SOHO : Small Office Home Office
Freeware - Opensource software tips, tricks, tweaks & fixes for managing, securing, improving the performance of SOHO Desktop, Laptop, Networks

Sunday, February 21, 2010

How to use .htaccess and .htpasswd files for basic authentication


steps to password protect a folder with .htaccess
  1. create .htaccess file
  2. create .htpasswd file
  3. edit httpd.conf file
Creating .htaccess file
Create a file with below text as guide and save it as .htaccess. Place this in the folder which has to be protected. The .htaccess file also protects subdirectories of the directory in which it is placed.
AuthUserFile /var/www/html/private/.htpasswd AuthGroupFile /dev/null AuthName "My Private Directory" AuthType Basic
require user username
Note:  
  • AuthUserFile is the absolute path to the .htpasswd file 
  • require user is where you enter the username of those who you want to have access to that portion of your site. Note that using this will allow only that specific user to be able to access that directory. This applies if you had an htpasswd file that had multiple users setup in it and you wanted each one to have access to an individual directory. If you wanted the entire list of users to have access to that directory, you would replace Require user xxx with require valid-user
  • AuthName is the name of the area you want to access. It could anything, such as "EnterPassword". You can change the name of this 'realm' to whatever you want, within reason. 
  • AuthType Basic because we are using basic HTTP authentication.
Creating .htpasswd file
This file contains the usernames and passwords of those individuals who we authorize access to our directory, and subdirectories. Log into the box with putty and in shell Type htpasswd -c .htpasswd username to create the .htpasswd file and add "username" to list of authorized users. The program will initially prompt you for a password and then ask you to verify it.OR use online tool  http://www.htaccesstools.com/htpasswd-generator/
For security, you should not upload the htpasswd file to a directory that is web accessible (yoursite.com/.htpasswd), it should be placed above your www root directory. You'll be specifying the location to it .in .htaccess file and should be uploaded as ASCII and not BINARY.

Setting the directory permissions

It is not advisable to use the chgrp-httpd script if you are protecting files in your CGI directory. Instead, chmod the protected directory to 711.
This final step is important to make make sure people with local accounts can't access your files via the unix file system. Set the correct permissions on your protected folder by running the following command from within the directory you want to protect:
chgrp-httpd
Editing httpd.conf file
  • The file httpd.conf can be found in /etc/httpd/conf/httpd.conf 
  • Find and change AllowOverride None to AllowOverride All
    # AllowOverride controls what directives may be placed in .htaccess files. # It can be "All", "None", or any combination of the keywords: #   Options FileInfo AuthConfig Limit     AllowOverride All

Accessing Your Protected Site

Your password protected site should now be available:
https://www.yourdomain.com/protected folder/
To enable .htaccess for virtual hosts add this to httpd.conf
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Monday, February 15, 2010

how to setup cron jobs in linux?

Setting up cron jobs in Unix and Solaris
cron is a unix, solaris utility that allows tasks to be automatically run in the background at regular intervals by the cron daemon. These tasks are often termed as cron jobs in unix , solaris.  Crontab (CRON TABle) is a file which contains the schedule of cron entries to be run and at specified times.
This document covers following aspects of Unix cron jobs

1. Crontab Restrictions
2. Crontab Commands
3. Crontab file – syntax
4. Crontab Example
5. Crontab Environment
6. Disable Email
7. Generate log file for crontab activity

1. Crontab Restrictions
You can execute crontab if your name appears in the file /usr/lib/cron/cron.allow. If that file does not exist, you can use
crontab if your name does not appear in the file /usr/lib/cron/cron.deny.
If only cron.deny exists and is empty, all users can use crontab. If neither file exists, only the root user can use crontab. The allow/deny files consist of one user name per line.

2. Crontab Commands
export EDITOR=vi ;to specify a editor to open crontab file.
crontab -e    Edit your crontab file, or create one if it doesn’t already exist.
crontab -l      Display your crontab file.
crontab -r      Remove your crontab file.
crontab -v      Display the last time you edited your crontab file. (This option is only available on a few systems.)

3. Crontab file
Crontab syntax :
A crontab file has five fields for specifying day , date and time followed by the command to be run at that interval.
*     *     *   *    *        command to be executed
-     -     -   -    -
|     |     |   |    |
|     |     |   |    +----- day of week (0 - 6) (Sunday=0)
|     |     |   +------- month (1 - 12)
|     |     +--------- day of        month (1 - 31)
|     +----------- hour (0 - 23)
+------------- min (0 - 59)
* in the value field above means all legal values as in braces for that column.
The value column can have a * or a list of elements separated by commas. An element is either a number in the ranges shown above or two numbers in the range separated by a hyphen (meaning an inclusive range).

Notes
A. ) Repeat pattern like /2 for every 2 minutes or /10 for every 10 minutes is not supported by all operating systems. If you try to use it and crontab complains it is probably not supported.
B.) The specification of days can be made in two fields: month day and weekday. If both are specified in an entry, they are cumulative meaning both of the entries will get executed .

4. Crontab Example
A line in crontab file like below removes the tmp files from /home/someuser/tmp each day at 6:30 PM.
30     18     *     *     *         rm /home/someuser/tmp/*
Changing the parameter values as below will cause this command to run at different time schedule below :
min hour day/month month day/week Execution time
30 0 1 1,6,12 * – 00:30 Hrs  on 1st of Jan, June & Dec.

0 20 * 10 1-5 –8.00 PM every weekday (Mon-Fri) only in Oct.

0 0 1,10,15 * * – midnight on 1st ,10th & 15th of month

5,10 0 10 * 1 – At 12.05,12.10 every Monday & on 10th of every month
:
Note : If you inadvertently enter the crontab command with no argument(s), do not attempt to get out with Control-d. This removes all entries in your crontab file. Instead, exit with Control-c.

5. Crontab Environment
cron invokes the command from the user’s HOME directory with the shell, (/usr/bin/sh).
cron supplies a default environment for every shell, defining:
HOME=user’s-home-directory
LOGNAME=user’s-login-id
PATH=/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:.
SHELL=/usr/bin/sh
Users who desire to have their .profile executed must explicitly do so in the crontab entry or in a script called by the entry.

6. Disable Email
By default cron jobs sends a email to the user account executing the cronjob. If this is not needed put the following command At the end of the cron job line .
>/dev/null 2>&1

7. Generate log file
To collect the cron execution execution log in a file :
30 18 * * * rm /home/someuser/tmp/* > /home/someuser/cronlogs/clean_tmp_dir.log

when you edit a cron file using crontab -e

crontab use vi editor, to start typing hit the Esc key on your keyboard followed by i key to insert then you could start typing

to save hit the Esc key on your keyboard, then semi colom i.e :
followed by wq
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Sunday, February 14, 2010

how to check mysql version?

mysql -u root -p -e status|grep 'Server version'
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How to enable control alt delete logon in win 7?

Any little piece of added security is embraced and when Microsoft did away with secured login’s via Control – Alt – Delete I needed to find another way to enable it. When you have to press that key combo now referred to as CAD you are making sure that the login window is an actual login window and not a password stealing application. Also when remotely connecting to a machine and automating tasks (as in an attack) this can add an additional  step for the hackers to overcome. Any little bit helps!
Here is what we need to do to fix the situation (found from CNet):
Go to the old Start button, now just a Windows logo. In the search box, type netplwiz and press enter or click on the result.
A pane called user accounts will appear.
Click on the Advanced tab.
At the bottom of the screen, under secure log-on, check "require users to press Ctrl + Alt + Delete"
Now when you log-in to your computer, you’ll have a rather boring pane asking for Ctrl-Alt-Del, which you’ll have to press before you can get to the log-in page.
Continue Reading...

create your own blogger template

 Source : http://www.elated.com/articles/create-your-own-blogger-template/

Create Your Own Blogger Template


Tutorial by Matt Doyle. Level: Intermediate. Published on 2 December 2009 in Website Authoring.
A step-by-step guide to creating your own beautiful Blogger template. Learn about Blogger tags, how to use images, and how to tweak your template CSS.
HTML code and palm treesOne of the nice things about Google's free Blogger service is that you can easily change the look of your blog. On a simple level, you can tweak the blog's fonts and colours via the Fonts and Colors tab in the admin area, and add, remove and reposition blog widgets with the Page Elements tab.
If you want to alter your blog's design more radically, though, then you'll need to change your blog's template. There are many nice free Blogger templates available for download, but for a really professional job and a unique look, you'll want to create your own template.
This easy-to-follow tutorial walks you through all the steps needed to make your own Blogger template. To save time, you'll start from an existing HTML template — our free Tope PageKit — rather than creating a template entirely from scratch. However, once you've followed this tutorial you'll have the knowledge to create your own Blogger template from the ground up.

Overview

Here's how you're going to create your Blogger template:
  1. Download the Tope PageKit and extract it
  2. Create a test blog in Blogger for testing your template
  3. Open a copy of Tope's index.html file in your text editor
  4. Replace the top chunk of the template code with the standard Blogger code
  5. Insert the CSS from the Tope template's style sheet, style.css
  6. Remove the right-hand sidebar from the template
  7. Upload the template images and fix up the image URLs in the template
  8. Test the template
  9. Add the Blogger tags to the template
  10. Test again
  11. Tweak the template CSS to work with the Blogger markup
  12. Test the finished template
Ready? Let's get going!

1. Download the Tope PageKit

Grab the Tope PageKit zip file and extract it to a folder called tope on your computer. When you open the folder you should see the files that make up the Tope template, including index.html and style.css.

2. Create a test blog

It's a good idea to create a separate blog for developing and testing your template. This will allow you to play with the look of your template without affecting your main blog.
To create your test blog, follow these steps:
  1. Log into your Blogger account.
  2. In the Dashboard, click Create a Blog.
  3. Enter a title, such as "My Test Blog", and a unique blog address (URL) — it doesn't matter what you use.
  4. Fill in the word verification section, then click Continue.
  5. On the "Choose a template" page, click Continue again.
  6. Your test blog has been created. Click the Start Blogging button.

3. Copy the PageKit's index.html file to a new Blogger template file

Most PageKits come with 2 template pages:
  • index.html for the site homepage, and
  • page.html for all of the site's inner pages
Blogger uses just 1 template page for all pages of a blog, so you'll base your Blogger template on the PageKit's index.html page and ignore the page.html file.
Now, open the tope folder on your hard drive and find the index.html file. Copy this file to a new file called tope.xml. This will be your Blogger template. Open tope.xml for editing in your favourite text editor (I like to use Notepad on Windows and TextWrangler or vim on the Mac).

4. Replace the top chunk of the PageKit's markup with Blogger's

A Blogger template contains various custom tags and attributes in its html and head elements. These tags are needed by Blogger to display the blog pages, so you'll need to replace these 2 elements in the tope.xml file with the following Blogger code:




  
    
    
    
  
To replace the code, follow these steps:
  1. Open tope.xml in your text editor.
  2. Select the above chunk of code and choose Edit > Copy.
  3. In tope.xml, select everything from the start of the file down to the closing tag, and choose Edit > Paste.
  4. Save the tope.xml file.

5. Insert the Tope CSS

Blogger templates use special elements to identify various parts of the template, such as the blog posts and sidebar widgets.
The first Blogger element you'll work with is called b:skin, and it's inside the head element you just pasted in. Amongst other things, the b:skin element holds the template's CSS styles, so you need to insert Tope's CSS into this element. Follow these steps:
  1. In the tope folder, open the tope.xml and style.css files in your text editor.
  2. Select the entire contents of the style.css file and choose Edit > Copy.
  3. In the tope.xml file, select the /* Insert CSS Here */ line near the top of the code, and choose Edit > Paste.
  4. Save tope.xml.

6. Remove the right-hand sidebar

The Tope PageKit has a 3-column layout:
  • The site title/menu column on the left (


    )
  • The main content column in the middle (


    ...
    )
  • A narrow sidebar column on the right (


    )
You'll use the left menu column to hold the Blogger sidebar widgets, and the main content column for the main Blogger content (i.e. the blog posts). This means that you don't need that right-hand sidebar column, so rip it out and extend the main content width to fill the gap.
To do this, first remove the
section from the tope.xml file. You should now have the following markup between your and comments:

    

    



Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, con sectetuer adipiscing elit, sed diam nonnumy nibh eeuismod tempor inci dunt ut labore et dolore magna ali quam erat volupat. Ut wisi enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud exerci tation ullamcorper suscipt laboris nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum irure dolor in henderit in vulputate velit esse consequat. Vel illum dolore eu feugiat nulla facilise at vero eos et accusam et ius to odio dignissim qui blandit prae sent luptatum zzril delenit aigue dous dolore et molestias exceptur sint occaecat cupidiata non simil pro vident tempor sunt in clulpa qui officia deserunt mollit anium ib est abor um et dolor fuga. Et harumd dereud facilis est er expedit distinct. Nam liber tempor cum soluta nobis eligend option congue nihil impediet doming id quod mazim placeat facer possim omnis voluptas assumenda est, omnis repellend. Temporibud auteui quinusd et aur office debit aut tum rerum neccessit atib saepe eveniet ut er molestia non recusand. Itaque earud rerum hic ten tury sapient delectus au aut prefer zim endis dolorib asperiore repellat.
Now remove the corresponding #sidebar selector from the CSS (inside the b:skin element). Delete the following code:

/* Sidebar area */

#sidebar
{
  float: right;
  width: 190px;
  padding: 2px 10px 0 0;
  font-size: 0.9em;
  line-height: 1.2em;
}
Next, you need to increase the width of the main content area so it stretches to fill the gap where the sidebar was. To do this, find the #main-content selector in the CSS and change the width from 340 pixels to 550 pixels:

/* Main content area */

#main-content
{
  float: left;
  width: 550px;
}

7. Upload the template images and adjust the image URLs

Tope's index.html template file uses 3 images:
  • palms-big.jpg (the top-right palm trees image)
  • pinstripe.png (the repeating pinstripe page background)
  • footer-rule.png (the white dotted border above the page footer)
You need to upload these images to the Web somewhere so that the blog template can use them. The easiest approach is to upload them to your own website (if you have one), although it's also possible — albeit fiddly — to upload them to Blogger by creating a blog post.
Here's where I uploaded my images:
The original Tope template references its images in an images folder relative to the template page. You'll need to adjust these references to point to the images you uploaded.
In tope.xml, find the references to:
  • palms-big.jpg (in the "main-image" img tag towards the bottom of the file)
  • pinstripe.png (in the body CSS rule)
  • footer-rule.png (in the #page-footer CSS rule)
and replace the URLs with those of your uploaded images. My new code looks like this (changes highlighted in bold):

Palm trees

body
{
  margin: 0;
  padding: 0;
  color: #393b4a;
  background: #d4d5c5 url(http://www.elated.com/res/Image/articles/authoring/create-your-own-blogger-template/pinstripe.png) repeat 0 0;
  font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
  font-size: 0.85em;
  line-height: 1.3em;
}

#page-footer
{
  margin: 10px 0 0 0;
  padding: 20px 0;
  background: transparent url(http://www.elated.com/res/Image/articles/authoring/create-your-own-blogger-template/footer-rule.png) repeat-x 0 0;
}

8. Test the template

So far you've taken the Tope template file, added the Blogger html and head code, inserted the CSS from Tope's style.css file, uploaded the images, and fixed up the image URLs. How's it all looking so far?
To test your template:
  1. Log into your Blogger account.
  2. Find your test blog in the Dashboard and click its Layout link.
  3. Click the Edit HTML tab.
  4. Click the Browse button and choose the tope.xml file on your hard drive, then click Upload.
  5. You'll probably see a "Widgets are about to be deleted" warning message. Don't worry, as this is only a test blog. Just go ahead and click Confirm & Save.
  6. Click the View Blog link to view your test blog.
You can see that your test blog now looks pretty much like the Tope homepage template, minus the right-hand sidebar which you removed previously:
Template with no Blogger tags
The template so far — no Blogger tags yet
However, it doesn't look much like a blog! That's because the template body doesn't contain the required Blogger tags to display things like the blog posts and sidebar widgets. You'll add these tags in the following step.

9. Add the Blogger tags

You now need to replace the static content in the template with various Blogger tags to display your blog posts, sidebar widgets, and other dynamic content. The most common types of Blogger tags are:
  • b:section tags, for marking out broad sections of the page such as the header, footer, sidebar, and main content area
  • b:widget tags, for inserting specific widgets (also called gadgets) in the page, such as the blog title/description, the Blog Archive links, and the blog posts themselves.
In this tutorial you'll add a few basic Blogger tags to get your blog template working, but there are a lot more tags that you can add. Find out more about Blogger section and widget tags.

9a. Replace the Site Title section with the Blogger "header" section

First, you'll replace the big "Site Title here" text in the Tope template with the blog title, and the "Introduce the site here with a little bit of copy" text below it with the blog description. The following Blogger tags can be used to display the blog title and description:

    
    
    
To insert the tags, follow these steps:
  1. Select the chunk of code above and choose Edit > Copy.
  2. Open tope.xml in your text editor and select the code between the and comments.
  3. Choose Edit > Paste to replace this code with the copied code.
Your Site Title section in tope.xml should now look similar to this:

    

    
    
    

9b. Replace the Menu section with the Blogger "sidebar" section

Tope's Menu section fills the rest of the left-hand column below the site title. You're going to use this area to display all your Blogger sidebar widgets, rather than Tope's default navigation menu.
Using the same technique shown in Step 9a above, replace the code between the and comments in tope.xml with the code shown below. This creates the Blogger "sidebar" section and adds 3 default widgets: Followers, Blog Archive, and Profile (About Me):

    

    
    
    
    
    

    

9c. Replace the main content dummy text with the Blogger "main" section

You're now going to replace the dummy text in the Tope main content area with the Blogger "main" section tags. This section displays your actual blog posts.
Using the technique shown in Step 9a, replace the dummy Lorem Ipsum text inside the "main-content" div in tope.xml with tags for the Blogger "main" section and "Blog" widget, as shown below:

    



9d. Add the Blogger "footer" section

Finally, you need to add the Blogger "footer" section to the Tope page footer. (You'll keep the PageKits copyright notice and links, as required by the Terms of Use for free PageKits.) The footer won't contain any widgets for now.
Add the "footer" section just above the copyright notice code, as shown below:

  
  




10. Test the template again

Now you can test the dynamic areas of your template. First, add some test content to your blog:
  1. Click your test blog's Settings tab.
  2. Enter some dummy text for the Description field, then click Save Settings.
  3. Click the Posting tab.
  4. Click New Post, then enter some dummy text for the post title and content. You may also like to add some labels. Click Publish Post when you're done.
  5. Repeat the last step a couple of times, so that your blog contains a few dummy posts.
Next, upload your tope.xml template again, as shown in Step 8. View your test blog. You can see that it now looks more like a blog, with your blog header, title, description, sidebar widgets, and blog posts all in place:
Template with Blogger tags
The template with Blogger tags inserted
However, things look a bit rough round the edges. For example, some of the headings are too small, and the spacing of various elements is a bit off. This is due to incompatibilities between the Tope CSS and the HTML generated by Blogger. You'll fix these in the following step.

11. Tweak the CSS

In this step you'll improve the appearance of your tope.xml template by making some tweaks to the CSS in the b:skin section at the top of the file.

11a. Sidebar positioning

It would be good if the sidebar widgets (Followers, Blog Archive and so on) started further down the sidebar, lining up with the date heading in the blog posts area. To do this, you can give the #header element, which comprises the blog title and description, a fixed height. Add the following CSS to the end of the existing CSS in the tope.xml file:

#header
{
  height: 336px;
}

11b. Blog Archive spacing

The Blog Archive links are bit cramped. To space them out vertically, add the following CSS:

#page-header li
{
  margin: 0;
  padding: 0 0 .25em 15px;
  text-indent: -15px;
  line-height: 1.5em;
}

11c. Link underlining

Some links are underlined, while some aren't. For consistency, you can remove underlines from all links, apart from those in the post bodies, by adding the following CSS:

a
{
  text-decoration: none;
}

.post-body a
{
  text-decoration: underline;
}

11d. The About Me section

The About Me section features the author photo and description. Currently this section doesn't have any CSS applied, so it looks pretty messy. You can fix this by adding the following CSS:

.profile-img
{ 
  float: left;
  margin: 5px 5px 5px 0;
  padding: 0;
  border: 1px solid #333;
}

.profile-data
{
  margin: 0;
  font-weight: bold;
  line-height: 1.6em;
  font-size: 0.8em;
}

.profile-datablock
{ 
  margin: 0.5em 0 0.5em;
}

.profile-textblock
{ 
  margin: 0;
  line-height: 1.2em;
  font-size: 0.9em;
}

.profile-link { 
  font-size: 0.9em;
}

11e. Line spacing

The lines of text look a bit cramped vertically. To increase the line spacing, change the line-height property in the body selector from 1.3 ems to 1.5:

body
{
  margin: 0;
  padding: 0;
  color: #393b4a;
  background: #d4d5c5 url(http://www.elated.com/res/Image/articles/authoring/create-your-own-blogger-template/pinstripe.png) repeat 0 0;
  font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
  font-size: 0.85em;
  line-height: 1.5em;
}

11f. Level 3 headings

The post titles, which are h3 heading elements, look far too small. Since they're links, they also inherit the link colours. It would be nicer if they had their own colour.
To fix both of these issues, simply increase the h3 font size from 0.8 ems to 1.3 in the CSS, and add selectors to style the h3 links:

h3
{
  font-weight: bold;
  font-size: 1.3em;
  margin: 0 0 10px 0;
}

h3 a:link, h3 a:active, h3 a:visited
{
  color: #a0854f;
}

h3 a:hover
{
  color: #000;
}

11g. Post footers

The post footers ("Posted by...") could do with a little separation from the post bodies, and it would be good to increase the vertical space between lines of text in the footers. Add the following CSS to space the footers vertically and give them a grey italic font:

.post-footer
{
  margin: 1em 0;
  line-height: 1.6em;
  font: italic normal 100% Georgia, "Times New Roman", Times, serif;
  color: #666;
}

.post-footer div
{
  line-height: 1.6em;
}

11h. Separator bars

It would be nice to have some dotted horizontal bars separating various elements in the page. Add these into tope.xml by adding the following CSS:

.post
{
  margin: .5em 0 1.5em;
  border-bottom: 1px dotted #333;
  padding-bottom: 1.5em;
}

.sidebar .widget, .main .widget
{ 
  border-bottom: 1px dotted #333;
  margin: 0 0 1.5em;
  padding: 0 0 1.5em;
}

11i. Pager links

Individual post pages contain "Newer Post" / "Home" / "Older Post" links at the bottom of the page. You can line these up nicely by adding the following CSS:

#blog-pager
{ 
  text-align: center;
  margin-bottom: 2em;
}

#blog-pager-newer-link
{
  float: left;
}
 
#blog-pager-older-link
{
  float: right;
}

12. Test the finished template

You've now tweaked your template's CSS to get everything looking good. Time to test your finished template!
Re-upload your tope.xml template, as shown in Step 8. View your test blog. It should look much more polished. Try adding a few comments to your posts, and make sure everything looks right. Here's how a blog post page should look:
Finished template showing a blog post page
The finished template showing a blog post page
Nice work! If you want, you can download the finished tope.xml file.
In this tutorial you've learned how to create a basic Blogger template. Blogger lets you take things further, though. For example, you can fully customize each widget by inserting data tags inside the widget tags, and you can even create your own widgets.
Another nice enhancement — particularly if you want others to use your template — is to make the template's fonts and colours tweakable via the Blogger Fonts and Colors tab. To do this, you need to insert Blogger variables into your template.
Happy blogging! :)
Continue Reading...

How to create your own blogger template theme?

BloggerThis tutorial will cover the steps needed to create your own blogger template. Many people have used blogger to run blogs and have wondered how they can make their own theme to use with it. There are a very few hard to find guides on how to do this, so I’ve decided to take up the task to help as many people as I can, create one.

To create a blogger template, you will need a graphic editor (Such as Photoshop, GIMP, or even Paint will do) to create images for backgrounds, post headers, sidebars, etc.. We will get to that later. You will also need an idea or vision about what you want to create. Without that, you are just wasting your time and electricity. Lastly, you will need to know about C.S.S (Cascading.Style.Sheets) and how to operate them. If you do not know how to do that, you cannot apply interesting effects to your newly designed template (Such as: Positioning pictures or text, creating repeated backgrounds, moving around pictures and text and more). A great guide on how to get started with this is available here.
Once you have got everything you need, you should start the C.S.S Framework by putting properties such as

body[ background-color: #000000; margin: 0 auto; font-family: “Trebuchet MS”, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif;
font-size: 14px;}
#title [ font-size: 32px; color: #000011; }
so-on and so forth. A basic list of these tags that were taken from Blogger’s simple white theme are available here: (PDF File) XML Tags Blogger List Of CSS. An easier way to do this would be to find a theme that you like and copy and paste the C.S.S, editing it along the way so that time is saved. The only problem with doing that is that every theme is engineered differently so the tags will change.
After configuring your CSS Stylesheet, you must piece it together in HTML. This can be achieved using similar structures.





Do not forget to reference blogger templates that have already been created for the required widgets that you are supposed to put in certain spots. Without doing this, you could not complete making your own template.
Now comes the grueling part that you can either do yourself which could take hours to finish, or copy from another site and edit accordingly. Blogger is configured using widgets. All your posts are just one big widget hence the code up there. An Example of the code that you could type yourself or copy is:



1















That code translated into human terms controls what goes at the bottom of every post…In this case its the author, time, comment link and labels. To extract the code from other templates, just click the “Expand Widget Templates” button and it is below the stylesheet on a certain template.
Most of creating a template is just trial and error. If you look at the code and try to piece it together bit by bit.. you will eventually succeed and reap the rewards of creating one. I hope this tutorial has covered everything that you will need and comments/suggestions would be greatly appreciated as it would be great if this tutorial would become a one-stop source for all of the Blogger CMS(Content Management System) users.
*Update*
Every different piece of code inside the template does not need to be used and can be modified to fit what you are creating. For example, you don’t need to include a “Labels” section in each post if it will make the design that you create look terrible. Then again, It is all in the eye of the beholder as everyone has different tastes.

source : http://bradblogging.com/blog-design/how-to-create-your-own-blogger-template-theme/
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Friday, February 5, 2010

Free app to record computer screen (a.k.a screencast recorder)

TipCam is the easiest-to-use, FREE screen recorder for Windows XP and Vista. One-click to record, one-click to share.

Easy and intuitive controls allow to record up to 20 minutes of video then review and share them instantly. Store the videos for private use or share with friends, coworkers or everyone with one click to upload and email the video via uTIPu.com service.

Features include:
- Smart Zoom and Pan window can be fixed or follow your mouse cursor
- Adjustable zooming window during recording.
- Free style hand drawing markup during recording.
- Voice-over lets you redo the audio leaving the video as-is.
- De facto web-standard video format Flash Video (FLV).
- Optimized for web delivery. Embed directly into blog, vlog and wiki pages using any FLV player.
- Viewable by anyone anywhere with nothing to download.
- Capable of recording screen activities remotely.

This video shows you how to record your screen using TipCam. It also shows how to zoom and draw while recording.


Download Tipcam
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