Top 10 Tech Web Tips

CSS Menu Writer from Web Assist - Not What I expected, but there’s a back Way In

Much of last week for me was spent using and learning a piece of software that I expected would save me weeks of time.  I thought I was buying a solution that would assist me in creating dynamic CSS menus.

I have coded CSS menus by hand before in the past.  I know how to do it and it is a pain in the neck.  :)  So I was looking for a $100 solution that might save me at least $101 if not more.

I ended up investing about $700 in time learning to use the software and even more importantly learning how NOT to use the software.  It comes with a lot of kNOTs which I had to unravel out of my head.

Once that was accomplished I realized that the software could not be used the way I wanted.  It was not a solution and definitely not the solution I was looking for.

However, it did have a redeeming quality.  That quality even justified the price and possibly my unintentional investment.

The thing is when I test things or when I learn them the best, I usually do it by breaking the rules.  By using something in a way that it was never intended to be used.  For me it is tolerance measurement.

When I tried to make dynamic css menus with CSS Menu Writer with the menus built on Word Press dynamic posts and pages it did not work.

But after learning the ins and outs of the program from a tangent, I learned at the very end of things how to accomplish the trick.

It is possible to do and without having to go through half of the work and endless numbers of nested loops that would normally be prescribed by the very helpful WebAssist tech that ultimately helped me clear up the last few areas of doubt.  I spent all week answering my own questions as this new software was not terribly well documented.

Plus, the documentation it did have (a pdf doc) would not load correctly on my system despite the fact that I have almost all of the Adobe programs and every other pdf I have works fine.  So I had to approach my efforts not knowing how things worked or what to expect if I tried something.

I captured about 20 minutes of 30 second clips showing the software breaking down when I tried to make it do something that it shouldn’t or could not do.

Now I have a bloggers paradox to deal with.  Should I share the know how that I found by writing up a tutorial, should I drop it in a white paper, or should I exploit the potential with my own design work for however long it takes other people to figure out this method or find an actual software solution for dynamic menus in word press installations.

For right now, I am going to ponder it for a while before I make my determination.  Its not like I’m sharing information about travel supplies on a travel blog.  It is something that once shared rapidly loses its value.

Linking to Your Own Images with Blogger Blogs

Here is a tip for blogger bloggers. 

When you have a blogger template, the defaults often times come with images in the template that are hosted on blogblog.com or some other site provided by Google or the maker of the template.  When you use these images, you are missing out on an opportunity to provide one of your own sites some incoming link action on every page.

Copy those images down, and post them up onto your own folder on a domain that you own.  Then update the code location url in the template to point to your domain where the image exists.

Below you can see one image that points to my site at softduit.com (this one has been updated).

You can also see another image that has not yet been updated pointing to blogblog.com.

 

NOTE. above I also placed the image in a directory that had the same name as my blogger blog, distribution business articles.   This also helps to give a bit of a file name association and contextual aspect to the image article as it then points out to the blog of the same name or title.  So if your site is about royal caribbean, then put the directory as royal caribbean as opposed to some generic name like image-file-xyz.