As you say, HTML 5 support can still be flaky at times. It’s important to realise that this is an evolving standard and hasn’t been ratified yet, so it’s every user on his/her own. And you’re right, some sites work better than others.

There’s a FireFox plugin that can help called HTML5toggle that’s designed for just this purpose. Check it out.

Remember when you’re playing with new technologies there’s always a risk. You may decide to steer away for now; it’s not like you’re going to get a multiple car insurance discount for making use of it.

I found this question on Twitter by Ang from Ang’s Chicken Coop who had recently migrated to the latest version of WordPress and probably found that her WordPress plugin that did her word count wasn’t working any more. The great thing is that WordPress now has a word count built into it, but she probably hadn’t spotted it, which can sometimes happen when you’re moving to new software and things suddenly change place.

Well, the great news is that you don’t even need a plugin any more; the word count is display on your screen right under your text editing area (shown below):

Voila, problem solved! I wish all my problems could be answered as easily as this one. Now if I had some home theater seating in my home office, I would just put my feet up, put on a good movie and relax in the knowledge that I’ve helped someone today

I came across this question asked by Noobkiller from Pariah’s Guild on the most excellent Bloggeries forum. Well, if you’re using WordPress, the answer is “you don’t need an extra plugin”. You see, WordPress comes with a built-in widget that lets you display headlines from any blog you like, as long as you have their RSS feed.

Go to your widget screen and look for a widget called RSS. Add this to your Sidebar. The next step is to configure this widget. It needs to know the following information:

• The RSS feed: This tells the widget where to gather the feed information from
• A title for the feed: This is used as a header for your widget
• How many items to display: The default is 10, but you can change this to anything you like
• Display item content: This controls whether to show just the headline, or whether you want the details of the post too
• Display item author if available: Quite useful if your feed contains posts from multiple authors
• Display item date: Do you want a date with the headline.

Here’s an example of a configured widget:

The great thing about the RSS widget is that it is really net-friendly, using the WordPress implementation of MagpieRSS. It doesn’t go off and grab the RSS feed every time it’s needed. Instead, it caches the feed on your server and only refreshes it occasionally. This means that it doesn’t place excessive load on the website you’re syndicating information from and is really quite well-behaved. And the great thing is that you can use this widget for just about anything. If you have a health blog, you can syndicate content from a natural acne treatment feed. If you have a joke blog, you can syndicate content off another joke blog.

Hope this helps. Happy blogging!

This question actually came up at work while we were doing some brainstorming about http://gov.im, and was actually answered for me by Sherrilynne from StrivePR without her even realising. It’s become quite popular for websites to add links to their favourite social bookmarking sites, but it is really wasteful on resources to have the same links and images on all the pages of your website when move people who use these networks really have a toolbar installed.

The answer comes in the form of a website called AddThis. The website lets you add a simple image shown here:

to each page which is just a short cut to a screen that lets you select the networks you would like to bookmark your page to. The great thing is that once you’ve used it, it can remember what your bookmarking service you like, so that the next time you bookmark something it will take you straight to your favourite social bookmarking engine. It wipes out the need for the multitude of little icons that seem to be inundating most blogs and websites nowadays.Oh .. and you can get it as a plugin for most blog engines too. Check it out.

As you can imagine, the Internet is full of useful sites dishing out information of every type and genre. Ones relating to carbon footprints are no exception. Here’s a list of sites that may be able to help:

• http://www.carbonfootprint.com/:  This website is packed with information about carbon footprints, carbon emissions and even contains a calculator to help you calculate your carbon footprint. It’s packed with recommendations on how you can reduce it and even offset it. The site also contains a flight calculator that can help you figure out your emissions when flying from one place to another.
• http://www.carbontrust.co.uk/: The Carbon Trust, a government-funded independent company, helps businesses and the public sector to cut carbon emissions and to exploit the potential of low carbon technologies.
• http://footprint.wwf.org.uk/: A easy to use carbon and ecology calculator by the WWF.

One interesting tool I cam across is a Firefox plugin called Real Costs. It works together with your browser to help give you information when you are booking your flights online. It does this by adding CO2 emission data to airfare websites like Orbitz, Delta.com etc based on your flying distance and compares it against other forms of transport. There’s a screenshot alongside this paragraph if you want to check it out. So, user the website, pack up your travel supplies and you can rest assured that you’re not hurting the planet too much.

I was joking with some friends the other day, how if we went on an extended holiday, there would be noone around to backup our blogs. It wouldn’t be so bad, except for the fact that we run blogs for other people and ideally they would be able to perform their own backups.

Now, if you look at the WordPress documention on how to take backups, it’s not as straight forward as it could be. You can also take backups by backing up MySQL, but most people I know would freak out if they found themselves at a command prompt!

This is where plugins come to the rescue. I came across a great plugin the other day called BackUpWordPress which, as the name suggests, is designed to help people take backups of WordPress. It has a great user interface and is extremely each to use. Here are some screenshots:

As you can see, it’s pretty comprehensive and I’ll be adding it to all the blogs I administer. That way if I go on an extended holiday, find myself in drug rehab or just get run over by a bus, I’ll know that at least my clients can take care of themselves.

Well Karen, it sounds like the HTML on your site is broken. This sometimes happens when you add something incomplete to the page and this affects everything else. One common complaint is caused by <div>s that aren’t terminated or even mistyping one or more characters in a URL. Here’s one mistake I often make:

<div class="test">This a <a href="http://redirectingat.com?id=8352X670472&xs=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwebsite%2Furl%26gt%3BBroken+link%26lt%3B%2Fa%26gt%3B%26lt%3B%2Fdiv%26gt%3B%3C%2Fcode%3E%3C%2Fp%3E%0A%3Cp%3EIf+you+look+closely+at+the+code+above%2C+you%26%238217%3Bll+notice+that+the+A+HREF+is+missing+a+closing+quote.+This+causes+your+browser+to+think+that+the+rest+of+the+line+is+actually+part+of+the+URL%2C+so+the+closing+%26lt%3Bdiv%26gt%3B+doesn%26%238217%3Bt+get+parsed%3B+resulting+in+a+skewed+page.%3C%2Fp%3E%0A%3Cp%3EOne+way+to+check+if+your+HTML+is+complete+is+to+run+it+through+one+of+the+online+validators.+A+good+one+is+the+%3Ca+href%3D&sref=rss"http://validator.w3.org/">W3C Validator which checks to make sure everything on your page is as it should be. You can also find another one at Validome which does pretty much the same thing.