol, ul, li, fieldset, form, label, legend, table, caption, tbody, tfoot, thead, tr, th, td { margin: 0; padding: 0; border: 0; outline: 0; font-weight: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-size: 100%; font-family: inherit; vertical-align: baseline; } /* remember to define focus styles! */ :focus {outline: 0;} body { line-height: 1; color: white; background: black; } ol, ul {list-style: none;} /* tables still need 'cellspacing="0"' in the markup */ table {border-collapse: separate; border-spacing: 0;} caption, th, td {text-align: left; font-weight: normal;} blockquote:before, blockquote:after, q:before, q:after {content: "";} blockquote, q {quotes: "" "";} /* images and linked images without border */ img, a img {border: 0;} /* globals --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- */ html {background: #fff;} body { background: #fff url(image.jpg) no-repeat left top; color: #000; display: table; font-size: 100%; /* reduces the body text from the 16px default (common to most browsers and OS set-ups) down to the 12px. */ width: 100%; /* This rule is primarily there for Internet Explorer 6 and below on Windows */ } html>body { font-size: 16px; /* sets the text size specifically and is ignored by IE6, but used by Firefox, Safari, IE7, Opera */ } a { border-bottom: 1px solid #670001; padding-bottom: 1px; text-decoration: none; } a:link, a:visited {color: #670001;} a:hover { background: #431611; border-bottom: 0; color: #fff; } /* Typography --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- */ p { font: 1em/1.75em Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; margin: 0; text-indent:0; } p+p {text-indent:2em;} .first {text-indent: 0;} h1 { border-bottom: 1px dotted #a3a3a3; font: 3em/1em "Baskerville", "Linotype Palatino", Times, Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-style: italic; font-weight: bold; margin-top: 80px; margin-left: 310px; margin-bottom: 1em; padding:0 30px 30px 20px; } h2 { font: 2.5em/1.75em Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; margin-top: 1em; margin-bottom: 0em; } h3 { color: #a3a3a3; font: 1.88em/0.934em Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif; margin-top: 1.068em; margin-bottom: 0em; } h4 { color: #fff; font: 2em/1.5em "Baskerville", "Linotype Palatino", Times, Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-style: italic; } h5 {color: #ccc; font: 1.25em/1.75em Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif;} .amp { font: 1em/1em "Baskerville", "Linotype Palatino", Times, Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif; font-style: italic; } /* use the best Ampersand */ /* layout elements --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- */ /* wrapper */ /* nav */ /* content */ /* footer */ /* end of this stylesheet -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- */

google-SERP-heat-mapclickdensitycrazyegg1CrazyEgg_heat-map

Two years back I was at Adobe live in a lecture about the changing internet. During what was an excellent talk I was introduced to the idea of heatmaps. They are a way of showing traffic trends via mouse movement and clicks. For me they are clearly a great tool for showing hotspots.

Recently I was reading a blog on a similar subject and it reminded me of heatmaps. I have been doing some searching and found an interesting article here which talks about how times are changing with regards to how people use google, they use a heatmap very interesting have a read.

How to use them

So I thought how do I use a heatmap, they are so handy I want to use one for my blogs. Searching around I have found some solutions:-

 

http://www.clickdensity.com/

these guys work on the first 5000 clicks being free and then you pay £2.50 – £1000 depending on the quality of clicks required.

 

http://crazyegg.com/

Crazyegg offer more than just heatmaps they do full stats. They charge from $9 to $99 depending on the quality of clicks needed.

 

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4779

I found this add-on which is now out of date but maybe it will get updated.

 

http://www.feng-gui.com/

Feng-GUI creates a heatmap of your website of an image and delineates which areas get the maximum attention. You can either enter your web page address or upload an image and make a heatmap in a few seconds.

 

http://nevyan.blogspot.com/2006/12/free-website-click-heatmap-diy.html

this site has a DIY solution to heatmaps.

 

http://blog.corunet.com/english/the-definitive-heatmap

Another solution for the coders out there.

Bellow are some examples of heat maps I found on the web.

I will look to test some of the service above and repost when I can give you more info on the subject.

f_reading_pattern_eyetracking2

google-SERP-heat-map

banner-and-button-template-graphic

So I have been using an .ai tempalte when desiging banners and buttons. It saves me time thinking about sizes and drawing out the shapes. Thought I would make it available for you to download.

So hotmail stopped popping to thunderbird the other day. The solution I found is:-

1. Ask thunderbird to create a new email account (not a web mail just a basic email account)

2. Put in your hotmail address, set the pop3 to pop3.live.com

3. In the server settings go to security settings and click the SSL box (make use the use secure auth box is NOT clicked). This will game the portto 995.

4. Restart thunderbird

Just about everybody these days has more than one email account, usually more than can be counted on one hand. Personally, I have 5+ accounts with different email service providers, including Yahoo, Gmail, Cox, my office email address, my website email, etc, etc. Currently, I use Outlook to check all of my accounts from one client application since it makes it easier to manage.

If you’re ok with Outlook, then there’s not a problem. However, if you prefer to use Gmail for everything since it’s web-based and therefore not tied down to one computer like Outlook, then you might be interested in knowing how to setup all of your email accounts in Gmail so you can receive all emails via your Google Inbox. Read More »

So I thought we would have a little poll, hate em or love em you need them so which OS is your fav?

This problem relates to the use of texter on vista systems. So after three weeks of pulling my hair out shouting at Vista, banning the keyboard, trying to fix, trying to live with just trying not to put the computer through the window. Finally today I have solved the problem.

The problem:- The keyboard was not functioning correctly on my vista system, shortcuts (hotkeys) did not work, some keys did not work, life was hell!

The cause of the problem:- texter (great little free application that I discovered on lifehacker) http://lifehacker.com/software/texter/lifehacker-code-texter-windows-238306.php

The solution:- Uninstall texter. Now to do this you will need to delete the texter folder in c:\programs. But before you delete the texter folder make sure the program is not active.