Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Installing Amazon's Product Preview tool

This article is about fixing a problem with installing Amazon's Product Preview feature into your blog or website.

Amazon's Product Preview code:

As you build your Amazon Associates product links through Amazon's website, you might notice that, in the sidebar, there there is a link to put the Product Previews feature into your website.

The instructions say to place the HTML "after your content and before your closing tag", which is fine provided you are willing to accept the disadvantages of editing your template, and are not using a dynamic template.

Is it that easy?

When I first discovered this, in Jan 2010, I tried to install it got this error:

"Your template could not be parsed as it is not well-formed. Please make sure that all XML elements are closed properly.
XML error message: The reference to entity "o" must end with the ';' delimiter."

After a little investigation, I found that this was an example of 3rd party HTML that needed to be "escaped" before it could be put into my template.

In particular, I had to change the & sign to &-amp-;
(but without the dashes, they're there to stop Blogger from display just an ampersand sign on this page!)

For example:

What Amazon gave me:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.co.uk/s/link-enhancer?tag=YOUR-AMAZON-ASSOCIATES-ID&o=2">
</script>
<noscript>
<img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.co.uk/s/noscript?tag=YOUR-AMAZON-ASSOCIATES-ID" alt="" />
</noscript>

What I needed to change it to:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.assoc-amazon.co.uk/s/link-enhancer?tag=YOUR-AMAZON-ASSOCIATES-ID&amp;o=2">
</script>
<noscript>
<img src="http://www.assoc-amazon.co.uk/s/noscript?tag=YOUR-AMAZON-ASSOCIATES-ID" alt="" />
</noscript>

What your readers see:

I don't have Amazon Product Preview installed in this blog, because that's not the effect I'm looing for - but I am going to try to install it into this post.

If I've been successful, then you will see it when you hover your mouse over the Amazon product ad to the right of this paragraph. (Though last time I checked, it had not been successful.)

Lamborghini Murciélago LP670-4 SuperVeloce

Exibida oficialmente no último Salão de Genebra, a versão especial do superesportivo italiano passa a ser trazida para o Brasil pelas mãos da importadora Platinuss, que já conta com uma unidade encomendada, e que aumenta a linha Murciélago por aqui: coupé por R$ 1,5 milhão e Roadster por R$ 1,7 milhão.

Mas não é apenas pelos exorbitantes R$ 2,7 milhões pedidos que este modelo é exclusivo. Se o SuperVeloce não parecer suficiente para indicar o nível do modelo, o número 4 simboliza a tração integral. Enquanto isso, o número 670 é nada menos que a potência do motor, um 6.5 V12, que lhe confere uma relação peso/potência impressionante, de 2,3 kg/cv.

Como era de se esperar, baixo peso e alta potência produzem resultados surpreendentes, como aceleração de 0 a 100 km/h em 3,2 segundos, e velocidade máxima de 342 km/h. As novidades visuais ficam por conta do exterior com acessórios que melhoram a aerodinâmica e o interior com materiais de peso reduzido.

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Land Rover Discovery 4

Levemente re-estilizado, o Discovery chega ao Brasil em sua quarta safra, que oferece três opções de motor distribuídas em três versões, com preço inicial de R$ 179.900. Seu exterior conta com parachoques redesenhados, enquanto faróis e lanternas receberam luzes de LEDs, mas sem ter alterações no formato. A cabine conta com console central inédito, que alberga os controles do ar-condicionado digital e do sistema de computador de bordo, este com tela de 5 polegadas. Os quase 180 mil reais são pedidos pela versão básica S, que vem apenas com o 2.7 V6 a diesel. A intermediária SE pode vir com este motor (R$ 199.900) ou com o 3.0 V6 também a diesel (R$ 215.000). A versão de topo HSE pode vir com o 3.0 (R$ 259.900), ou com o 5.0 V8 (R$ 245.900), este a gasolina.

Saturday, January 16, 2010

Pictues, Albums and Slideshows - Advantanges and Disadvantages

This article summarises the advantages and disadvantages of using individual pictures, album links and slideshows in your blog.

In the Picasa overview article, I described Picasa web albums as a tool that stores individual pictures, grouped into albums. It also has tools that let you display the pictures from an album in a slideshow.

When should you use each type of Picasa item

Really, the answer to this depends on your blog, the amount of time you want to spend, and what you want to show your readers. This table helps to work through the options.

	Advantages	Disadvantages
Individual picture	Quick and easy The best option if you only want one or two photos. You have total control of how the text is shown relative to the picture (with some HTML coding) Readers don't have to click anything - they're shown all the pictures when the page loads.	Very time consuming if you want to do more than a few pictures. Readers have to see/download all the pictures on the page, even if they're only slightly interested. Captions that you've entered in Picasa are not shown to readers.
Album link	Gives readers a "taste" of your set of photos, with them having to download all of them. You can apply extra security (requiring sign-in to view particular albums) Captions you've entered in Picasa are visible	Some readers won't think to click on the album, so will miss out on seeing the photos except for the album cover. Readers who click the link are taken away from your blog to the Picasa-web-albums application to view the photos. Some readers will be confused because they don't understand the Picasa-web-albums application.
As a Slideshow	Readers don't have to leave your Blog to see all the photos. You choose if the slideshow plans when the page is loaded, or only when the reader clicks the play icon. (NB only if you use the slideshow-code generator from Picasa-web-albums. Not currently part of the standard slideshow Gadget) Captions you've entered in Picasa are visible (optional unless you use the standard Gadget)	"All or nothing" - a slideshow includes all the pictures from the selected album, not just a subset. Auto-advancing photos in a slideshow may be very distracting for readers. Readers cannot control how quickly the slides in the slideshow are advanced, and sometimes the caption can appear before the next photo does - this may not be good for readers who have a slow internet connection. (However they do have buttons for previous, pause and next if you don't use the Slideshow Gadget - and they have buttons to take them to the Picasa-web-albums application to view the slideshow).

Putting an album into your sidebar

This article shows how to put an album link into your sidebar (or anywhere that you can put a gadget on your template) in Blogger.

Make your album

Previously I've introduced Picasa and Picasa-web-albums (PWA), and listed some ways that you can link PWA to your blog.

Go to Picasa Web Albums
Check that you have already uploaded the album you want from your PC to Picasa-web-albums.
(and if you haven't, go back to Picasa and upload it now) - and that you are allowed to publish all of the pictures
Choose an album by clicking on it.
The album view opens, showing you a thumbnail of all the photos in it on the left of the screen. On the right of the screen, there is a sidebar of useful tools. One of these is "Link to this Album".
Click on "Link to this Album".
This opens two options, showing the code to use to link to the album in an email, and one with the HTML to embed in a website.
Copy the entry under "HTML to embed in website".

Put it into your blog:

The HTML code that you copied from PWA is just like HTML code from and other 3rd party source, so it can be in stalled the same way: option 1 in this article shows you how to put it into a gadget.

Once it's there, you may like to move it to a new location (while you're still in the layout editor), or centre-align it.

What your readers see:

Amazon recommendations

This puts a picture-link to your album into your sidebar (or wherever you chose to put the gadget): it will have a white border (like the one beside this paragraph) - though you may want to edit the HTML to make it look different.

When a reader clicks on the picture-link they are taken to the Picasa-web-album, where they can view, but not edit, the album you've linked to.

Related Articles:

Picasa & Blogger - Part 1, What is Picasa?

Picasa & Blogger - Part 2, Options for linking Picasa into your Blog

Putting 3rd party HTML into your blog

Centering gadgets

Copyright, blogs and bloggers - copyright applies to pictures too.

Honda Civic LXL

Depois de lançar a variação LXS C para a versão básica, a Honda agora presenteia o Civic com uma nova versão, esta sim intermediária, que traz de volta a sigla LXL, usada na geração anterior, e que agora parte de R$ 66.405, ante R$ 65.745 da básica LXS, R$ 85.610 da topo EXS, e R$ 103.650 da esportiva Si.

As diferenças se resumem à oferta de equipamentos: ainda que o preço da nova versão seja pouco maior que o da básica, a LXL oferece como opcionais sistema de som melhorado com tweeters, volante com detalhes prateados, tampa do porta-malas com forração interna e abertura pela chave, e repetidores das luzes de direção nos retrovisores.

Externamente, a única mudança são as rodas, de liga leve e medindo 16 polegadas, que apresentam desenho exclusivo. Quanto a motor, todas permanecem com o 1.8 16v flex de 138/140 cv e 17,5/17,7 kgfm de torque (gasolina/álcool).

A chegada desta versão também trouxe melhoriasmudanças para todas. O sistema de ar-condicionado foi extensamente revisto, o câmbio automático (de série apenas na EXS e inexistente apenas na Si) foi reprogramado, e a direção assistida agora é elétrica, para evitar a perda de força do motor. Os bancos de couro passam a ser um dos poucos diferenciais entre as versões: inexistentes na LXS, opcionais na LXL, e de série na LXS e Si.

Friday, January 15, 2010

Understanding Picasa (under development)

This article (when finished) will describe in detail how Picasa web albums manages photographs. In the meantime, it's just a stub, put here because I published under this topic heading a long time ago, and never finished it. Apologies for any inconvenience.

All about ...

On your PC, file are stored in folders, and folders can have sub-folders inside them.

In the Picasa application program on your PC, photos are stored in folders, which correspond to folders on your PC. But there are also albums, which are not the same as sub-folders on the PC: an album is a collection of links to photographs within their folders, not of photographs themselves. So if you delete an album, you aren't necessarily deleting the photos too. (NEED TO DOUBLE CHECK THIS)

The same thing is true in Picasa-web-albums: you can create albums, which are logical collections of photographs, and indeed slideshows of these albums.

... more, including diagrams, coming soon

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Saturday, January 16, 2010

Friday, January 15, 2010

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