Here’s a quick tutorial to show you how to use jZip to compress and decompress files. This is normally called zipping and unzipping. Jzip is a free file compression program which you can download from www.jZip.com.

Sending Emails Attachments As Zipped Archives

You may be sending an email with several attachments. For example you might want to send a Word Document, an Excel Spreadsheet and a photo to a friend. You can attach each file in turn – so in this case you’d be sending three attachments, or you can zip the three files up into one package and send that as a single attachment to your email. The single zipped package of files is sometimes referred to as an archive.

Why Zip Files in the First Place?

Of course the files do not have to be of different types, as in my example. You might want to send 10 Word files or a number of text files. The major reason for sending files as a single zipped file, is to minimise the file size. Most files, when zipped have al the excess space squashed out of them, so the resulting single zip archive is smaller than the individual files that it contains. This makes it faster to send or store.

Zipping doesn’t usually make some images any smaller as they are aleaady in a compressed format. jpg images are a good example of this. You’ll find that a number of jpg image files zipped together won’t be much smaller than the total size of the individual files.

The process is shown below in the diagram.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I received an email today from EnnisP – a blogging self-starter (the very type of person I love to encourage) who is teaching himself about all manner of online tech stuff so that he can run his own Religious Issues website well.

Due to his efforts, EnnisP is also able to show others what he himself has learned and as such finds he needs to put code samples on his site. This gets tricky because a Wordpress page is itself written in HTML. His specific question was however,

how can you type an HTML code sample and get it to wrap without some of the lines jutting out into the sidebars of the blog?

I think the problem and solution are best demonstrated with as short video clip.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here is the code from EnnisP’s website inserted here, using the Syntax Highlighter Evolved Plugin (based on original code by Alex Gorbatchev)

The settings I used for the plugin are as follows :

And the tags I used were :

[code lang="xml"]
.
.
.
[/code]

To help the plugin break lines effectively add the source code with line breaks where you can or in an example like the code below, it will attempt to put the code all on one line (because that is how it is supposed to be written.) This is how it looks with hard line breaks added by me :

<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0849946018?ie=UTF8&tag=XXXXXXXX&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&
creativeASIN=0849946018"
target="_blank">
<img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-1062" title="Jesus Manifesto"
src="http://nowthinkaboutit.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Jesus-Manifesto.jpg"
alt="" width="74" height="110" /></a>

And this is how it looks with no line breaks, just with the code as written. But you can play around with the tags and settings to get it to look as you want it to.

<a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0849946018?ie=UTF8&tag=XXXXXXXX&linkCode=as2&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0849946018" target="_blank"><img class="alignleft size-full wp-image-1062" title="Jesus Manifesto" src="http://nowthinkaboutit.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Jesus-Manifesto.jpg" alt="" width="74" height="110" /></a>

Click here to view the embedded video.

When you leave a comment on a blog, if you haven’t set yourself up with an avatar your comment will be branded with a default or a generated avatar as chosen by the blog’s owner. This means that when you comment on blogs, post on Twitter, Facebook, most forms of social media in fact, (and some forums), that you won’t be branding yourself with an image that people in your niche will learn to recognise.

Here are some examples of default and generated avatars used on Wordpress blogs for commenters with no avatar of their own.

Mystery Man
Gravatar Logo
Example Monster Avatars (these are generated)
Example Wavatars (these are generated)
Example Indenticons (these are generated)

I’m sure you recognise them.

How Do I Get My Own Avatar?

The answer is you set up a Globally Recognized Avatar or Gravatar. It’s easy and it’s free!

1. Find a photo of yourself or an image of something that you wish to represent you online
2. Crop it so that it’s square and about 200px x 200px in size
3. Go and sign up at Gravatar
4. Associate the photo with your email address or email addresses (if you a number of email addresses you may want to have a different photo for each one. Or you can use the same photo for each email address. It’s up to you.)
5. You’re done. The next time you leave a comment on a blog, or post in a forum your little image will mark the spot. People will get to recognise your little avatar and this helps to build trust.

Note that if you sign up for a gravatar, any places that make use of Gravatars where you’ve already left a comment or a post, will instantly apply your new avatar. This also means that when you tire of your gravatar, you can change it easily and everywhere, all at once.

One of the most common issues with Slickr Flickr was to do with caching. You would update Flickr but it would take what seemed at age before those changes appeared in your Slickr Flickr gallery or slideshow on Wordpress. This was down to Wordpress caching the Flickr RSS feed. The cache could take up to 12 hours to expire which meant that it could be up to 12 hours before your Wordpress site reflected your latest photos, titles and descriptions.

Fortunately, since version 1.7, Slickr Flickr included a button on the Admin settings page which clears the RSS cache. This means that Wordpress can be updated with the changes on Flickr as soon as they are available via RSS.

Below is a demonstration that shows the caching problem and how to resolve it.

Flickr RSS Updates Are Not Instant

Please note, however, that the Flickr RSS feed is not updated the instant you add new photos or update title, tags and descriptions on Flickr. It seems Flickr updates its RSS feeds every 15 minutes or so. In other words, you may still have to wait a little while to access your Flickr updates but at least now it is only 15 minutes and not 12 hours!

You can check the Flickr RSS cache simply using your browser using the following URL where you replace yourFlickrId by your Flickr ID and yourtag by the tag you are using for your slideshow or gallery.

http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?lang=en-us&format=rss_200&id=yourFlickrID&tags=yourtag

Don’t Update Your Cache If The Flickr RSS Feed is Still Out Of Date

If the link above which displays the Flickr RSS feed does not show your updates then there is no point in clearing the RSS cache. Only when the Flickr RSS feed is up to date then you should clear the cache.

Note that you do need to clear the RSS cache manually; the feature is not automatic. So, if your slideshow or gallery is out of date, then go to Slickr Flickr Admin Settings and click the Clear RSS cache button then refresh your page.