HTML Tables

I have not been doing much blogging lately. Instead I have been working with Google Page Creator to put together a web site. I often find the need to display tabular data. And at first I tried putting the items in a list and spacing them apart manually. However this turned out to be a bad idea. The spacing got messed up.

So I turned to HTML tables. This required me to click "Edit HTML" to code my own markup. But it was worth it in the end. Which of these two tabular data displays looks better:

Software Maintenance Oracle Development
Software Management Surfing the INTERNET

Software Maintenance	Oracle Development
Software Management	Surfing the INTERNET

The second one is better, right? It just seems neater. Alignment is clean. You know exactly where the end of each link is. And this effect is more pronounced for tabular data with more rows and columns. Simple tables are easy to code up in HTML. I wish I had thought about this before I started doing my web site without tables. I know I will be smarter when I start my next web site.

Trip to Page Creator

For the most part I use Blogger to do a lot of blogging. But sometimes you really need a web site and not a blog. Being partial to Google, I have used Google Page Creator to make some sites. But I think something must not be right with Page Creator. After I have created about 20 or so pages, the thing seems to really slow down. My work around has been to close Internet Explorer and start it up again to do the rest of the pages.

Another thing that irks me about Page Creator is that sometimes I want to embed some Javascript in a field. Page Creator lets me edit the raw HTML. However there is some logic built in that detects that there is no static text in a field and deletes my Javascript. Not nice. As with most things, I have a work around for this. I ensure the first item in each field is some static text. But this limitation is cramping my style.

All in all Page Creator is pretty good. The price is right (free). Free use of the tool. Free space to host pages on Google. What more can you ask for? Wait. Don't answer that.

Adsense Channels

The latest blogger allows you to easily add Google AdSense to your blog. You just go to your template, click "Add a Page Element", and choose "Add To Blog" under AdSense. This will bring up a dialog with many options to customize the AdSense ads.

I did this for a while. However I have a number of web pages and blogs which take advantage of AdSense. And I like to track which pages and ideas are generating me the best money. So I use Google channels to track each ad type differently. The method previously described does not allow you to choose an AdSense channel.

However you can use channels with your blogger blogs. You still click "Add a Page Element". But instead of choosing "Add To Blog" under AdSense, you choose it under HTML/Javascript. Then you paste in the AdSense HTML code from your AdSense page. The normal AdSense ad configuration page has the option to choose a channel for your ads. And this HTML code has the channel information built in.

In it to Win it

I read a story about the founder of whateverlife, a web site to help you spice up your myspace page. This was a high school girl with a rags to riches story. It was very inspiring. After reading about her I decided to blog myself. So far I have been experimenting.

Now I am reading my third book about blogging. The first book I read was Make Easy Money with Google. That was a little too simplified. I am a programmer by trade and can handle deep topics. The second book I read was the Adsense Code. This one was more exciting and much deeper. Currently I am getting near the end of Blogging Heroes. This one is very interesting.

I plan to chronicle my experience with blogging in general here. Let it be known that I use Blogger exclusively for my blogging needs. And so far I am using just the basics of blogger. Once I tried to host my blog at another sight but still use the blogger software. That experiment failed because my web host was weak. But that is a story for another post.