Blogging and Websites

Free Weather Widgets

Visit my website, check out the weather in your neck of the woods, and then add a weather widget to your blog or website. Yesterday I located five websites that offer free, unique weather widgets that come in many shapes, sizes and styles. 

AccuWeather.com – In addition to the embedable weather widgets, Accuweather offers the weather via e-mail alerts, twitter, tumblr, web browser extensions and desktop widgets.  The widgets are available in multiple themes and nine different sizes for more than 3 million locations around the world and come in both English and Spanish.

Weather.com — The Weather Channel’s website has three different free widgets available for blogs, websites and social networking sites–two basic, smallish widgets that show local weather conditions and alerts, and a larger, more complex News/Breaking Weather Widget which I have presented on my website.  In addition, there is an iGoogle gadget, a Vista sidebar gadget and an Apple dashboard widget.

WeatherBug — On WeatherBug.com you can find several styles, shapes and sizes of web widgets that display live local weather conditions as well as severe weather alerts. All have that cute little weather bug on them . WeatherBug also has desktop widgets.

Show My Weather — Show My Weather’s free weather widget comes in one very simple style that can be customized to a limited extent. This widget works only for the USA and Canada. One tiny glitch in the system, the widget did not recognize my location by zip code as all the others had done so I had to use the “city/state” option.

WeatherforBlog.com — WeatherforBlog.com offers one weather widget that is simple but customizable with cute background pictures such as puppies, kittens, snowmen and sports scenes.  This one comes in two sizes:  300×250 or 160×600.

A word of caution to save you the frustration that I experienced.  Unless you know a trick that I am missing, do not try to put more than one weather widget from each company on  a single web or blog page.  The poor things become confused, scatter themselves all over the page and refuse to work properly.  I guess they don’t like sharing the limelight.  Weather is so fickle and unpredictable.

LinkWithin Plugin

To me, one of the most exciting aspects of searching the Internet is finding the stuff I wasn’t looking for at the time but have always wanted to find.  For instance, last night during a search for weather and recipe widgets for my website, I accidentally stumbled upon a food blog (of all things) that led me to the LinkWithin page.  Although I was exhausted and should have gone to bed hours earlier, curiosity got the best of me and I had to investigate.

I have often seen on other blogs a set of three or four links to related posts within the blog listed at the end of the post to hopefully attract readers to stay longer and read more and been green with envy.  Since my first sight of this feature, I have searched and searched to no avail.  Finally, when I had just about given up hope, I found this little gem during a totally unrelated search. 

LinkWithin is a blog widget that appears under each post, providing links to related stories from your blog archive.  Do you have photos in your posts?  LinkWithin will even add thumbnails to your links.  LinkWithinis free, has no adds, is quick and easy to install, does not require registration or sign-up, and is customizable to fit in with blogs that have light text on a dark background.  The widget defaults to three story links per post, but you can choose to feature up to five.

Check it out — http://www.linkwithin.com/learn

Google This!

I am a Christian–I bow to none other than the One true God–but if i were not a Christian, I would definitely worship the god of Google.  Google is everywhere and has it’s spiny fingers into everything I do.  If I go to YouTube, Google art there.  If I go to FeedBurner, Google art there.  If I sign up for Blogger, Google art there.  Google holdeth some of my treasured photographs at Picasa.  If I look for a new web browser, Google doth provide Chrome.  If I need to see a photo of my own house on my own street or someone else’s house halfway across the world, Google giveth me the power to do so with Google Earth or Google Street View.  All I need is one Google ID to take care of much of my business on the Internet:  AdSense, analytics, bookmarks, e-mail, search, feed reading, feed sharing, blogging, connecting with friends, watching videos, storing photos and more.  If Google can’t provide it, I probably don’t need it.

The problem?  All I need is one Google ID, but I have many and Google remembers me everywhere I go.  I am constantly signing out of one Google account and into another.  Currently I have bookmarks under three Google ID’s and they are all different depending on which identity I was claiming at the time I hit the bookmark button.  Trying to keep them all the same is a never ending challenge of importing and exporting and adding and deleting.  Google should figure a way for a person to remain signed in for the toolbar with one account while signing in and out of other accounts for AdSense, Analytics, e-mail, and etc.  God forbid that Google should allow me to have several different e-mail addresses without each being an account that it wants me to use to access everything Google.  And, what if I want to delete the e-mail address that my AdSense account is associated with (and I do)?  What if I want to use the same identity for AdSense that I now use for Analytics and FeedBurner? Take pity on me Google, I didn’t know that you were going to own everything when I signed up for all this stuff and I didn’t know it would be written in stone for the rest of my Internet life.  I change e-mail addresses and account names like I change domiciles, every couple of years or so.  I like change.  Change is good.  Help me!

KompoZer strikes again

Obviously humiliated and disgruntled that I figured a way around its javascript and flash upload obstacles, last night KompoZer began to threaten me again.  I was typing along when all of a sudden came the warning sign, the hourglass appeared next to the mouse pointer letting me know that a lockup, shutdown or document ruining crash of some kind was imminent.  Grrrrrrrr.  I growled at it, saved my document, and continued, determined to finish my additions to the page. KompoZer must have been angry that I beat it — I managed to get the page completed and uploaded despite the hourglass – because it readied itself to play its next card.  After uploading, I shut KompoZer down for a few moments and then reopened it, giving it a chance to compose itself (no pun intended).  This time when I opened the document I had been working on KompoZer informed me that an error had occurred and the page was no longer editable.  What?  But I beat it at its own game again.  Without panicking, I did a “save as” saving it as the original document and voilá the page was now editable.  KompoZer, I await your next challenge.  Bring it on.  Let me see what you’ve got! 

On a brighter note, the widgets and gadgets section of my site is getting close to completion (for now anyway).  Check it out and see what you find that you just can’t live without.  It’s all free, of course.  I’ve become addicted to the cute and useful little guys.

It’s the little things in life

It’s the little things in life that thrill me.  Tonight I had a breakthrough, a light bulb turned on in my brain, the solution all of a sudden became perfectly clear.  Why had I missed it before now?  I have been struggling, bumping my head against the ceiling and running into walls, trying unsuccessfully to upload my Google ads and other cool little widgets and gadgets to my website.  I mean what is the point of having a website and a vision when you are unable to make it workable and attractive, right?  Such a bummer and a downer this has been for me.  I rarely succumb to a challenge, but this one had me beat.  Until tonight, I had almost caved, said all is lost, and hung my head in disgust and shame.  Enter the epiphany at approximately 10:45 p.m. in the form of a quick second glance at a little option on the KompoZer File Menu called “Export to Text” and yippee, I’m off and running again.

KompoZer is a great program and not only that but it’s free.  Because it has been such a beneficial tool for me–I cannot produce a web page from scratch without my handy dandy WYSIWYG editor–I have felt guilty criticizing its shortcomings publicly. The lockups and the unexpected shutdowns I can manage, but I cannot abide the way it garbles code, especially javascript, when it publishes and causes it not to do what it is supposed to do.  Over the past several days, I have spent countless hours fighting this issue and finally tonight have found a solution so I thought I would share it in case anyone else is struggling with this problem.

If you want to enter code other than basic HTML into KompoZer, DO NOT use KompoZer’s Publish function.  After saving the file, click on <File> and then choose <Export to Text>.  Save the file as the original name, including the .html ending.  Then, upload the file using an FTP client such as Filezilla.  You will go from frustration to glee within seconds!

Boy am I going to be tired tomorrow at work!

Crashin’ and burnin’

Ugh! I have come to a standstill, a state of creative stagnation. Last night I slept and slept — went to bed at 11 pm and didn’t wake up until 10 a.m. A far cry from my wired habits of the past few days, and I woke up with a monster sinus headache and a sore throat. Could it be that Bubbles’ cage is needing cleaned or am I just worn out from my manic creative spree?

Currently, I am trying to overcome some javascript issues presented by KompoZer which are preventing me from uploading my Google ads and my free Feedjit widgets. At present, I have to upload the page and then go in and edit it on the server to add these gadgets. This is very tedious and irritating given the number of times my pages have all changed during the past few days.  If anyone out there has experienced this glitch and can offer a solution, I would be happy to hear it.  Of course, I suppose if I would just work with code from scratch I could overcome all of this, but I am just not that talented, “yet”.

More coffee with French vanilla creamer and a piece of pizza and back to the drawing board I go.  I should clean myself up, I’m filthy, and go out to get some rabbit litter and groceries, but I probably will obsess on this project and not leave the house until tomorrow when I have to return to work — ugh!  Yes, I have to work on Labor Day while the rest of you are out picnicking.

Ixnay on the Feedjit Twitter Widget

Gonna pitch the Feedjit Twitter Widget as it is exhibiting an annoying tendency to display multiple occurrences of each tweet. My OCD will NOT handle that!

Another long night ahead

I’m still feeling a bit manic.  I have rested some but not slept much and have consumed much java.  As a result, my website is progressing quite nicely. Last night, I added a cool feedback form that I got from thesitewizard.com, an awesome website that I cannot say enough about, and today I added the about me section and fleshed out the home page.

When I first purchased my domain name, crystal-miller.net, three days ago in the middle of the night, I had no idea what I was going to do with it.  It was a whim.  Originally, I had intended just to buy the name and hold onto it for awhile.  No rush.  I could always do something with it later, much later, maybe years later.  But I allowed the website bug to bite me in the tush and now I’m on a roll.  This afternoon, following a short nap, I decided to make crystal-miller.net a resource website with links to all kinds of cool free stuff on the Internet — information, widgets, gadgets, templates, software, instructions, tutorials, etc.  Eventually, I would like to offer some items for purchase as well, but I have much work to do before that time comes.

Tonight, after I take a much needed short nap, I am going to add a guestbook to this blog.  If ya drop by, please sign it.  Hmmm.  I wonder who will be the first to sign?

Hello, again, world!

It’s 5:31 a.m. and I am definitely going to bed now.  I have deleted a blog, made my twitter account public and made a few more changes to my “under construction” website.  Oh, yeah, and if you didn’t notice . . . the Gravatars are working!