Tips & Tricks

Almost a thousand entries on this blog – and then maybe I stop. An iPal asked be some help to start his own blog. This looks like a good moment to pass some knowledge that I collected the past few years. To spice-up your blog, you need some basic html-coding skills. Actually, some are not that basic. I wish here to thank my Nephew for all the evenings and nights that he showed me hands-on the html basics. I learned about 20+ tips and tricks. They can be found in the .txt file of this blog-entry (bottom). Here I will only show you a few that I used many times on this blog.

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- First, this is a simple hotlink to a famous music forum.
This is a simple hotlink to Wikipedia, one of my favorite sites.
The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) is great for movie-lovers.

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Here is an example of a 400 pix wide picture and a picture caption in a smaller font.

Birdman of Alcatraz (1962)

I get my pictures usually from a Google-search; but they must be persistent and free accessible. You can upload your own picture to Picasa.com (also from Google). You can scale pictures up and down with the "width" attribute. Scaling-up will give you some quality loss as is shown in this example; the original was about 350 pix wide and it was scaled-up to 400 pix.

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When you scale-down a picture to fit your blog, you can add a "click here to enlarge" message, when the mouse hovers over the picture. Both URL's are typically the same.

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Here is an example of what you can do with formatting tags in html. I use them very seldom because the text can look pretty shitty cluttered. I use the © Copyright tag with pictures when it is known. I think this is standard etiquette. The Trademark™ tag is rarely used on non-commercial websites.

You can control text with the font statement. This example uses size="3" face="verdana" color="yellow".

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Here is a simple example of an (unordered) list. I don't like the big spacing;

• Red


• White


• Blue

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Another example with the font tag used;

• Red


• White


• Blue

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You can make more advanced lists (and tables) by replacing the Red/White/Blue text with hotlinks to sites.

• Homepage of the CIA


• Homepage of the FBI


• Homepage of the NSA

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Here is a last example of a smaller picture (half the blog size) with text wrapped around it. The picture is of William of Orange and the text is the text of the Dutch hymn. In this example you don't use a break between the picture and the text.


1. Wilhelmus van Nassouwe
ben ik, van Duitsen bloed,
den Vaderland getrouwe
blijf ik tot in den dood.
Een prinse van Oranje
ben ik, vrij onverveerd,
den Koning van Hispanje
heb ik altijd geëerd.

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A nice element on your blog is a preview and a link to a YouTube clip. You can copy-paste the object embed code from YouTube. It's easy when you keep the aspect ratio right; about 400x320 pix for my blog. Here are the Dutch Women Volleyball team singing our National Hymn.

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I skip the table.html for now; it's too complicated to explain; maybe later. You can do very well without it. I uploaded the html 8kb .txt coding file for this blog to several sites file. The file is called TTUN.txt (Tips and Tricks from Uncle and Nephew). Take your pick;
- From RapidShare
- From MegaUpload
- From HotFile
- From SendSpace
- From FilesMail
- From YourFileHost

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Good luck, Harry