It’s been a long time coming but I’ve finally managed to sort out my RSS feed.  To many people this is not a big deal.  Some people however like to subscribe to blogs as opposed to visit the site every few days.

So, if you would like to subscribe to my feed, feel free.

These days its fairly common to embed videos from YouTube onto your blog/website.  It’s easy to do, just copy and paste the code generated by YouTube.  Its as easy as that.

There is one problem however, Web Standards, something far too many people take for granted.  Now you may not care about web standards or you simply might not know what they are.

They are there in order to make web sites accessible to as many people as possible, but how to you know if your site meets the standards?

Go here to check.  All you have to do is type in your websites URL and you will either be told that your site meets the standards or it tells you exactly how many errors there are, what they are and where you can find them in your code.

I check my site regularly, particularly when I make big changes, to make sure it complies to current web standards, although I have found when embedding YouTube videos my site is no longer standards compliant.

This isn’t a major thing for me because I don’t really embed videos on my blog.  Maybe I’ve held off because I didn’t know the standards compliant way to do so.

That won’t happen any longer, as I’ve found a place that can help you to embed your videos the web standards friendly way.

It takes a few steps to set this up but it doesn’t take too long and it is detailed clearly in the tutorial.

I hope more people take the time to adhere to standards as th eweb continues to grow.  If oyu are publishing content on the web then you have a responsibility to make your content accessible to EVERYONE.

There are side benefits too, presumably if you are publishing for the web then you like as many people as possible to access your content, so by making your site unaccessible you are potentially reducing your possible traffic.

I will say that MySpace and Facebook users will not be able to do this for their profiles.  Those two sites are so big and varied that you stand no chance of fixing it.

This is something we should all think about…

You may not have noticed but over the last couple of weeks there has been a few changes to this site.  The majority of these changes aren’t blindingly obvious, however I think they make a difference.

I’ve been thinking a lot about the functionality of this site and the little things that bug me about other web pages, such as:

• Error 404 - Not Found
• Links not being clear
• No link back to the home page
• No content
• Complicated Navigation

So, these are things that I have addressed.  If you make a mistake in the address of a page on this site or an old link tot his site doesn’t take you where it should you’ll be taken to a search engine so you can find what you are looking for.

I’ve also arranged the navigation so the ‘home’ link is only displayed on pages other than the home page.  And if all else fails you can click anywhere on the header image to take you back home.

I’ve styled my links to have underlines so they stand out a little more.  I used to just change the color but I thought they needed something a little more.

As always I’ll be making tweaks here and there but I think the site is now functional enough for me to stop obsessing over it and return to songwriting.

If you’re anything like me then you have probably signed up to several social networking services.  Keeping them all updated can be very time consuming, especially if you want to update them all with the same information.

Here’s the answer, Ping.FM.  A free service that lets you update many major social networking sites at once.

This serivce is still in Beta at the moment but if you want to sign up then you can use the following code:

• pingscompany

Ping.FM lets you update your status (twitter, friend feed, Identi.ca, facebook etc) and blogs (myspace, bebo, xanga etc).  All from one single form.

It’s easy to set up, its free and its a great time saver. Try it now.

Apples Safari browser has the potential to be great, however on Windows I’ve found it to be very slow.  Until now that is.

I’ve always been disappointed because I need to test my web pages in Safari, as well as common Windows browsers.  In fact, I even prefer the way my site looks in Safari.  The text is clearer, colors seem bolder, maybe its just me?  

Anyway, after some searching I came accross this tweak which should make Safari render pages much faster on Windows.

It worked for me, tell me if it works for you or not?

UPDATE: If this doesn’t work for you try this.  In my opinion it is far more effective.