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

Time

You must know by now that I am a special movie lover. Try the “sleaze” keyword and you know what I mean. For quick and cheep thrills you often can do with [a] the movie-poster [b] the imdb-entry and [c] the trailer from the tube.

“Once Upon a Time in the West” is of course an exception. This is a very special 'now-then' tube with modern windmills on the horizon and the great music fron EM.

Enjoy

Winter

Hendrick Avercamp – Dutch Winter Scene on a Canal – 1585

Avercamp spent most of his life in the small quiet town of Kampen on the eastern shore of the Zuider Zee (now IJsselmeer). Residence relatively far from the principal artistic centre of the Netherlands helps to explain why this artist, who discovered the pictorial qualities of flat landscapes and was the first to specialize in winter scenes of outdoor sport and leisure, had little influence on the development of Dutch landscape paintings.
Avercamp's pictures peopled with motley crowds of all ages and classes skating, sledging, golfing, and fishing on the frozen canals of Holland fascinate social historians as well as art historians. The latter sometimes find him a troublesome painter, because it is difficult to trace his development. The plain fact seems to be that he did not have a marked one. From the very beginning he could paint a landscape with a high horizon, a great accumulation of detail, and a number of light colors, or one with a low horizon, few details, and vivid colors in the foreground which lighten as they recede to the distance. The two possibilities existed simultaneously and could be used at will until the end of his career, depending on either the artist's, or his patron's predilections.

(Sorry, Dutch again). But I need to make a small reply to my little nephew. It is stervens koud over here (very cold). We thank these Ladies for taking care of the poor and cold.
“Foor de homoseksuel’n met de kleine beurs bied’n wij hier een soort aanfullingspakket, soort pret-pakket”.

The Hell of ’63 is a recent Dutch movie about a famous local skating tour (11 sted’n tocht); about hongerklop and bevroren pisbuizen. I’ll first drop dead and then post this movie. This is ultimate Dutch horror. I guess the trailer will do for now.

Enjoy

Hans

Hans Aarsman, looking sharp

Hans Aarsman puts a photo in my newpaper every week and he then writes a few hundred words about it. It's a free course in looking and seeing. I never skip his articles. It's almost as exiting as Joe Jackson's music.

Enjoy

El

El Hamdaoui just made another goal against Heracles, feb, 2009

I am not sure about Maroco, there is a Riff region where most of our Dutch friends come from and there is the M-king's capitol where the directions are coming from and the M-capitol doesn't like the Riff people - so we have some complications included for free.

Some M-guys are very nasty (indeed) and the M-king has some reach into the lowlands too. But we like our M-football players.

Dutch saying; "Keep your dirty hands off from our dirty Marocans".

El Hamdaoui is from AZ and he is the current dutch footbal top scorer. He can't be very well google'd or wikie'd; it's just a bloody shame.

Michelle

Barack and Michelle

What I picked up from the newspapers, that she is a kinda super-woman, classy, mother, lover, wife and all. Barack sure will need her on his side. I like her and her kids too.

Here's the Yes We Can song that crossed my mind [from the tube].

And here is the empeethree version [Yes We Can Can, The Pointer Sisters].

Enjoy

Page

Bettie Page, 1923 - 2008

She died peacefully this weekend and she made my eyes wet.

Cars

Alfa Romeo 8C from 1931

When you are into cars, it's difficult to make some blog without posting the usual super-cars from the super-magazines.

I blogged some USA V8 songs before. Cars are romantic and also about testosterones - it's hard to keep your braincells and hormones in-synch.

My eyes realy got wet from these Japanese guys. It looks [not sure] they make pencil drawings from great cars without using a computer. This site is dedicated to some of these great Japanese Masters in the Art of Automotive Illustration. Take a stroll and be amazed.

Enjoy

TV

The Beijing CCTV building [2004-2009]

Some modern Dutch stuff about architecture. I urgently needed to make this blog, because I keep forgetting his name. Rem Koolhaas is a well known Dutch architect. His Rotterdam based OMA bureau did some prestigious projects. I'm sure you can Wiki/Google more about this guy when you like this stuff.

I just want to mention his CCTV project (Chinese State Television) because it got some exposure during the Bejing Olympics. The story goes that (viewed from a certain angle) the building looks like a Chinese character. INTELLECTUAL-ALERT; Rem also wrote books and articles in many magazines.

This is what the Chinese jury said about the design;
"The jury considered the final architectural design for the new CCTV site neither humble nor pert, showing a striking style of its own while bearing no marks of exclusiveness. As a graceful and sturdy sculpture-style edifice, the planned new CCTV building can not only represent the new image of Beijing, but also express, in the language of architecture, the importance and the cultural nature of the TV industry. The novelty and feasibility of the structural design will surely push forward the innovation of structural systems and theories of China’s high-rise buildings. The jury believed that the implementation of the design will not only help establish the symbolic image of CCTV, but also turn over a new leaf in the annals of Chinese architecture."

Enjoy

Calvi

the Calvi citadel from the beach

Calvi is a coastal town on the French isle of Corsica. I was there about 5 or 6 times on holiday, many years ago. It just gives me some silly romantic memories. There are some barracks in the citadel of the French Légion Etrangere. These great guys always were spic-and-span dressed in the disco. I took a lot of pictures from the citadel.

And then I re-found these French soldier songs, not from the Légion but from the French Military Academy Ecole Superieure Militaire de Saint-Cyr
- Le Pékin de Bahut
- La Galette
- Les Casos

Corsica is an island and not strictly French. They have their own habits and musics and even a liberation movement. I posted this Corsican music a long time ago, but it still sound pretty OK to me. It's a kind of local folkish acapella - several male voices without music. These guys just do it on the beach, I was so lucky to hear some of them 'live' while I had my Salade Nicoise and white wine.
- A Cumpagnia, Barbara Furtuna
- Canta U Populu Corsu, Paghjella
- I Muvrini, Agnus Dei

And there was this restaurant, way up in the citadel where famous people came around. I never went inside, but it has a great story.

And there was this cheep/lousy/great back-pack 'Hotel Du Centre' near the village-square where I always stayed. It's so great & simple, I love the guy who is running this h/motel in the centre of the town.

The f*cking problem is, that I can't give you any more google-info/pix. It is probably all too 'exotic'. When you are in Europe (God Forbid) try to visit the isle of Corsica for a week or so - recommended.

Good heavens, I could go on-and-on

Enjoy

Sarah

Sarah Palin [1964], 11th Governor of Alaska, ex-beauty-queen

This blog is not about politics - there are a zillion of blogs who do a better job. But I was pretty amazed about ex-beauty-queen Sarah Palin as the running mate for John McCain.

The druly guy almost followed my advice to pick Beyoncé as a running gag [because she's young, black and sexy].

I'm not a special fan of John [nr#2] nor Barak [nr#1] - both will do fine I'm sure. The item only strengthened my opinion that American politics is all a great, sick and dangerous running joke. No harm done; Sarah is better looking than Mrs. Clinton or Condy Rice.

Sleep

A picture that doesn't need many words. Katherine is sleeping her last night with husband Jim [just died in Iraq] and playing some favorite .mp3's on their laptop.

Ymre

Ymre Stiekema - Dutch Super Model

When you google for 'Dutch Super Models' you get almost 700,000 hits. Dutch models are a niche market of great [neutral/natural] looking and easy-to-handle girls with non-star-ambitions. The story of provincial [Friesland] girl Doutzen Kroes is already splattered around the web.

Ymre Stiekema is a new 16-yo. provincial junior highschool student [Groningen]. She is the new model for the Prada Red Line. Her school mates are discussing her/succes. I guess Ymre needs some anti-bitch-coaching ... ;)

[Suus] ze zit bij me op school en is echt een arrogante bitch
[Lis] ik ben het met Suus eens, ze is inderdaad een arrogante bitch,
zit ook bij haar op school, dus Suus en ik kunnen het weten!)
[Liz] He Suus, beetje jaloers? Ben ff een beetje blij voor d'r joh! Ymre you go girl!

Enjoy

Wall

Heidi Klum [1973] is from Germany

There is someone out there [a guy?] that collected a zillion of great big pictures of the top most sexiest women (sometimes called wallpapers).
They really are gorgeous. All credits go to Adobe for the photo shopping.

Enjoy