Ya i had to take a break, don’t ask “iMamoo taking a break?” Did you know a common mistake which people make, is not to take breaks. specially the performance oriented people like me should take breaks when they need. Taking a break is like changing the oil on your car. It is a basic need and your performance will suffer if you decide to just “press on through.” Let’s say you normally operate at 70% to 90% of your potential, but when you get burn out, your capability drops to 20% to 30%. Simply trying to spend more time on the same thing reduced effectiveness, so does it make sense. You will be far better off to take some time off and come back at your normal 70% to 90%. You need breaks on different levels.

(Pottson, when he hear iMamoo say this, realized how much he had missed iMamoo and his talks. He geared up to hear about the W3C level 1 validation for web accessibility)

These guidelines explain how to make Web content accessible to people with disabilities.

The primary goal of these guidelines is to promote accessibility. However, following them will also make Web content more available to all users, whatever user agent they are using (e.g., desktop browser, voice browser, mobile phone, automobile-based personal computer, etc.) or constraints they may be operating under (e.g., noisy surroundings, under- or over-illuminated rooms, in a hands-free environment, etc.). Following these guidelines will also help people find information on the Web more quickly. These guidelines do not discourage content developers from using images, video, etc., but rather explain how to make multimedia content more accessible to a wide audience.

There are three levels :

1. Level A
2. Level AA
3. Level AAA

Below I have give level A checkpoint. If you implement all the three levels to your web page your site will become more user friendly.

Level A checkpoints :

1. Provide a text equivalent for every non-text element (e.g., via “alt”, “longdesc”, or in element content). This includes: images, graphical representations of text (including symbols), image map regions, animations (e.g., animated GIFs), applets and programmatic objects, ascii art, frames, scripts, images used as list bullets, spacers, graphical buttons, sounds (played with or without user interaction), stand-alone audio files, audio tracks of video, and video.
2. Ensure that all information conveyed with color is also available without color, for example from context or markup.
3. Clearly identify changes in the natural language of a document’s text and any text equivalents (e.g., captions).
4. Organize documents so they may be read without style sheets. For example, when an HTML document is rendered without associated style sheets, it must still be possible to read the document.
5. Ensure that equivalents for dynamic content are updated when the dynamic content changes.
6. Until user agents allow users to control flickering, avoid causing the screen to flicker.
7. Use the clearest and simplest language appropriate for a site’s content.

And if you use images and image maps

1. Provide redundant text links for each active region of a server-side image map.
2. Provide client-side image maps instead of server-side image maps except where the regions cannot be defined with an available geometric shape.

And if you use tables

1. For data tables, identify row and column headers.
2. For data tables that have two or more logical levels of row or column headers, use markup to associate data cells and header cells.

And if you use frames

1. Title each frame to facilitate frame identification and navigation.

And if you use applets and scripts

1. Ensure that pages are usable when scripts, applets, or other programmatic objects are turned off or not supported. If this is not possible, provide equivalent information on an alternative accessible page.

And if you use multimedia

1. Until user agents can automatically read aloud the text equivalent of a visual track, provide an auditory description of the important information of the visual track of a multimedia presentation.
2. For any time-based multimedia presentation (e.g., a movie or animation), synchronize equivalent alternatives (e.g., captions or auditory descriptions of the visual track) with the presentation.

And if all else fails

1. If, after best efforts, you cannot create an accessible page, provide a link to an alternative page that uses W3C technologies, is accessible, has equivalent information (or functionality), and is updated as often as the inaccessible (original) page.

PS: iMamoo & Pottson are the two mascots of iPOTT SaiaS

courtesy:http://www.w3.org/TR/WCAG10/checkpoint-list.html

Pottson always funny but he is very good in learning new things, like wise when we were browsing, pottson asked is it possible to create toolbar?. I said it is very easy and I told him how to do it. I have given below the details to create toolbar and you will get surprised by yourself.

Conduit provides website syndication solutions for web publishers that increase site traffic, revenue, and brand loyalty while simplifying access to the content, communities and applications that subscribers care about most. By creating a direct, always-on connection between publishers and subscribers, Conduit opens new channels for real-time communication and commerce.

Some steps to create tool bar

1. Register or login into conduit.com
2. Once you are successfully logged you will see lot of tabs like dashboard, Toolbar, Alerts, Banners etc..
3. Click Toolbar tab and you will see some components, like basic components, content components, personalized components etc..
4. Click on the components it will take to a detailed page where you can chose icon and give the URL, Hint etc..
5. Click save to save changes. Like that you can chose more components for your tool bar.
6. Once you have done the tool bar will be ready and you can download your tool bar.

7. On top of the page you will see ‘Your toolbar’s download page’ in the key Links.
8. Click Install your toolbar. The installation process is very simple and it wont take much time.

We can make customized video through animoto.com just sign up with the account and we are ready for the smart video making.

Now see how to go about for making the video :

1) Sign in for the account
2) In that 4 tabs will be provided ,click on create video.
3) You will find a box choose your videos having 2 options
i) Animoto short ii) Full Length
4) Animoto short is one which is free and 30sec video
5) Full length which is paid one.
6) The one we are talking about is Animoto short.
7) Click on animoto short and again some options are available to select pictures to upload in animoto.
For me i choose the first one upload from your computer.
9) Select file from your computer and if you want to select all pictures together, hold ctrl and select all pictures by clicking on it and now pictures will get uploaded in the site.
10) Select continue.
11) Nice thing comes as we can place some music in it,either we can upload from the animoto or from your system.
12) Select your music, save and continue.
13) Now finalization of video comes i.e. Customize your video
14) Check the video length button you need, select image pacing and continue
18 ) Now Enter Video Info. and click on create video and you are done with the video
15) It will take some time to make video but as we know patience will give good video.
16) One great thing about animoto video is that we can share this other video sites even we can place in our own site.
Check out our small video of animoto which we have shared in Youtube
Video..

The web is full of duplicate content. Search engines try to index and display the original or “canonical” version. Searchers only want to see one version in results. And site owners worry that if search engines find multiple versions of a page, their link credit will be diluted and they’ll lose ranking.

Today, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft (links are to their separate announcements) have united to offer a way to reduce duplicate content clutter and make things easier for everyone. Webmasters rejoice! Worried about duplicate content on your site? Want to know what “canonical” means? Read on for more details.

Multiple URLs, one page

Duplicate content comes in different forms, but a major scenario is multiple URLs that point to the same page. This can come up for lots of reasons. An ecommerce site might allow various sort orders for a page (by lowest price, highest rated…), the marketing department might want tracking codes added to URLs for analytics. You could end up with 100 pages, but 10 URLs for each page. Suddenly search engines have to sort through 1,000 URLs.
This can be a problem for a couple of reasons.

• Less of the site may get crawled. Search engine crawlers use a limited amount of bandwidth on each site (based on numerous factors). If the crawler only is able to crawl 100 pages of your site in a single visit, you want it to be 100 unique pages, not 10 pages 10 times each.
• Each page may not get full link credit. If a page has 10 URLs that point to it, then other sites can link to it 10 different ways. One link to each URL dilutes the value the page could have if all 10 links pointed to a single URL.

 Using the new canonical tag

Specify the canonical version using a tag in the head section of the page as follows:

That’s it!

• You can only use the tag on pages within a single site (subdomains and subfolders are fine).
• You can use relative or absolute links, but the search engines recommend absolute links.

This tag will operate in a similar way to a 301 redirect for all URLs that display the page with this tag.

• Links to all URLs will be consolidated to the one specified as canonical.
• Search engines will consider this URL a “strong hint” as to the one to crawl and index.

Canonical URL best practices

The search engines use this as a hint, not as a directive, (Google calls it a “suggestion that we honor strongly”) but are more likely to use  it if the URLs use best practices, such as:

• The  content rendered for each URL is very similar or exact
• The canonical URL is the shortest version
• The URL uses easy to understand parameter patterns (such as using ? and %)

For instance, this tag will only work with very similar or identical content, so you can’t use it to send all of the link value from the less important pages of your site to the more important ones.
If tags conflict (such as pages point to each other as canonical, the URL specified as canonical redirects to a non-canonical version, or the page specified as canonical doesn’t exist), search engines will sort things out just as they do now, and will determine which URL they think is the best canonical version.

The tag in action

This tag will most often be useful in the case of multiple URLs pointing at the same page, but might also be used when multiple versions of a page exist. 
 

courtesy:http://searchengineland.com/canonical-tag-16537

How nice it will be, if we get all our RSS updates at one place. And this facility is provided by Yahoo for us. This page will contain all your updated favorite RSS feeds on page which will be easy to access and read.

Now we will see how to add RSS feeds in personalized page of Yahoo.

1) To add RSS feeds sign up for Yahoo account and then login .

2) You will find a link on upper left corner as My Yahoo, click on it.

3) Now you can find two main tabs My Main Tab and New Tab

4) Under My Main Tab you will find Add Content tab, click on it.

5) All addons will get displayed there after clicking that tab and below you will find ADD RSS Feed link.

6) Click on that link and you can feed all your favorite RSS in that and it will displayed in your personalized home page and we are done.

Because it is a personalized page, MyYahoo allows you to organize your feeds into separate tabs. This is great if you want to divide your feeds by subject matter. You also have three columns on the main page, and two columns on additional pages that can be used for feeds.

Want to know more about My Yahoo

Those of you interested in increasing the reach and visibility of your RSS feeds, you now have a fast, easy and direct way to submit your those feeds to Google itself, While it is hard to say now how and when Google will start leveraging that RSS-based content to augment, expand and diversify its search capabilities.

You can submit your RSS feeds to the Google personalized homepage.

To add your feeds to Google you need to sign up for a personal account. Once you have done this, you can log into your account. To add a feed just click on the add content link in your personalized account page. It will take you to the page where you can add gadgets as well as you can add your RSS to that page just by clicking Add feed or gadget. By clicking the link a small window will appear. You can now type in the URL of your feed and click add.

The new feeds added to your personal Google homepage will appear showing the feed title and by default the 3 most recent items.Currently only the titles of each item are displayed and clicking this takes you directly to the linked page.

At the very least this allows you to make Google aware of your RSS feeds by creating your own personal homepage and adding your own feeds. Perhaps the future will bring and RSS search facility within Google that will be a boon for RSS publishers.

The Google personalized homepage seems to be treating RSS feeds as news headlines rather than the more techie RSS feed look. This would suggest Google may be going for a simple implementation of RSS so as to appeal to the less techie audience who are mostly unaware of RSS.

If this is the direction Google are taking then it would make sense that Google will be adding some sort of news search facility on the personalized homepage to make it easier for users to search for news that they are interested in. At the moment the RSS feed URL has to be entered which is really only useful to those who are familiar with RSS.

courtesy : http://www.newsniche.com/submit-your-rss-feed-to-google.php

WHAT ARE THE WEB SAFE COLORS?

Web safe colors are sets of colors that will not be altered (dithered) when shown on browsers running on a 256-color browser.   These sets of colors are initially selected by Netscape for use on their browsers.

Web safe colors seem to be irrelevant for today’s computers, but back when the web was invented, many people still use graphics card which supports only 256 colors (or less).  In fact, even today, Netscape browsers seems to still have some problems when displaying colors; while Internet Explorer seems to have better color handling.

Of the 256 possible colors, there are 216 that is designated to be web safe colors; they are shown on the table above.   The remaining 32 colors are used by the operating system (such as Windows 95, or MacOS) and are reserved for the color of title bar, desktop, menu bar, etc.

A web color is usually specified as a 6-digits hexadecimal number.  The 6-digits represents the Red Green Blue value of the color, commonly referred as the RGB values.  Even though there are 6 digits on each number, these six digits are actually three separate pairs of numbers, specifically:
The first two digits are the Red (R) value of the color.
The next two digits are the Green (G) value of the color.
The last two digits are the Blue (B) value of the color.
You might attempt to interpret all six digits as a whole, but that will be meaningless.   Instead, you should always break up the six digits into RGB values like this RRGGBB.  So if the hex value is FF6699, then RR=FF, GG=66, BB=99.

HOW TO DETERMINE IF A COLOR IS WEB SAFE

This is actually quite easy.  All you need to do is to break up the RRGGBB values into the RGB components, and make sure each component are multiples of 33 (hexadecimal).  So, to be web safe, the RR, GG, and BB values must be one of these numbers:

Hexadecimal:      00  33  66  99  CC FF

So, for example: 0033CC is web safe (because RR=00 which is a multiple of 33; GG=33, which is a multiple of 33; and BB=99, which is also a multiple of 33)

If you use web safe colors, The quality of your design ideas will improve and your Web page will look the same on monitors that can display 256 colors or more, on both Macintosh and PC computers.

no matter which computer monitor or which browser is used to open the web site. Any system capable of displaying an 8 bit color system will be able to display a site.

For more examples regarding Logos & other templates you can check with www.ipott.info.

I will be happy to receive your comments.
contact me for any help at imamoo(at)ipott(dot)com

courtesy:http://www.permadi.com/tutorial/websafecolor/index.html

If you’re a template designer or happen to redesign your blog on your own, you must want to know how it looks in other browsers than the one you’re using.

It’s easy enough to open up the few browsers you have installed in your computer and test your newly designed blog in it. But to know for sure that it works ok in all the browsers out there is next to impossible. Just to test in 2 different version of browsers, IE6 and IE7, are tough enough – as I’ve faced with previously.

What is this?

Browsershots makes screenshots of your web design in different browsers.
It is a free open-source online service created by Johann C. Rocholl.
When you submit your web address, it will be added to the job queue.
A number of distributed computers will open your website in their browser.
Then they will make screenshots and upload them to the central server here.

browsershots.org

Browsershots.org is an online free service that takes the URL of the blog to be tested and opens it up in all the different browsers on their machines. Screenshots, or snapshots, of the blog page in each one of the browsers are then taken and uploaded back within a a few minutes into the main page for your viewing pleasure/displeasure. From there, you can immediately see which browser works or not, and zoom in to a full page ( top to bottom of page) to see the details.

How does Browsershots.org work?

The service is very simple to use. The user visits http://Browsershots.org and enter their website’s URL. Browsershots will then take screen-shots of the page using the selected web browsers. Within a few minutes the screen-shots are posted at http://browsershots.org// for viewing.

I will be happy to receive your comments.
contact me for any help at imamoo(at)ipott(dot)com

Last week myself and pottson had discussion about the use xhtml valiadtion. It was nice and it will be usefull to everyone whoever doing website design. So I have given below what it is and how to do that.

what is xhtml :

The Extensible Hypertext Markup Language, or XHTML, is a markup language that has the same depth of expression as HTML, but also conforms to XML syntax.
XHTML is in many ways similar to HTML, but is designed to work with the new eXtensible Markup Language, or XML, that will soon serve as the core language for designing all sorts of new Web applications, in which XHTML will be only one of many “languages.” But, XHTML is designed to work with these other language, so that different documents, in different languages, can be easily mixed together.

Importance of XHTML validation :

XHTML validation ensures that a site is indexed quickly by search engines; it also greatly improves the chances of a website achieving high rank on search engines. More webmasters than ever have started converting their websites into XHTHML-compatible sites.

Get Quality Score from Search Engines by getting your site Validated!

XHTML validation is one of the most vital aspects of search engine optimisation. Unfortunately most search engine optimisation firms ignore the importance of XHTML validation in search engine optimisation.

xhtml validation :

An XHTML document is validated against a Document Type Definition (DTD).
Before an XHTML file can be validated, a correct DTD must be added as the first line of the file.
The Strict DTD includes elements and attributes that have not been deprecated or do not appear in framesets:

The Transitional DTD includes everything in the strict DTD plus deprecated elements and attributes:

The Frameset DTD includes everything in the transitional DTD plus frames as well:

“XHTML Validation can make your site Search Engine Friendly!”

Url for validate your site :

After clicking the check button if you get an error in your page, you will see an error message of “Errors found while checking this document as XHTML 1.0 Strict!” in red color, else you will get a message lke “This document was successfully checked as HTML 4.01 Strict!” in green color. Along with error message they will give suggestion, like actual syntax for the error – you can easily rectify these errors.

I will be happy to receive your comments.
contact me for any help at imamoo(at)ipott(dot)com

Most of the people want to popularise their site. but they forget the website standard and they might not be aware of drawbacks. Having a website with international standard is one way to popularise the organization.

What is w3c?

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is the main international standards organization for the Internet. Complying with W3C standards is voluntary, but failing to do so can result in serious penalties from the major Search Engines.

What is Validation?

Validation is a process of checking your documents against a formal Standard, such as those published by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) for HTML and XML-derived Web document types, or by the WapForum for WML, etc. It serves a similar purpose to spell checking and proofreading for grammar and syntax, but is much more precise and reliable than any of those processes because it is dealing with precisely-specified machine languages, not with nebulously-defined human natural language.

It is important to note that validation has a very precise meaning. Unfortunately the issue is confused by the fact that some products falsely claim to “validate”, whilst in fact applying an arbitrary selection of tests that are not derived from any standard. Such tools may be genuinely useful, but should be used alongside true validation, not in place of it.

Why Validate?

Well, firstly there is the very practical issue that non-valid pages are (by definition) relying on error-correction by a browser. This error correction can and does vary radically across different browsers and versions, so that many authors who unwittingly relied on the quirks of Netscape 1.1 suddenly found their pages appeared totally blank in Netscape 2.0. Whilst Internet Explorer initially set out to be bug-compatible with Netscape, it too has moved towards standards compliance in later releases. Other browsers differ further.

How do I use this service?

Most probably, you will want to use the online Markup Validation service. The simple way to use this service to validate a Web page is to paste its address into the text area on the validator’s home page, and press the “Check” button.

Url for validate your website :

http://validator.w3.org/

After clicking the check button if you get an error in your page, you will see an error message of “Errors found while checking this document as XHTML 1.0 Strict!” in red color, else you will get a message lke “This document was successfully checked as HTML 4.01 Strict!” in green color. Along with error message they will give suggestion, like actual syntax for the error – you can easily rectify these errors.

check the below url which has been already validated with w3c validator with zero error.

http://www.ipott.com/jsp/newsLetter.jsp
http://www.ipott.info/
http://www.ipott.in/

I will be happy to receive your comments.
contact me for any help at imamoo(at)ipott(dot)com