Semiomantics XO with CSS3 and HTML5

Time has come to learn about new technologies available for web designers and developers. All common browsers are increasingly able to read and interpret CSS 3 and HTML5 and about all computers are equipped to read java and jQuery. Therefore new possibilities become available to XO developers which we will focus on during the January Seminar.

XO has evolved over the past 4 years along with WordPress Developments. The theme has become responsive and shows perfectly on smart phones and tablets.

Subsequent to the release of WordPress 3.3.x XO needed some adjustments and updates which we have implemented and tested. New design functions become available for advanced customization. XO remains the most flexible theme for custom development, accessible to most anyone.

The goal of the seminar is to become familiar with XO and it’s new features as well as to learn how CSS3, HTML5 and jQuery allow to adapt XO to most any customer’s needs.

Some of the technical issues we will have a detailed look at are:

• Transparencies with CSS3
• Background Sliders
• Mobile Verions using WPTouch Pro
• Content and Frame sliders with Pro Slider and SlideDeck Pro
• Social Network connectivity with FacePages
• How to make a WP theme responsive (adapting to different screen sizes such as Smart Phones Tablets and bigger)

The most obvious expansions are via plug-ins. We will show how to make the best use of plug-ins for the Mobile Web, Social Networking, Social Media Publishing, Social Network Marketing as well as for more attractive display. Time permitting we will look into additional functions, such as shopping cart or marketing specific scripts.

We also will start looking into another important chapter:

How to convert your XO sites into a Mobile App!

In order to make the understanding easier, we will build a new site during the 2 days event. Please join our pre-seminar call on Thursday to prepare the event by setting up a new XO powered site.

All materials will be provided. You will just need some images/photos, videos and other content you may want to use to populate the XO site.

Saturday and Sunday, 28/29 January, 2012 from 1 pm London time till 9 pm London time.

Tickets are available on our new shop at HIOD.com. Please click on the below image to order.

Discounts as usual for Ycademy Pros: Please mail Bianca at bianca(at)ycademy.com for the coupon code.

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Google Top 10 with Flash Fonts

The use of Flash Fonts is delicate and namely when you use them in Titles. Google Spiders can not read the flash content and it is therefore important to code the scripts to provide readable contents for spiders in parallel to the flash version.

Semiomantics Scripts are tuned to provide optimized readability to storm Google top 10, even when using Flash Fonts.

Flash Fonts

Learn all about Flash Fonts in Blog Titles

Join tonight’s Ycademy call tp learn all about Flash Font powered Titles on WordPress blogs. We will show you how to add flash fonts as well as how to cope with updates of the fontburner plug-in to preserve your customization.

Join: www.yorgotalk.com at 7 pm London time.

Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics. If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader, Email delivery, or Kindle subscription.

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Wordpress Update – Webmaster Training by Ycademy

Tonight at 7 pm London Time: WordPress update. This Training is for Webmasters dealing with Wordpress powered sites as well as for Semiomantics NewsCast users. Login from: http://yorgotalk.com.

Wordpress 2.8.6

The Wordpress update to version 2.8.6 is not a big deal and should not trigger any problems. Just update from your Dashboard using automatic update. The new version includes just two fixes which will not impact on your wp configuration and settings.

Also there are a few plugin updates we will look into.

Semiomantics

We will deal with issuse related to NewsCast – YORGOO Press for interested webmasters.

YORGOO Press

Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics. If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader, Email delivery, or Kindle subscription.

Read also:

• Wave Seminar Hits Google Top 10
• Web Design Workshop 16 – Scroll over Background
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10 Steps to Implement your Facebook Strategy with WordPress

Implementing your Facebook Strategy will be at the center of the November Ycademy Seminar. This hands-on Seminar and Workshop will stretch over two days and build with participants an eye-ball-twisting Facebook presence. See the seminar schedule at the bottom of the post.

The Seminar is designed for WordPress Developers and WP users who are looking for high productivity and customized publishing and marketing solutions.

This topic deals with efficient strategies which will efficiently improve your Facebook presence.

Visit the Semiomantics Facebook Page

Surfing through Facebook we notice some common errors well intended people commit when building their Facebook presence. We will discuss these issues and show you how to eliminate them from your personal or business Facebook.

While content is king, there are different ways of making it accessible to visitors. We will discuss the recent changes Facebook has implemented and show you where the focus should be in order to improve your visibility, traffic and business or network expansion on Facebook.

Function of your strategy we will define and optimize privacy settings in order to grant potentially interested visitors access to relevant information. Privacy, Accessibility and List-building as well as Targeted Communication are the essentials of this key session.

For people looking for you, your business, services or products, your Profile and Info page are of the utmost importance, the more that your info is visible from outside Facebook and therefore Google efficient. We will set up with participants an efficient Info Page.

We will discuss the recent changes implemented by Facebook and how they impact on our strategies.  Friends, Fans and Subscription features impact on the way we expand our network and influence on Facebook.

Overview of the Facebook Page feature. Integration techniques, Apps, Content, Canvas and Pages.

The focus is on the technical set-up of a Facebook Page. As  content we will use a graphic, picture of video.

What is it you actually wish to display on your Facebook page? In fact there is no limit and it depends entirely on your strategy.

This is the center piece of the seminar. Creating Facebook Page right from your WordPress site is now possible. We will set up a reveal page and different Facebook pages depending on participants needs. In fact we show you how to create a whole website in Facebook, straight from your WordPress.

While this works with most any WordPress 3.1 enabled Theme, we will demonstrate the integration with Semiomantics XO.

In fact we will work with a professional plugin modified for Semiomantics XO.

The Seminar will guide you to master the following and more:

• Create Unlimited Facebook Fan Pages with WordPress

• Increase Likes by 150% with Reveal “Like” Tab Gateways

• Unlimited Customization Options When Designing Your Fan Pages

• Create Unlimited Custom Pages with the WordPress Page Editor

• Create Custom Menus and Navigation with Just a Few Clicks

• Comments, Like, Send and Over 50+ Custom Shortcodes for Enhanced Customization

• Facebook Open Graph Integration for Enhanced Facebook Integration and Google SEO

• Auto Post to Facebook From Your WordPress Blog

• Use Your Facebook Albums and Photos on Your Blog and Fan Pages

• Add Google Maps to Your Facebook Fan Pages

• Create Squeeze and Sales Pages with Just a Few Clicks on Facebook

Add Facebook related widgets to your front and/or content pages. Google+ and Twitter buttons. Pull in Facebook Albums, Events, like Buttons and more. Use Facebook Connect to log in to or to register with your blog.

Create content which is only accessible after visitors clicked the “Like” button. A smashing filter which allows you to manage accessibility right from your XO.

Saturday and Sunday November 26/27, 2011.

We start at 1 pm London Time and end at 9 pm London time both days.

You need a WordPress blog preferably with FTP access.

Scripts and all other materials are provided.

We will install the necessary scripts for you previous to the Seminar; please get your Tickets early. If we are not yet in possession of the FTP access to your site, please send it by email to Bianca Gubalke at bianca(at)ycademy.com.

The Price for Participating, Materials and access to recordings is $85.

Click to get your Ticket

Discount as usual for Ycademy Pros. Please contact Bianca Gubalke at bianca(at)ycademy.com for the code or any other question you may have pertaining to the Seminar.

• social community feature like facebook in wordpress
• strategy for facebook wordpress integration
• facebook strategy
• creating efficient blog pages in wordpress
• scheduled facebook page posts
• price create facebook page
• integrate wordpress blog with facebook page
• increase likes on a wordpress post
• implement strategy to add to our number of facebook fan
• auto post to facebook from wordpress

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Copyright © Yorgo Nestoridis - Original Article at Greek Cat Relaxing.

Psychic Readings on Google Top 10

We are observing the development of Psychic Readings on Google Top 10. Bianca Gubalke has referenced our first Psychic Readings entry into Google Top 10 2 days ago.

Today we can see that Google always finds good stuff and references Semiomantics sites efficiently:

Psychic Readings on Google Top 10

This morning we find Auction Talk Live on rank 5 of recent Google Top 10 entries:

Psychic Readings

Psychic Readings is a hot keyword as there are loads of publications targeting the term daily. To reach Google Top 10 on the general search quickly we estimate that we will need a campaign with multiple good posts by Delia O’Riordan published efficiently.

Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics. If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader, Email delivery, or Kindle subscription.

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• Google Top 10 again
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Most psychic readings do not begin as spectacularly as mine had.

Psychic Readings

First off,  there was the statement that my sister and I were both psychic and then the question about the crystal skull!  Brigid and I exchanged one of our ‘how weird is this’ looks as our psychic walked into her living room and set the tea cups on a table. Before either of us could say anything, she asked who wanted to go first? Brigid urged me on as this was her gift to me, so off I went to the ‘reading room’ a small, pleasant room that overlooked the garden.  The psychic wasted no time. She handed me a page of notes that she had written before Brigid and I arrived.  That was basically my reading! And what a reading it was!

She had noted physical characteristics that were spot on,  issues that I was trying to resolve at the time, predicted a trip that would happen three years in the future to a place I did not fancy going,  predicted some financial events that were still in the future, and alerted me to a health problem that my husband would face within a few months time and told me that I would one day be doing what she was doing: I would be a professional psychic!

When I finished reading, I looked at her in astonishment.  She had ‘received’ all of this in meditation the day before the reading.  Remember, she had only my sister’s first name and no other information about us.  Was she accurate?  Judge for yourself.

Her physical description of me: height, hair and eye colour, even the fact that I had had surgery for a rare condition twenty years previously, were eerily accurate.  I had no plans to travel–but, unbeknownst to me  my mother did and within three years we were in Eire, a country would not have chosen as a destination. The financial events she foresaw also happened and my husband had bowel surgery (sixth months later) for a condition that had not yet shown itself at the time of the reading.

As we went over the details of the reading, other revelations emerged but as my profession was definitely ‘left brain’ at the time and I had gone to great lengths to hide my ‘psychic side’ from colleagues and even friends, I could not imagine being a professional psychic.  But on that point ,too, she proved correct. To be continued…

nestoridis posted a photo:

Athens

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Copyright © Yorgo Nestoridis - Original Article at Athens.

nestoridis posted a photo:

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Copyright © Yorgo Nestoridis - Original Article at Syros.

nestoridis posted a photo:

Agapi

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Copyright © Yorgo Nestoridis - Original Article at Agapi.

nestoridis posted a photo:

Monastery

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Copyright © Yorgo Nestoridis - Original Article at Monastery.

nestoridis posted a photo:

Evia North

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Copyright © Yorgo Nestoridis - Original Article at Evia North.

nestoridis posted a photo:

Evia North

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Copyright © Yorgo Nestoridis - Original Article at Evia North.

nestoridis posted a photo:

Evia North

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Copyright © Yorgo Nestoridis - Original Article at Evia North.

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Copyright © Yorgo Nestoridis - Original Article at Facebook Pages.

Important Webmaster Training

Tonight’s webmaster training will take place at 8 pm London time at Yorgotalk. The main focus will be on cleaning your WordPress database to assure smooth functioning of your site.

Important: we will not make available any recordings of the session as the topic is delicate and errors may lead to the destruction of your blog. We prefer to accompany you when doing the operations and guide you with individual choices and challenges.

Besides the above we will edit an Photo or image simply with Windows tools.

Paint

Live Gallery

Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics. If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader, Email delivery, or Kindle subscription.

Read also:

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Web Design Workshop 17 – Resizing Large Background Image

Web Design Workshop 17 follows Workshop 16 where we discussed scrolling content over fixed backgrounds. Using large images and pictures as backgrounds, we need to pay particular attention to the concerned file size.

Large Background Image Marble Stadium

For the purpose of this exercise let’s use a photograph of the Marble Stadium which has been constructed for the 1896 Olympics in Athens.

Marble Stadium Athens

The original file is quite large with 2048 x 1536 pixels. This is the dimension we want to load to the Semiomantics XO as background image to allow visitors using resolutions up to 2048 to have a background in one piece.

A picture of this dimension comes usually with 3.5 to 4.5 MB from the camera to the computer.

Download Background Image

Download the image HERE. It is already reduced to about 800 KB, which is still much too big to serve as a background.

Save to disk and decompress the file.

Edit the image in Gimp or Photoshop

First let’s give it a long shut and save with 20% quality settings, and all other parameters optimized for smallest file output:

Gimp Settings

With Photoshop you get a similar result:

Photoshop Settings

With both above settings you end up with a weight of about 105 KB.

Compare the details:

Sample from 800 KB picture:

Sample Marble Stadium

Sample from 105 KB Image:

Sample 1 Marble Stadium

How about reducing further? Yes, we can!

Use a blur filter such as Gauss set to 2.5 and you end up with 62 KB only; see the detail:

Gaussian Blur

Of course this blur and reduction of quality may be extreme; however a blur factor of 0.5 to 1.00 could make sense as blur optically sends the background back and helps to put more emphasis on the foreground (your content) provided your content images are sharp …:-).

Example: Blur 2.0 but 30% quality output:

30 pct with 2.0 Blur

Wow, this his is a lean 79 KB! Click a few times on the pic till you get full size.

Apply the Background to the Site

Let’s load the image to our image folder in the Semiomantics XO theme folder and adapt the style sheet.

My image is called marble1300.jpg and I want it to be fixed so that the content can scroll over it:

body {
background: #000000 url(images/marble1300.jpg) repeat-x;
background-attachment: fixed;
margin: 0 auto;
font-size: 14px;
padding: 0;
}

This is what I get on my 1680 x 1050 resolution monitor (click to view in overlay):

As I would like to see more of the stadium and place my site “into” the stadium, I cut off 250 pixels about from the top of the image whic reduces the image size by a few pixels and I reload it to get my final result:

Background Image size 2048 x 1300 pixels and 76.1 KB, that’s over 10 times lighter than the original.

Have a look at the site for as long as these background settings are loaded HERE.

Ycademy Web Design Workshop

Join tonight’s Ycademy Web Design Workshop for your customized implementation.

Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics. If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader, Email delivery, or Kindle subscription.

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How to let your Content Scroll over the Background

Scr5olling over a background image may save resources, namely if you use a large background picture. Also it gives you more control over the way your blog displays on different monitors and with different resolution settings.

On my design blog you see an example.

Transparent WordPress scrolls over Background

Background CSS

CSS lets any element have a background image and or color. Using the appropriate standard properties, you are in control of the background.

Our Web design Workshops 6 and 11 have already developed the topic.

CSS Background Properties

CSS goes beyond the background atributes of HTML.

The CSS Background Properties are:

• background-image
• background-attachment
• background-repeat
• background-position
• background
• background-color

Background Attachment

In order to control scrolling or not scrolling over the background we need to define the background attachment.

The background-attachment property can take two values: scroll or fixed. The default value is “scroll” meaning that the background scrolls with the content.

If we want to obtain a static background and scroll content dynamically over that background, then we use the value “fixed”.

CSS Fixed Background Example with Semiomantics XO

On the mentioned Design Blog, the body background style is defined as follows:

body {
background: #fff2d4 url(images/wall1680c.jpg) repeat-x;
background-attachment: fixed;
margin: 0 auto;
padding: 0;
font-size: 14px;
color: #000125;
}


We are interested in the following two lines:

background: #fff2d4 url(images/wall1680c.jpg) repeat-x ;
background-attachment: fixed;

As you see the background color is defined with a color and an image (the color may load faster). The image has a width of 1680 pixels. We tile the image horizontally for the case that visitors may use larger resolutions than 1680 pixels wide. Vertical tiling is not really required as we scroll over the background. (Of course some visitors with a mega screen may have a vertical resolution bigger than the 1250 pixels of the image, but the bottom of the image fades into white).

The second line defines the background attachment: here we use fixed.

Now our page content scrolls over the background.

Note: Make sure your background image is not too heavy! On the Design Blog I have reduced 4.5 MB to 130 KB which is still big but it opens fast enough with most visitor’s ADSL line.

Web Design Workshop by Ycademy

Join tonight’s Ycademy Web Design Workshop16 at 8 pm GMT (London) where we will step by step apply the above. We will resize an image for the purpose of the background and then edit the style sheet to implement the fixed background effect.

Author: Yorgo Nestoridis, Media Marketing & Publishing, Founder of YORGOO Publishing, YORGOO Press and Semiomantics. If you enjoyed reading the above, please consider following future tips and strategies by RSS reader, Email delivery, or Kindle subscription.

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On YORGOO Booster you can use the YORGOO Ads Plugin for 3 types of ads, the top, bottom and custom ads.

The Custom ad is an add you insert when editing a post using the corresponding tag.

Here is a sample of such an ad:

[yorgooads]

YORGOO Custom Ads support most any format as you can see and they come in handy when you want to associate your preferred product to a specific post.

Try them out and play with content: make it interesting for the visitor, knowing it’s a distraction, but a rewarding distraction for you as the publisher.

Do you like my search insert?

Join tonight’s web master training at 8 pm GMT at yorGOtalk and tweak your own insert. By the way, the idea is: you can target any keyword instead of doing a belly button ego centric one as I show here:-).

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On YORGOO Booster you can use the YORGOO Ads Plugin for 3 types of ads, the top, bottom and custom ads.

The Custom ad is an add you insert when editing a post using the corresponding tag.

Here is a sample of such an ad:

[yorgooads]

YORGOO Custom Ads support most any format as you can see and they come in handy when you want to associate your preferred product to a specific post.

Try them out and play with content: make it interesting for the visitor, knowing it’s a distraction, but a rewarding distraction for you as the publisher.

Do you like my search insert?

Join tonight’s web master training at 8 pm GMT at yorGOtalk and tweak your own insert. By the way, the idea is: you can target any keyword instead of doing a belly button ego centric one as I show here:-).

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Copyright © Yorgo Nestoridis - Original Article at Do You Like My Ad?.