The Download Munkey : Tracking the Treasure Down …

Nice!

I recently installed the LinkWithin widget for thoo2 who always wanted a more pictorial way of presenting links to related content below each post over at her blog. LinkWithin just happens to be one such free(!) service which fits her needs admirably and comes without any annoying ads (yet )

Heck, the cool people at LinkWithin don’t even require you to register an account to get the widget (currently available for Blogger, WordPress and Typepad blogs). Installation for these blogs is a breeze – simply download the widget, follow the instructions at linkwithin.com and you’re done.

For people on other blogging platforms or are using older WordPress themes, don’t fret as you can still use LinkWithin with a wee bit of tinkering with code to insert some Javascript for the widget.

Of course, there’s a catch to LinkWithin being freely available – whenever anyone clicks on a link via the widget, it redirects to LinkWithin’s servers before navigating to the original link. While the redirection is very quick and unobstrusive, those concerned with privacy and data-tracking might want to take note of this little issue before installing it on their blogs. I personally assume it’s for statistics tracking at Linkwithin’s end but don’t take my word for it

Nice!

For most bloggers, the LinkWithin widget is definitely a quick and very attractive way to add a related content section to each post automatically. I’m very sure that the automated selection of related links for each post will never be as relevant as manually handpicked links but there’s a price to pay for laziness, you know

Check out LinkWithin.

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Automatically Translate Your Website into 13 Languages via Google Translate My Page

Just found this very useful Google Gadget Translate My Page to automatically translate English websites into any of the 13 available languages. Installing this widget on a non-English site usually gives you only one option to translate it into English, but it’s still better than nothing. Now you can attract a larger international audience to your wonderful blogs, especially for those written in English

This Google Gadget works on most sites except those that expressively forbid scripting – meaning self-hosted sites and blogs on Blogspot get to enjoy it while blogs on WordPress.com don’t

© nothing2hide.net

Originally, I used the excellent Global Translator WordPress widget (above)from nothing2hide.net which comes with cute little flags of all languages available for translation. Although Dreamhost offers a fantastic 500+ GB of bandwidth per month, it isn’t exactly that generous in terms of download speed and causes the flag images for the Global Translator plugin to not load on multiple occassions, so I finally gave up and made the switch to Translate My Page last week.

IMPORTANT: The Global Translator WordPress plugin caches the translated pages which can be indexed by search engines, meaning visitors can find your site with non-English keywords. The Translate My Page widget doesn’t so that’s a important consideration if you’re thinking of making the same transition.

Get the script code for Translate My Page at the Google Translate site (top) or if you want additional customizability (widget size, border, default language, etc), visit its Google Gadget page (bottom). There’s more Google Gadgets to embed on your website over at iGoogle.

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A brand new series of technical tips over here @ The Download Munkey, based on her requests

She asked for a favicon for her blog hosted on Blogger so here’s the steps if you’re interested in doing the same for your site.

Although the favicon can be of ICO, GIF or PNG format, Internet Explorer 7.0 seems to occassionally have some issues with formats other than ICO so we’ll use ICOs here.

Create a 16×16 ICO file from your image by going to FavIcon from Pics or using your favourite image editor.

Choose an image from your computer and click Generate Favicon.ico to preview and save your favicon.

After previewing, click Download Favicon to get a zip containing your favicon.

Extract the zip file and upload your Favicon.ico to somewhere like Google Pages since Blogger doesn’t allow uploading of ICO files. Remember to rename your file to something like Favicon1.ico or else you’ll end up displaying Google Pages’s favicon instead

Now you’ll need to login to Blogger and edit the Blogger XHTML template under Template > Edit Html. Remember to backup and save your template via Download my Template first!

Search for the <head> tag in your template and insert the following line after it:

<link rel=’shortcut icon’ href=’XXX‘ type=’image/x-icon’ />

where XXX will be the URL of your favicon. The edited template should look something like the screenshot below.

Save the template and it’s done! Internet Explorer users might need to clear their cache and/or restart Internet Explorer first.

Hooray!

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Blogger Backup Utility by Greg Duncan

I have to settle something important in Real Life™ for the next three weeks and have therefore thought of three possible options and their consequences over the past weekend.

Work on the real life issues and update this site simultaneously.

Articles written by skeletons make for some really dry reading

Work on the updating this site and neglect the real life issue.

Yeah, I know my drawing is really bad but that’s definitely not a friendly shoulder massage

Guess I really only have one option left which means this site will be updated once in a while for the next three weeks.

Everything will return to normal on the 16 October 2007, meanwhile do feel free to peruse the archives or marvel at the works of some of my favourite artists or art, wallpapers and videos.

Or visit some of my daily reads:

1. HungryPrettyMonster – Foodie stuff (usually in Chinese)
2. Brothers Brick – Lego eye kandi
3. Rendered Beauty – More eye kandi
4. JayIsGames – Flash and casual games
5. The Random Gnome’s Random Lair – Indie, Retro and Tabletop Gaming
6. The Meditation Chamber – Cars & Toys
7. Ping.sg – Singaporean blog aggregator
8. gHacks tech news – Techie stuff

More quality links on the right sidebar

Tags: Blogger Life

Here’s the top three posts at The Download Munkey for this month:

Top Cow Comics Wallpapers (The Darkness, Witchblade, etc)
Index Astartes PDFs for Blood Angels & Flesh Tearers
Long Range Shooting Demo

After I made the decision to switch to Google Analytics last month for stat tracking, Google has to acquire Feedburner and offer the TotalStats feature in Feedburner for free

Anyway, below are two reasons why I took out the Feedburner StandardStats tracking code after using Google Analytics.

1. I can finally get an accurate overview of the most popular pages for the month instead of manually tabulating the stats.
2. Google Analytics stats tracking server is definitely faster than the Feedburner server. Previously, this blog would sometimes stop loading when attempting to connect to the Feedburner servers.
3. Google Analytics has more comprehensive statistics as well as the ability to view consolidated stats for any date range. Feedburner StandardStats could only view stats for a single day, the past week or for the current month. TotalStats should have this feature though.

I still miss Feedburner StandardStats’s incoming stats page though – Google Analytics only shows the domain from which your visitors come from but not the actual page on that domain unlike Feedburner.

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