Santhosh’s Blog

Before getting started, I would like to say that this is a “Short Review” of a new website of one my friend and the one who sponsored few of my wordpress themes.

Myself being a web designer, I love CSS and will always keep learning new things. CSS sounds kinda complicated, but when you start learning it you will come to know that it is just a jigsaw puzzle. All you need to do is plan the layout of your template or theme whatsoever and then slice & combine them if it is PSD or just combine them if you had created those pieces individually (which I do).

Well, if this is the first time you are reading about CSS and wondering what it is, you may read this wiki article.

Things you can do in CSS will sound very limited in the beginning, but as the time passes you will start doing new things which will amaze yourself. There are many myths that says CSS is very limited, but not when you see a site called “CSS Play” – Well that is way too professional work that can be done and achieved from CSS.

To learn CSS there are many sites, such as w3schools . After learning CSS, you can create your own templates and themes and then submit to many sites for free or you may sell it. But its good if you begin by submitting your theme as a Open Source Templates so that you will come to know whether people really like your work or not. There are many such sites available to submit your open source templates among which OSWD is popular. Since it is popular, there is very less chances that your template will be published soon. So I prefer “Open Designs“. You can see some of my web templates here. By the way, sorry for too links, but I have to. So now you came to know things about CSS (not the code, though).

As the title of this post says, CSS Portal is a website, which has many things! (so called “Portal”) where you can learn CSS and create your own themes and after doing that you can submit it to the same site! And whats more, he has another site called “Generate it“, which is easy to use and add new jazzy stuffs to your template easily such as buttons and reflection etc. And soon after you start designing, you may gain popularity and will wish to have your own website to showcase your work to the mass. To do that, you will need to buy a webspace and a domain name. You can buy those two from a web hosting service providers. There are thousands of such web hosting companies and you will be throne into dilemma. So the CSS Portal also has a site, that will help you decide and make your deal easy. eHost Info is their site which has reviews and a directory of many web hosting providers.

So the conclusion is, CSS Portal is a website where you can actually “learn” many things and finally get into the world of web designing and eventually you can make money out of it!

Well, this is tutorial is not just limited to ThinkDigit forum, it can also be applied to other forums and websites as well. The reason for the title is because this forum is favorite of many people, including me (not now, though).

Recently the forum was upgrade to the latest version of vBulletin 3.7.0. And along with that forum has got new theme as well with annoying ads in the sidebar. Everyone do not like to see their favorite site or forum in messed condition. And though if they do wish to see the forum in such condition, they never click on the ads and besides that they will be wasting their bandwidth.

So blocking the unwanted elements is the way to go. And to block the elements you may need to say good bye to your favorite web browser and switch to Firefox to say hello again to your favorite site or forum. So download and install the latest version of Firefox from here.

Many of guys know how to block ads by using Add-on such as Adblock Plus, but I bet few doesn’t know that there are Add-ons which can “actually” block the HTML and other elements on the page while loading!

To do that, first install adblock all the adsense or the other ads and then you need to download and install 2 Add-ons. Only one Add-on can do the job, but I recommend another one coz… I will tell you later.

First download and install a Add-on called “Aardvark” from here. And then download and install another called “R.i.P” from here. – Short for “Remove it Permanently”

After installing DO NOT DO ANY EXPERIMENTS until you read further instruction in the tutorial.

I said one Add-on can do the job, that is R.i.P. You can use it to remove the elements by just performing right click on the element and by clicking on “Remove this Permanently”. But there are chances that you will R.i.P “Wanted Elements”, so that’s the reason why you need “Aardvark”.

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I hope most of you know about the Brainy Quotes, if not it is a website which has a large collection of quotes made by famous peoples in the past and in the present. Majority of the quotes are worth reading there. If you like both the website and their collection of quotes, they have a goodie for you and your website visitors.

They have a set of javascripts that you can use on your website or blog to display “Quote of the Day” picked by the administrators. It is pretty easy task. All you need to do is just copy and paste the javascript where you want it appear on your site/blog, then there you go, it displays quotes everyday. So you won’t miss some good quotes and your visitors will be engaged.

They also have categories like Quote of the Day, Art Quote of the Day, Funny Quote of the Day, Love Quote of the Day  & Nature Quote of the Day. So you can choose the one you want on your site.

As you can see on my blog’s left sidebar, i’ve got “Quote of the Day”.

Visit this page to get the javascript.