Bluelime Media Vancouver Web Development » Resource

Free Easter Bunny Icons at Icon Dock

Christine — Fri, 06 Mar 2009 15:03:31 +0000

Just in time for Easter, Icon Dock has released a set of 40 free icons which you can use on your marketing material, blog, etc…

Check out their website for other great icons.

Web Search explained by Common Craft

Christine — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 17:52:51 +0000

The web wouldn’t be what it is without the ability to search. My home page is set to Google and use it to search for everything. Finding information is often quite tedious because there are so many web pages out there. Luckily a few tricks are available to allow you to refine your search.

Lee Fever at Common Craft has created this wonderful video explaining how web searches work and offers tips on how you can avoid being swallowed up by the web.

Free Guide to Learn How to Create Web Videos

Christine — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 18:39:19 +0000

So you’ve been blogging for a few years now and started podcasting… but video is what you really want to do? Via Kate, I discovered this great website put together by video blogger Jim Kukral. Simply sign up for free and you’ll learn what equipment to use, how to set up lighting, where to upload your videos and a whole lot more for free.

How to create a privacy policy

Christine — Wed, 11 Jun 2008 14:58:12 +0000

When building websites, I am given all of the website content, but more often than not, the privacy policy is not part of this document. As a result I end up looking at the current site and copying the existing text or searching the web for inspiration and writing something brief for the client.

If you are collecting any type of information from your website, such as email for a newsletter or comments on your blog, then you should have a privacy policy in place. But what do you put in there?

Via a great post by Linda at Get Elastic, I found a privacy policy generator. Simply enter your company details, answer questions by selecting radio buttons and checking off checkboxes that apply and voila. Your privacy policy in HTML or plain text is ready to go.

After a few minutes, this is the policy that was generated for Bluelime Media:

This is the web site of Bluelime Media.
Our postal address is
207-1238 Seymour Street
Vancouver

We can be reached via e-mail at info@bluelimemedia.com
or you can reach us by telephone at 604.561.6287
For each visitor to our Web page, our Web server automatically recognizes no information regarding the domain or e-mail address.
We collect the e-mail addresses of those who post messages to our bulletin board, the e-mail addresses of those who communicate with us via e-mail, no information on consumers who browse our Web page.
With respect to cookies: We do not set any cookies.
If you do not want to receive e-mail from us in the future, please let us know by sending us e-mail at the above address.
With respect to Ad Servers: We do not partner with or have special relationships with any ad server companies.

I don’t think that the wording is great and I think I would remove the info about ad servers. I’m not sure that it’s necessary, but this tool is a great start. Reading through all of the questions, it also made me think more about my website and how it is being used. It might also help your company if you do collect lots of information but aren’t sure if you should inform your users or not.

Google Calendar for your Website

Tzaddi — Fri, 08 Feb 2008 05:36:06 +0000

Louise’s great suggestion for putting your business on the Google map reminded me of another way to use Google’s tools for your business: a Google Calendar. You can share your calendar with selected viewers, say, to keep your family or partners in the loop. If you want the whole world to know when your Tupperware party is, you can make your calendar public to anyone with just a few clicks. (Do they still have Tupperware parties? OK, maybe you want to list your naughty toys party instead. Whatever floats your boat…)

You can take it even a step further, and include a public calendar in your own website to list your events or schedule. When you sign up for a Google Calendar you can create more than one calendar — so if you had a Bed & Breakfast, for instance, a calendar for each room could show when it’s booked.

There are certainly more advanced and customized ways of doing some of these things, but this is some great functionality if you’re on a budget.

How to add a public calendar to your WordPress site

If you’re comfortable with the teensiest bit of HTML tweaking this is really easy to do.

Create a public calendar at google.com/calendar
Make a page in WordPress
Go to the Google Calendar Details screen and copy the code for including the calendar in your website
Paste it into your WordPress page. Note, you’ll need to switch from Visual view to Code view in your WordPress editor. You may also need to adjust the width and height to fit your page layout.

Your website calendar page will be kept up-to-date because it loads all the events you add within the Google Calendar interface, each time your page is visited.

That’s it. Neat trick, eh?