Justsayhi is for many users a dating site. But if you visit justsayhi.com/bb you will find a great and funny resource for blog widgets and quizzes for geeks. You can try out to see how many html elements can you type in five minutes or how many css properties you can type in 7 minutes. If you do not like web development you can test how much do you know about the internet or find out how much electricity does yout body produce.

Apart from the quizzes there are several quality badges to stick on your blog (most of them funny, like “the blogger is coffee addicted”) or find out how many germs live in your keyboard or whether you are an apple addicted or not! Geek quiz is nice too! There is also some crazy stuff there, like “take this quiz to find out your possibilities of surviving in a zombie apocalypse”!
The design of the site and its chicklets is cool and thats makes it different from such sites for me. I tend not to review web sites except when they are special or original and justsayhi is! Quizzes use AJAX which makes the pages fast-responding and professional-looking.

The badges you get after completing a quiz looks like this one below (and yeah the code given for sticking them on your blog validates as XHTML 1.0 transitional).

Many users have been using the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin in their WordPress installation to have tag management in WordPress versions before the latest release 2.3. The problem is that version 2.3 does not support the UTW tags. There is an option though to import UTW tags in the built in tag system. Remember to import tags in parts of 1500 tags (if you have more than 5000 tags). After importing the tags you can add the tag cloud widget in your sidebar.

If you want to embed the tags in your theme, you need to modify index.php and single.php. Just copy the following code

<?php the_tags(‘title’, ‘separator’, ‘end’); ?>

and paste it under the <?php the_content(); ?>. Index.php is the main page of your blog. Modify single.php if you want tags to appear also when viewing single post pages. Where title, write what you want to appear before tags (in my blog that is Tags:), where separator write what you want between tags (here it is “,”) and where end write what you want to appear after tags (I’ve left it blank as I do not want a word after my tags).

In a previous post, I wrote a review about the social browser: Flock 0.9. Recently Flock reached version 1.0. The update to the final version is recommended for everyone who uses Flock. Many bugs are fixed, and many features are added:

• Flock 1.0 has added a “People” sidebar to support new service integration with Facebook and Twitter.
• Flickr and Youtube have been promoted to “People” services.
• Several performance and stability enhancements have been implemented and several memory leaks have been fixed.

Flock 1.0 has all Mozilla enhancements and security patches up to 2.0.0.8 (not 2.0.0.9 up to now, but a patch will be out soon I guess). You can read Shawn Hardin’s official announcement post here.

The interface is almost the same with version 0.9, except the splash screen which is changed as you see in the image and some addons on the navigation bar. Bug report button (which was placed on the upper right corner) is absent. Default search engine is again Yahoo, but that could be changed with a single click. The default “My World” page is also rebuilt and seems much more easy-to-read-and-manage now. If you would like to update your Flock installation or try Flock for the first time visit the official download page.

WordPress 2.3 is out for a while. For the past 4 months I have been using WordPress 2.1.3 for Typpz Blog. After extended back-ups (database export, contenet files etc) and plug-in deactivation, I updated the blog to WordPress 2.3.1! All plug-ins worked after reactivation, except the post listing plugin which is listed in the WordPress site as non-compatible with the latest version of the blogging platform and the ultimate tag warrior which in not needed as the new WordPress comes with built-in tag support. Tags were not imported as they should from Ultimate tag warrior, so I have to tag my posts again.

I have to say that the blog now corresponds much faster. I also liked the update notifications for new versions of the installed plugins. I recommend to everyone to upgrade to WordPress 2.3. Remember before upgrading: Backup, Backup, Backup (few clicks can save your blog in case something goes the wrong ).

There too many browsers there available for download (for free). Many of them are commonly used, like Firefox and Internet Explorer, and some others are dedicated to smaller user groups, like Shiira and Flock. Vote below for the browser you use! Poll will end on 29 November 2007.

Poll Results:
Firefox 71% (78 votes)
Safari 17% (22 votes)
Internet Explorer 10% (13 votes)
Opera 5% (6 votes)
Flock 3% (4 votes)
Camino 2% (2 votes)
Shiira 2% (2 votes)
Konqueror 1% (1 vote)

On this guide you will learn how to create a Web Photo gallery (Flash or pure HTML) in 5 minutes using Adobe Bridge and Adobe Photoshop. No Flash knowledge is needed!

1. Create a folder on your computer and name it as you like (here you will store your final files that need to be uploaded to your web site).
2. Open Adobe Bridge and navigate to the folder that contains the pics you are going to use. Using control (for PCs) or command (for Macs) select the images you want.

   

3. Click on tools -> Create Metadata Template. Fill in the fields you want and click save.
4. After the Metadata info is saved, click on tools -> Photoshop -> Web Photo Gallery.
5. When Photoshop loads, an option window opens. Choose in the first field any style you like (in the demo I used Flash-Gallery 2), but there are many. Previews are shown on the right.
6. On the “use” field in source images select “Selected Images From Bridge”. Select “include all subfolders” if your photos are placed in many folders.
7. Fill the”destination” field with the folder you created in step 1.
8. In options tab, modify banner, colors and image sizes as you like.

   

9. In the security option tab you can write something that will appear over your pics, to inform visitors that they are copyrighted and to ensure that they will not be usable in case of copy.
10. After filling the option tabs click OK to create your Photo Gallery. If you want a soundtrack to play on the background, choose a .mp3 file, rename it as “useraudio”.mp3 and place it in the folder you created in step 1.
11. Upload the folder (yes the one you created in step 1 ) to your server, navigate there and enjoy!
12. If you want to check your gallery locally, open the index.html file.

Note that if you use audio soundtrack, it is preferable that the audio file will be small to ensure fast loading times. Click here to see the demo galley in action.

Tracking the feedback from our users we decided to add some features on Typpz blog. From now on, under each post (in single post page), there will be a list with related posts to help you navigate through the blog. That helps also SEO optimization. Tags are also added to help you searching and finding the post you look for. Tags are displayed above the related posts section and the links to digg and del.icio.us. As you may have experienced when surfing around a blog, some times you make a mistake when posting a comment. We have the same problem some times, so we added AJAX comment editing which gives you 15 minutes to edit your comment after you post it. Just click the text you posted and edit it! Hope that the changes will help you and will improve your experience!

During the previous week, the new version of WordPress (2.3) was released to public. The new version provides some great features to bloggers, like tag support and update notifications. Tag support is a great add-on (which was already used with the appropriate plug-in) that helps users and web spiders-crawlers to navigate through your blog more smoothly and easily. Update notifications is the other most expected feature. One-click updates are the dream of anyone using WordPress. That means probably end of database back-up and ftp deletes and uploads any time a new version of WordPress is released. Taking back-ups though should be in your timetable regularly .

The new version supports sidebar widgets by default. The problem is that many users used themes that need some plugins installed to operate properly, which means that if these plugins are not working with version 2.3 they will not be able to upgrade until a new version of the confusing plugin is released. For example, the theme I use, needs the sidebar listing plugin which does not support version 2.3 of WordPress, so I still use the previous version of the platform.

For sure WordPress 2.3 is a recommended update for everyone that is able to upgrade, but remember to check your stuff before you do (themes, plugins etc) and also pay attention to the official extended instructions for backing up your database and upgrading. No one wants to lose data because of luck of attention to the instructions! If you are using WordPress 2.3 or have tested it, feel free to post a comment and tell your opinion about it.

Here is a video edition of our Web 2.0 logo creation tutorial that you loved. Video is streamed via youtube as it is 8 mins long and would be hard for our bandwitch to have it stored in our host. The quality is not the best, but it will help you alongside with the original detailed post. Remeber to use XHTML validated code when embedding youtube videos in your site

OPML is an XML-based format that allows exchange of outline-structured information between applications running on different operating systems and environments. With an OPML file you are able to add multiple feeds to your favorite feed reader, without having to add each feed url seperately. Most feed readers (like RSS owl, Google Reader) allow users to export their feeds in an OPML file and share them or import them in another reader. You can download our OPML file and see what we are reading (we read Greek blogs too, but the file contains only the those that are written in English), including Java blogs, tech blogs and news-based blogs.

You can get the official OPML icon or read about how it was created here.