Unicode special characters at your advantage

25 November, 2010 | | 1 comments |

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I’m sure you would have come across Facebook status updates and Tweets having special characters which you don’t find them on your keyboard. These special characters convey expressions, feelings and adorn your text from aesthetics point-of-view.


Examples: ☺ ♣ ♥ ◘ ♫ ¿ ► ↔ » ☼ ■ ± √ ¼ Ω Ü £ ░  ... many more


Check the following examples on Facebook and Twitter


Facebook Update with special characters

Twitter Update with special characters


These are called Unicode Special Characters and there are many of them. You can use ALT codes to get these characters on screen. The idea is to keep the ALT key pressed and then type the CODE from your numeric keypad. Check the following Unicode special character list along with its equivalent ALT code. For language specific characters check Here.




Note:

  • Make sure you have the Num Lock ON.
  • You need the numeric keypad on your keyboard layout to use these codes else use the Character Map in Windows. Apple Mac OSX users can refer this link Here for using Unicode special characters. The ‘Character Map’ equivalent in Macintosh is known as Character Palette. You can read more on both of them below.
  • The ALT key has to be released once the code is typed.


■ How do I use Unicode special characters in Web Pages?

There are several ways you can type or import Unicode text, but each page must include a encoding meta tag specifying the utf-8 Unicode encoding, so that browsers render the text correctly. See the code below for HTML5:


  •  
  • <head>
  •  
  • <meta charset="UTF-8" />
  • ...
  •  
  • </head>


■ Use 'Character Map' in Windows if you don't have access to Web or can't remember ALT Codes:

Start → Run → charmap ↵


■ For Apple Macintosh users:

The ‘Character Map’ equivalent in Macintosh is known as Character Viewer. Read more on it Here.



Why Google’s Blogger is the best blogging service according to me

08 November, 2010 | | 2 comments |

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There are many options available for having your Blog like Wordpress, Blogger, LiveSpaces, etc. But the best I'd recommend is Google's Blogger. Some of the prime reasons I rank it above WordPress, LiveSpaces

  • Provides customizations to the best possible extent including adding Scripts, custom HTML, etc to the template.
  • Publishing a post subsequently indexes the same on Google Search instantly. Check it out for yourself.
  • Has a lucid and user-friendly interface making it easy for any beginner to quickly get started.
  • Provides publishing over FTP or E-Mail. FTP publishing literally means publishing your blog to your personal website with content hosted over Blogger. E-Mail publishing offers making posts by sending an E-Mail to a E-Mail address which can be configured from the Settings Tab.
  • Direct integration with Google Picasa Web Albums and YouTube which provides a central repository for storing your images and videos respectively.
  • Support for both RSS and Atom(default) feeds with ample customization possibilities over the following things:
»» Templates – Here
»» Customization Scripts –Here





Check out Google’s Blogger Here:
    Google's Blogger service




My personal suggestions

• Once registered with an ID say ' abc ' you'll have your blog in this fashion - www.abc.blogspot.com

• Before registering, please think as to what subject you'll be focusing on for your blog. Choose an apt title for your blog and any posts you make so that search engines index your blog appropriately depending on your quality of content. This way you'll get some decent readers VIA search engine results.

• Blogger offers some cool features like a rich text-editor, 1GB image storage space over Picasa, comment moderation, Blog publishing via E-Mail, FTP hosting on your personal web-site, importing previous posts, various templates, etc.


So start blogging ... (just make it a habit)