[Curtis Thompson]

hello…

you linking to other people doesn’t really help your ranking at all, unfortunately – some engines use algorithms to factor in how many people link to you, which typically indicates that people find your site to be useful…

so if you used that area to link swap with people then ya – it could help you. but on it’s own, it won’t increase (or decrease for that matter) your ranking at all…

sitruc

[Curtis Thompson]

hello…

pretty much every blog product i’ve seen out there works under the model that you can fully customize it to look like your site, however, to do this you need to know a bit of html to customize the templates… :-/

if you want to hire a contractor to write you one that is completely customized to your site, it can be done. if you would like to contact me regarding my rates, you can do so by getting my email address here:

https://www.creativecow.net/show.php?forumid=1&page=/contact_us.html

sitruc

[Curtis Thompson]

hello…

iframes are pretty good and i’ve used them a lot in the past, so i should qualify that they work nicely – but there are always subtle little things between browsers in them (like borders is one thing i can think of), and much older browsers won’t like them at all, so if i personally had the option to not use them and have an include php bit that still gave me the template effect, i’d go for that just because i know i’d sleep easier… 🙂

sitruc

[Curtis Thompson]

hello…

i guess i’d play devil’s advocate and ask why (assuming that your pages are already php anyway) you’d even mess with iframes, as a simple include file can be changed as easily as an iframe and then you don’t have to worry about very ancient browsers or wackiness between browsers when it comes to iframes? the include will be seen as transparent html in the end, and that would seem to save you a lot of headaches..

now if the site wasn’t already php, then an iframe is a handy way to get a single nav menu file going…and in that case, with your scrolling issue, i think i’d just try making your iframe height the maximum height the nav menu could be with all its sub menus expanded – then there won’t ever be a need for it to scroll as it’s height is safely covering the worst case scenario…

if i’m following you correctly on that scroll isssue, that is…

sitruc

[Curtis Thompson]

hello…

yes – instead of percentage widths (or no widths at all), use fixed pixel widths for cells and the table itself…

sitruc

[Curtis Thompson]

hello…

blogger.com will actually let you host the blog on your site and you can do whatever you want with it there (or on their server, too – just edit the templates, although there you still will have the bar across the top)…if you host it on your site, you just need to set up an ftp account on your box and put it in the settings on blogger.com and they will ftp the blog content to your site whenever you tell them too (like when you post)…just make sure that account has very limited access to the blog dir only.

alternately, there’s a tool like word press – mysql and php and free for download: https://wordpress.org/

sitruc

[Curtis Thompson]

hello…

ya – if you have php on your server then you could use that (i’m the curtis they’re referring to)…here’s the zip file:

https://www.sitruc.com/downloads/php_client_area.zip

it’s got an install and suggestions for seeing if you can run it in the _INSTALL.txt file…

sitruc

[Curtis Thompson]

hello…

this is a hard one to answer – you can write file upload scripts in just about any scripting language, which won’t need to make use of ftp – they work on the typical port 80 instead of ftp ports, but they do the trick just fine….

do you have reference to the documentation where they say this so that i can see what they mean?

sitruc

[Curtis Thompson]

hello…

sorry! i’m slow to respond… :-/

i still use tables as well – i think css positioning is pretty nice and it’s a cool idea, but tables just aren’t really broke for me…i can do very complex layouts with them, and i don’t necessarily buy into the time it takes to get something positioned with cssp – plus from what i’ve seen, it can be a bit bug prone, whereas tables are pretty consistent across all platforms…

css2 is nice – i don’t use it very much, either…what’s odd is that it’s been in standards for a few years now but it’s really not being used too much – there are a few cool css tips and tricks sites out there (your subject item included) that have some really neat stuff in them, though…

how about you?

sitruc

[Curtis Thompson]

hello…

links are always legal and fine, but referencing material in other people’s documents is not always so unless you at least give a source and better yet check for re-printing permission…

sitruc