If you are looking for free photos that you can use for your blog or website, you can find them at the Stock.Xchang.  I find normal stockphoto sites annoying since they either give photos with a very large resolution that  one will have to resize afterwards.  Or they show you a note that the picture you desire can be downloaded for a fee. At Stock.Xchng, I don’t have to worry about that.

If you are looking for high quality JPG files for your website to use as headers or as category images (for blogs), go to DreamTimes.  They have a wide collection of searchable free stock photos that are high quality (with resolutions reaching 3400 in width).  Free downloads however require membership.  If you don’t like registering for free downloads, try the stock photos at DesignsbyDarren.  They are excellent too but fewer in number.

I just found about a content management system that is very small and very highly configurable. It is called sNews. It is geeky though and those who may have learned how to install a cms like WordPress may just find sNews difficult to install since it requires one to create tables from within PHPMyAdmin.  Once it installs however, it is a breeze modifying its template with something downloaded from DesignsbyDarren or from one’s creations (with a help from this page).

Second, sNews only works with .htaccess.  If your webhost does not allow .htaccess (there are some freewebhosts that don’t) then one can’t use sNews.

About Creating MySQL Tables

I have been looking around for PHP scripts that allows one to create tables and found this one from About.COM

I tried using it, but it didn’t work out for me. Perhaps someone would try it and tell me whether it worked out or not.

I got this tip from LifeHacker

Blogger and Microsoft employee Derek Dysart has posted a great tip for automatically dating every new entry in a text file edited with Notepad.

Open a blank Notepad file Write .LOG (in uppercase) in the first line of the file, followed by Enter. Save the file and close it. Double-click the file to open it and notice that Notepad appends the current date and time to the end of the file and places the cursor on the line after. Type your notes and then save and close the file. Each time you open the file, Notepad repeats the process, appending the time and date to the end of the file and placing the cursor below it.

This is a really cool trick that could make for a nice Notepad journal file. A reader once suggested this tip in the comments of the life in .txt post, but I had all but forgotten about it until I checked out Derek’s post. A comment in Derek’s post also points out that simply pressing F5 in Notepad will also insert the date and time. So no matter how you do it, it’s easy to create your own to-the-minute journal in Notepad. — Adam Pash

Create “your own to-the-minute journal”… Hmmmm. If you’re a geek, you’ll need it.

I am updating the Collectanea and right now, in connection with a tutorial I am writing on, I have created a new subsection to this site that I think might as well become the Collectanea version 2.0.

The new look is supplied by another web designer who gives out free templates for HTML pages. Their names are found below this blog. It just so happened that the template I took from them has a WordPress theme counterpart, so I installed the theme here. I don’t know really how people will take to this change. For the moment however, it is the only thing I have.

The next tutorial I am working on is about customizing free templates. I am not a web designer and I know that there are a lot of people out there who can only take advantage of the offerings of web layout artists. As a demo, I have set up a subsite that I can at the same time use as a repository of additionaly HTML and web-related tutorials. The subsite currently has three new articles:

• replacing notepad
• bbcodes and web bulletin boards
• the 110mb FileManager

I will be placing the next tutorial’s title in the old page so that it will be easily seen by the. I will be linking the title of the new tutorial to the new subsite.

The guys at GridinSoft have also updated their NotePad…

The image above is from Gridinsoft Notepad 3.2.3 Pro version.  There is also a freeware lite version that is actually cripple ware.  This latter has features that though limited compared to the Pro version is still quite superior to the native Windows notepad.

I am still figuring out how I can override some of the features of the original CSS, but I think that for the moment this will do.