If you look down to the bottom of my frontpage, you’ll see that my posts are divided over a couple of pages.

The nice thing about this way of paginating is that people can move to whichever page they want to. This also works with categories.

I was visiting John Chow’s “Rambling” category and I wanted to go to the first articles written in that category. There are 2 ways to do that:

1. Click on the Next link on the bottom of the page till you reach the end
2. Click on archives, find how many posts are in that category, divide that by the number of posts per page (at time of writing that is 328 posts, 10 posts per page = 32 pages), click on the category, and then scroll to the bottom, click Next 1 time, change the “page/2/” in the address bar to “page/32/”

Either way, you understand that this can be discouraging for visitors. I need to mention that this is something I see at a lot of big name bloggers. For some reason they did not pay attention to this part of the user experience.

Making a numbered pagination can give people to reach the end (or beginning) a lot faster.

I read a couple of blogs where people say they don’t like Snap Preview Anywhere popup previews. Here’s my take on the matter.

I’m a designer writing about (mainly web) design. When I browse the web, the look of a site is very important to me as to how much I value the content of the site. Of course there are exceptions. So when I have the chance to see a snap shot of a site, it’s easier to decide whether or not I want to visit the linked site or not. Such a snap shot is also helpful to see if it’s a site you have already visited.

I read in most of the reviews that they talk about the service where the preview pops up when you hover the link. Most of the reviews were from last year.

Icon only
SPA comes in 3 modes:

• Link: When you hover the link itself, the preview pops up.
• Icon: There is a small icon displayed at the end of the link. When you hover this icon, the preview pops up. When you hover the link, nothing happens
• Link and Icon: hovering both the link and the icon shows the preview. This method can be used to show people that that particular link has a SPA popup connected to it.

In my blog I installed the second mode. If someone is interested in looking at the site preview, they just hover the icon behind the text. If they are not interested in the preview they just can hover the link as much as they are used to with the same result they are used to: No preview popup, only the link in the status bar.

What do you think?
I’m interested in knowing if this works for my visitors. To me those little icons are not disturbing and you can use them whenever you feel the need to. But my opinion in this one is less important than yours. What do you think of the little icons behind my links and the preview they produce?

Suggested Hardware
Acer 19″ Wide LCD Monitor

Previously, I mentioned some challenges people are facing when they would want to switch from XP (or Vista) to Ubuntu (or other Linux Distros). After that I wrote about steps you could take to try out Ubuntu to decide for yourself if the switch is something for you.

To show that it shouldn’t be difficult to switch, I’m going to compare some of the applications I used on my XP installation to their alternatives on my current Ubuntu box. Hopefully, this can help some folks to make the switch. These comparisons will be ordered according to importance to me.

I need to make a note that the idea for this article was drawn from Rea Maor’s article Open Source Alternatives to Commercial Programs.

Dreamweaver vs Quanta Plus
One of the applications I will miss the most from the Windows environment is Macromedia Dreamweaver (Macromedia has been acquired by Adobe). But the more I work with Quanta Plus, the more features I discover that I used in Dreamweaver. Quanta Plus even has some nice features that I missed in Dreamweaver. One of those is the highlighting of opening en closing brackets, curly brackets, etc. This makes it easy to debug functions and clauses.

Microsoft Office vs OpenOffice.org
Even when I was using Windows, I started looking into OpenOffice.org (OOO) when Microsoft made the stupid move to charge for the Beta version of Office 2007. With OOO you can do virtually the same as with Office. Even people currently still running any version of Windows I would advise to try out OOO.

OOO consists of the following components:

• Writer: This is the word processor of the suite. The feature I like the most in Writer is that, in the out of the box installation, you can publish your documents to PDF without the need to buy any extra software. Writer save documents in OpenDocument format by default. This is the new international standard for office documents, which mean that you will be able to open these documents in all word processors that use these standards.
• Impress: This is the application for creating presentations. Impress has a built-in ability to create Flash (.swf) versions of your presentations. Writer is also OpenDocument compliant.
• Calc: this is the all-purpose spreadsheet in the suite. It is said to be more user friendly and easier to understand than Excel. “Advanced DataPilot technology makes it easy to pull in raw data from corporate databases; cross-tabulate, summarize, and convert it into meaningful information.” It also converts to PDF and is also OpenDocument complaint.
• Base, the component with a nice descriptive sub title: The new way to access databases. Base comes with a full installation of a HSQL database engine, where data is stored in XML files. It can also access dBase files natively. Base can access virtually any database through ODBC and JDBC.
• Draw is the graphics package of the suite. “From a quick sketch to a complex plan, DRAW gives you the tools to communicate with graphics and diagrams.” Import possible from popular graphic formats (GIF, PNG, JPEG, etc) and export to Flash (.swf) can be done for free.
• Math is OpenOffice.org’s component for mathematical equations. It’s used as equation editor in other components in the suite, but it can also be used in standalone mode to create and edit math equations and formulas.

Fireworks vs The GIMP
Macromedia Fireworks is also one of the applications I am missing a lot. But with GIMP it is the same as with Quanta Plus: The more I use it, the more I like it. The only thing I’m still missing in using GIMP is that I can’t seem to “stick” the panels to the editing window. It may be just something I have overlooked, but I’m missing that part.

Rea has a nice comparison of GIMP and Adobe Photoshop. I sporadically used Photoshop, so I did not mention it here.

Microsoft Outlook vs Evolution
Evolution is my Outlook alternative. It offers a lot of features that Mozilla Thunderbird is lacking when you want to switch from Outlook, such as calendar integration, powerful filters, memos, tasks, contacts. The list of features goes on. You can check them out on the Evolution site.

Live Messenger vs aMSN
Live Messenger (previously known as MSN Messenger) was the only IM I had been using constantly. I used ICQ for a long time, but since I installed Ubuntu I decided to leave it out for now. aMSN Messenger, Alvaro’s Messenger, is a MSN Messenger clone, most of the features of MSN. There are some features of Live missing, but this is probably the IM application that comes closest to MSN.

Try it first on Windows
Even though it might take a little time to get used to these alternatives when you are used to Windows applications, it is well worth the switch. The best motivator should be that it’s all free.

Since most of these programs are platform independent, you can install them on your Windows installation to try them out. Get used to working with them. The more you can get used to working with these great applications, the easier it will be to switch to Ubuntu (or just get rid of Microsoft product).

Highly recommended reading
Ubuntu Linux for Non-Geeks: A Pain-Free, Project-Based, Get-Things-Done Guidebook

I got the idea of writing this article when I was reading about Flipping website in the blog of Dave and Jay.

Dave visited my MyBlogLog profile, so I wanted to see what his blog got to offer. On the home page I saw “Website Flipping for Profit – Part 3″. I personally don’t like to read part 3 of anything, unless I’ve read parts 1 and 2. So naturally I went looking for part 1 first. It was not on the first page and there is no “Recent Posts” section. There are some categories listed, so I looked at them for a second. That’s when I thought “Fokkit” and I closed the tab.

Later I was checking out my MBL profile page and I saw Dave’s avatar on it, with the text in that purple-ish color that tells you, you visited that link before. I could not remember what I saw on that site so I went back to look. “Ow, yeah, it’s that ‘flipping websites’ blog”, I thought. But something told me to go look for that Part 1. So I did. And it turned out to be a really great group of articles.

Disclaimer
I want to make it very clear that I’m not cracking on these guys, or try to be negative. On the contrary, I think there is a lesson to be learned for everyone and their blog provided a very good example. I personally would suggest you read this blog, because it holds a great deal of very helpful information. This blog will be in my top 10 in the near future.

Internal links
It is very important to create links to other posts in your blog. Especially when the articles are closely related and they are a little far apart from eachother.

I suggested to Dave and Jay to link the words “Part1″ and “Part 2″ in the first sentence of Part 3, to the respective parts of the series. They might have already done so by the time you read this article.

Non-related reading
Transcending CSS: The Fine Art of Web Design (Voices That Matter)

Always backup
LaCie F.A. Porsche 320 GB External Hard Drive for $99.50

It’s all over the Internet: Suriname’s Fareisa Joemmanbaks is the new Miss India Worldwide.

Fareisa won this contest, where 19 other contestants tried to get the title. While the other contestants did some form of traditional or modern Indian dance or a combination, Fareisa chose to show her belly dance talents. This probably helped her a lot. Another remarkable development was her answer to the question during the question round. According to a local newspaper, she was asked what she would change about herself, if she had the possibility. She simply answered that she would change nothing, because, you can only become a great person in society, when you go through the ups and downs in life.

I want to congratulate Fareisa and her family and the Suriname community as a whole. SurIndia Glamour deserves commendation for the hard work they put in all the Surinamese girls who participated in the Miss India Suriname contest, and especially for guiding and supporting Fareisa through the Worldwide contest.

Suriname has a lot of beautiful girls. It gives a great feeling to see that one of those beauties is recognized globally.

Related reading
The Crowning Touch: Preparing for Beauty Pageant Competition

I discovered that my articles were displayed on the first page of Google results, when searches are conducted using simple words I mention in my blog. “blog worth” puts me in the top 3 results, with a link to Can you trust blog worth calculators?, “paypal vs moneybookers” put me on top, etc.

I make it easy for the Google spiders to crawl my site by using the Google Sitemap WordPress plugin. This plugin creates a sitemap compliant to the standards set by www.sitemaps.org. These standards provide a way to make spiders crawl your site faster and more efficiently.

More search engines
Microsoft, Yahoo and Ask have joined this initiative to use the XML-Sitemaps to crawl sites more efficiently. This means that your pages could get seen faster. What should you do to enjoy these services?

WordPress Users
Download and install the Google Sitemap WordPress plugin. Tweak it to your own needs (Options -> Sitemap).

Other blog software users
Find and install an appropriate plugin for your software. If you can’t find any, try to follow the guidelines at http://www.sitemaps.org/protocol.html to set up your own sitemap.

Everyone
After you have your sitemap up and working, add the following line to your robots.txt:
Sitemap: http://www.example.com/sitemap.xml
Replace www.example.com with your own URL, and make sure this is the right place where the sitemap.xml is to be found.

Now the above mentioned search engines will be able to crawl your pages more efficiently.

Suggested reading
Sams Teach Yourself XML in 24 Hours, Complete Starter Kit

Suck it
If you like this article why don’t you suck my feed to be kept up to date about my recent articles?

When writing any type of code, whether it’s HTML, PHP, Perl or some other kind of programming language, it is important to write neatly.

In most programming and scripting language it doesn’t matter if you write all the code on one line. The code is then read just like we humans read, from left to right, with the necessary jumps here and there to find the right functions.

There are several reasons why you want to avoid writing too much code bundles together on one line:

• Code is easier to debug if it is neatly organized
• Organized code is easier to reuse
• Code is easier to read for others (in case of sharing the code or asking for help)
• Well organized code looks great and professional

Best practices
Indent nested code
Add one or 2 spaces, or a tab to parts that belong to a parent section.
Example 1: HTML

<div id=”1″>
  <div id=”2″>
    <p>This is the text that belongs in div 2, which is nested within div 1</p>
  </div>
</div>

Example 2: CSS

#1 {
  color: #FFFFFF;
  font-weight: bold;
}

Example 3: PHP

while($result = mysql_fetch_object($query)) {
  if ($result->type == “5″) {
    echo “You are not allowed to see this resource!”;
  }
  echo “This is type ” . $result->type . “.”;
}

Add an empty line between sections
If you have a function handling a query and after that you have a definition of a function to handle the output to the website, add a blank line so you can see where that particular section starts and ends.

Use standards
The modern day standards for HTML and CSS say that uppercase tags and attributes are replaced by lowercase code. <BODY> is now simply <body>.
For accessibility reasons, some tags are being replaced by others: <b> is replaced by <strong>, <i> is replaced by <em>.

Conclusion
Keeping your code organized is not only a good practice for yourself (reusibility, debugging), but also for others, who’s help you might need or who you shared your code with.

Another tip: Keep your feeds organized and add mine to your list.

Every time I write an article I use words of which I think I understand them, but am not sure if others do.

To make sure everyone knows what I’m talking about, I added a glossary to my blog. There you’ll find terms I use with a short description.

These descriptions are related to the information I present in my blog. The real definition may be broader, but the more I would expand on the definition, the more I would have to explain, the more chance you have to read off topic information.

Some descriptions may be expanded later, when I write about a different aspect of that particular term.

If you still see a term in one of my (future) posts which you don’t understand, just ask for a description of that term in a comment to that specific post. I will try to keep my glossary as up to date as possible.

There is a link to the glossary in the header section of my blog. That is the grayish part, where the name of my blog is written.

In the meantime, why don’t you suck my feed or write about yourself?

In my first experience with Ubuntu, I played around a bit with the Operating System, testing out several options and programs to find what I need to have the best experience. I lost a lot of the feeds I was reading, but I remember some of them, so I created another list.

In playing around I installed Beryl, then I installed the Xfce desktop and removed the Gnome desktop. But that’s not what this post is about.

Last week I backed everything up, and did a clean Xubuntu install. But since then I had not configured my Akregator yet to read my favorite feeds. I finally did that a couple of minutes ago.

The reason why I’m writing about this is because I was thrilled to see that David Pitlyuk mentioned my blog in one of his posts. He provides links of interest for his reader and one of those links is to From fulltime webdesigner to fulltime blogger in 7 steps .

So for interesting links to other blogs, I suggest David Pitlyuk’s links of interest for his reader.

I see a lot of unique visitors and I wonder who all these people are who visit my blog.

So tell me a little about yourself in a comment on this article. What’s your name, where are you from, what do you do in daily life, male/female, what is your site URL.

I am Rehuel.

So… Who are you?