Tag Archives: blogs

How To

If you can't see the photos on this site

Just had a friend tell me he can’t see the photos in my posts, so I called him and we figured out the problem. There are two things to check, and this solution applies to all blogs out there that might have this problem.

  1. Are you at work? If you are, there’s a good chance that your network admins might have blocked photo sharing sites like Flickr. Therefore, all blogs using those sites to host their images will have problems displaying their photos. While the blog might very well come up, the images won’t, and if you don’t know what’s going on, you’ll be wondering if the blog’s owner is in a right state of mind, talking about pictures that aren’t there… But really, everything’s on the up and up, except for your lousy network admins and cheesy IT policies.
  2. Are you using Firefox? If so, have you gone to Tools >> Options >> Content >> Load Images and checked the box next to “For originating site only”? If you did this, no images of any kind (GIF, JPG, PNG, etc.) will show up unless hosted directly on the blog. Uncheck that option, and a whole new world will open up to you. Here’s a screenshot of that Options tab in Firefox.

Load images option in Firefox

Hope this fixes it for you!

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Thoughts

Some big news at ComeAcross

I finally finished working on a new look for the site (version 1 wasn’t as flexible and easy to maintain as I wanted it to be) and also propagated that new look throughout the various ComeAcross sections. Yes, this means that whether you visit the main site (blog) or the podcast, or the current news section or the new mobile section, you’ll see the same look (which wasn’t the case with version 1, btw). The only section that still hasn’t got the new look is photos, but Gallery, the package I use to manage that, is definitely a monster when it comes to skins and customizations, so I don’t even want to touch that for now. In fact, I may even switch to a hosted photo service like Flickr. We’ll see…

Give the new and improved ComeAcross (version 2) a try, and surf through the different sections. Let me know how you like it, drop me a line. Working on it these past three days has been a very interesting experience, to say the least… I had this horrible bout of flu, and it was a bit hard to concentrate, since I wasn’t sure what to do first: pass out, vomit or just lie in bed and try to sleep (with “try” being the operative, though unsuccessful word.) I don’t know what kind of a virus this was, but it sure was a nasty one! When I have a cold or a flu, it lasts 1, 2 days tops. This time, it’s coming up on 3 1/2 days and I’m still not over it. Not fun, not fun… not fun. Add to that ridiculous muscle aches, bone aches, headaches and this ugly urge to keep moving my legs while in bed,and I’d hate to foist this monster on anyone, even my worst enemy.

So anyway, I managed to get a few hours’ worth of work done every day, although it was a nightmare. I hope you enjoy the end result, because this flu sure gave a new meaning to the creative birthing process… Trust me, this new look is no flu-ke! I for one don’t think the new look is flu-lish… Alright, okay, I’ll stop…

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Thoughts

Bonjour and Hello from across the pond

I see that the friendly folks at Nabaztag have linked to my review of their smart bunny on both their English and French blogs. Hi! 😀

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Reviews

A review of BackupMyBlog

Michael Arrington from TechCrunch posted a review of BackupMyBlog, a new service that backs up blogs on a daily basis. He said something that really piqued my interest at the end of his review. He suggested FeedBurner ought to be offering this sort of service. Now that’s an idea!

Incidentally, I posted the latest podcasting figures from FeedBurner yesterday, and in that post, I compared the feed security one gets from using their service with locking up important documents in a thick safe. Now I realize I was thinking pretty much the same thing, except I couldn’t put my finger on it. Yes, I couldn’t agree more. That would be a true value-added service from FeedBurner. It’d be a one-stop shop for one’s feed needs. It makes sense. The only question that remains is whether or not FeedBurner should offer a podcasting backup service as well.

➡ Updated 2/17/08: I ended up not using BackupMyBlog, and FeedBurner never introduced a backup service. The thing is, backing up websites and blogs is pretty easy once you know how to do it. The people who want to back them up have a vested interest in doing so and already have ways to do it. The ones that aren’t already backing them up are the ones using free services to host their sites, and those people aren’t very likely to pay for a backup service. That makes the whole incentive to develop such a service diminish to zero.

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Reviews

A review of My Life of Travel

My Life of TravelNo, that’s not my life of travel, it’s My Life of Travel, a site where travelling bloggers can document their adventures. Kiera Bailey of My Life of Travel invited me to write a review.

I love the concept of this site, which is so simple it can be expressed in only a few words, as I just did in my opening paragraph. Perhaps the folks there can take a clue from me, and rephrase their description of the site:

“My Life of Travel is a free web-based travel journal and travel research tool that lets travellers record their journeys, map travel histories, share tips with fellow tourists and keep in touch with friends and family, without the need for mass email communication and photo sharing sites.”

As you can see, this is noticeably longer that what I’ve got. What’s the word I’m looking for… ah, yes, verbose.

The site is built in .NET, which one can tell right away by the .aspx extension of the web pages. I found it interesting – uncommon, but interesting – that they chose to explain the technology that makes the site work.

Their service seems to be a win-win situation for everyone involved. Bloggers can host their journals and photos for free with them and make money from the web traffic by using their Google AdSense accounts, and My Life of Travel gets to be an entertaining source of information for many people, and also gets to sell advertising on its own to support its services. We, the web visitors, get to browse all the locations and see the world vicariously, through the eyes of intrepid travelers.

That’s the main draw of this site – for me, the web surfer. I can stumble on some pretty cool photos from different places in the world, and hopefully find out how that area is – what it’s like to travel through there. I might even pick up some useful advice, right? You could even call this site a travel wiki.

In theory, that’s how things are supposed to work. In practice, stuff gets a little boring. I chose to browse journals, and selected a drop-down menu for a location. I said, gee, wouldn’t it be nice to see photos from Antigua? Three journals came up for that, none of them with photos, and all with very little text, mostly one-line titles. It was like that for most smaller or out of the way places. And I suppose that’s to be expected, right? Until their site builds up to a critical mass of users, the world isn’t going to be well represented. One can’t hold that against them. So I chose bigger places, like Paris, or London. Stuff came up in the searches, but for some search results, even though I was supposed to get photos from those cities, I got photos from the countryside. I think the tagging system needs to be tweaked a bit to reflect locations better.

Then I started looking at photos. Most were group photos of people, or people standing in front of stuff – you know, the usual tourist photos. When there were landscape photos, the mix was about 50/50 between the good photos and the fuzzy or blurry ones. Again, typical. I started reading text, and most was the self-serving kind: I met up with buddies, drank some beer, hey, here’s a photo of me with some Guinness… etc. Typical once more, and that’s the caveat. Most people don’t know how or don’t care about keeping journals. They also don’t know how or don’t care to know how to take photos. So most of the stuff on the site is boring, run-of-the-mill, touristy stuff, the kind that’s good for a chuckle and a smirk, but doesn’t leave you feeling you’ve learned something.

If the entire site was like that, it wouldn’t be worth it. But, thankfully, it isn’t. They’ve done something smart, which is to highlight useful/popular member profiles. It also helps that these people take better photos, and usually write more useful things. Here’s an example of a good journal entry, with good photos. This is what makes this site worthwhile. What they need to do is to focus on these people and encourage them to keep blogging and posting. This sort of quality content is valuable stuff.

Bottom line: good travel site with great promise. They need to focus on building up their user base and encouraging people to post useful entries with great photos. It wouldn’t hurt to reward the valuable members through incentives of some kind, financial or otherwise.

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