Importance of Ensuring your Template/Web Design Browser Compatibility

Just recently, I tried using Internet Explorer (IE) to view some of my blogs, and to my surprise I found out that some templates that I were using had a browser incompatibility problem with IE.

Luckily for me, it just dropped one of the sidebars, and did not jumble the contents, although the contents are still readable, it still caused me some disappointment 'cause I only noticed it yesterday and to think that I had been using the said template for almost a year now.

What causes browser incompatibility anyways, and how come most of the time it only affects IE and not the other browsers?

Well, browser incompatibility results from the way our HTML with CSS and XHTML codes are interpreted by the browser that we use. 

Do remember that whenever we try to  access a website, our system downloads this codes and our browser interprets them. 

HTML with CSS and XHTML codings have already evolved in time. If the browser that we are using to surf the web is outdated, there is a great chance that it will interpret websites developed using the newer HTML with CSS and XHTML standards differently. 

But why is it that even if  I'm already using the latest web browser, I still encounter this kind of problem?

Although most web sites nowadays were developed using the W3C standards that helps resolve this problem in the case of IE, it was designed to use a different standards in interpreting these codes, unlike Firefox and Chrome that are W3C standards compliant.

Since HTML with CSS and XHTML codes can be written in many ways, and is still expected to produced the same type of output, when a different standards are used to read this codes, the end result is browser incompatibility -- which simply means the inability of a browser to correctly interpret HTML and CSS codes used in a website.

In my case, what caused the problem was the width setting of the sidebars.  For Goggle Chrome and Firefox, the width was interpreted correctly, but differently by IE.

The remedy, I simply increased the total width of the template from 980 to 1000.

The lesson learned?

Before you decide to use web templates that were developed by others for your website or blogger, never forget to check if this template was tested with other browsers, less you encounter same problem as I did.

Luckily enough for me, it only caused a slight problem, but what if it caused a problem that jumbled your contents? 

Google Webmaster Tool

If you want to know your websites standing and the possible problems that Google has encountered when its Bot crawls your website/s or blog, Goggle Webmaster Tools can help a lot.

By adding your site to Goggle Webmaster Tools, you will be able to:

• analyze search queries that are related to your site;
• see links to your site;
• know common keywords that goggle found during its queries;
• see your sites internal links;
• submit site maps that could help goggle bot when crawling your site;
• removed indexed deleted pages on your site;
• and other information that could help you in your Goggle search engine ranking.

Aside from these features, it also has diagnostic capabilities that can inform you of possible malware presence, crawl errors that the Goggle bot has/have encountered, crawl statistics and HTML suggestions regarding your meta tags and possible non-indexable pages.

This tool was really helpful to me that I have eventually added all my blogs in it.

Why not try and see for your self?

Google Browser for Windows, Mac and Linux

All Internet surfers cannot deny the importance of web browsers.  It is the application that we use to surf the web.  

Sadly, there exist a problem when it comes to the availability of browsers that could be use over the different Operating Systems (OS) and Computer Systems that are currently available, since not all web browsers are designed to run on multiple OS or multiple systems.

This is where Goggle Chrome or Chrome, developed by Google comes in. 

Goggle Chrome browser where designed so that it could could be run over three different platforms, namely: PC, Mac and Linux.

Designed for web surfers that requires speed, security and simplicity.  It also has lots of features that is readily available depending on user preferences.

I use Google Chrome to test web layout compatibility issues, being a web developer and a blogger by hobby, it allows me to see compatibility issues that I might miss when designing and developing web layouts.

You can download Goggle Chrome by clicking Here.  For on-line instructions you can click here.

Firefox

For more than a year now, I had been using Firefox as my primary web browser.

Not only do I find it more useful in blogging but the add-ons that a user can deploy is far more than what I had expected when I first installed and actually used it.

Take for example this utility add-on that I'm currently using to write this post.

This utility is called Scribefire. A utility designed for blog writers that allows us to publish our post without actually manually logging into my domain.

As a blogger that uses this utility, I can easily view my previous post, add tags and just publish or edit my post by just clicking a single button, making my life easier than meets the eye.

Aside from this, another Firefox feature that really helps me a lot, is its tab capability, which allows me to view and visit different sites without necessarily running another browser, thus, limiting memory usage and conserving processor power.

And of course its security feature had allowed me to browse pages even in the absence of a web filtering software.

There are still lots of features and add-ons that I haven't tried yet, but so far I'm really satisfied with this web browser.

So why not try it and see for yourself.

Auto Play Your Embeded Youtube Videos

There are times that a blog post can be made more fascinating and enticing by auto-playing embedded videos.

In my previous post, I had written about the topic of embedding YouTube videos on Blogger. This time I will be writing in how to auto-play it.

So how do we do this to an embedded YouTube video?

I had already mentioned before that a script needs to be generated in order to post YouTube Videos on blogger. Once we generate this script, we only need to copy paste it to our blog.

Eventually an auto-play option is not included when the script is generated, to make this possible, we need to add the following code "&autoplay=1" to our auto-generated script.

The next question that comes now, is where do we add this additional code?

• Open the HTML/JavaScript Element or the blog where your embedded YouTube video is located, and look for the following block of code that starts with:

• Add the code at the very end of this block of code.

Example:

• Save your element, or re-publish your post.
• View your blog, and see how your embedded YouTube video auto-plays once your page loads.

Add YouTube videos to your Blogger

Imagine this situation, you were surfing the web, specifically looking for you're favorite music, then all of a sudden, you were able to find this song posted in YouTube.

Since you're also a blogger, you decided to post this video on you're blog. How do you that?

Luckily for us YouTube has an embed utility button that is located at the lover right side of the video viewer which we can use to post our favorite videos to blogger.

To post the selected video we do the following:

1. Click on the "embed" button.
2. Check on the item/s that you would like to include.
3. Click on your preferred video size, or simply type the size.
4. Highlight and copy the code that was generated. **
5. Login to your blogger account.
6. Select your blog.
7. Click on the design tab.
8. Select where you would like to place your video.
9. Click on "Add a Gadget"
10. Select "HTML/JavaScript"
11. Paste your copied code to the configuration window that will appear.
12. Click on save.
13. Check your embedded video.

Note:

** (The script that you will be posting to your blogger site is generated as you set the parameters)

Wi-fi Anyone?

More than a month ago, my boss asked me to study the possibility and the amount that would be needed to make our Institution a wi-fi enabled facility.

Although during those times wi-fi has already been around for a long-long while and is no longer new to me, frankly speaking, I never really had any Idea how to incorporate and deploy the system within our internal networks.

Luckily for me, a client of ours asked me to do the same, and in less than a week I was able to request a test unit and try a test configuration and temporary deployment.

To my surprise, the set-up in itself was really easy and the only thing that I really needed to do was to reconfigure a setting or two, open a port on our firewall and there it goes.

Well, with plug and play technology nowadays, I really wonder for how much longer will a network system technician be of any use in the future?

I guess, a retraining is not really a bad idea...hehehehe.