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The reaction to this weeks special offer with The World Class Seminar Workshop has taken me a little by surprise! I closed down the offer yesterday, but after one film maker pestered my over and over, I decided to keep the offer open. I will leave the workshop reduced from £69.99 to £37.99 for the next week or so. If you are thinking of signing up, now is the time.

After this surge I decided I needed to deal with two long standing updates with the workshop.

First, the whole online course will now work on both iPhone and iPad. It still amazes me when I see it on my iPhone.

Second, I upgraded the login system so you can stay permanently logged in, something a lot of past users have been asking for.

Learn Basic HTML web language
So because of this, yesterday was a day of web coding. It reminded my just how important a basic knowledge of HTML can be. And if you have a basic understanding of HTML, then you kind of have no fear with tinkering around with CSS and the code for all the widgets we so commonly use on our websites and blogs.

I have seen countless Facebook widgets that are badly implemented on other websites, the wrong size, displaying the wrong number of faces. And yet it’s so easy to fix in the code so it displays properly. If you look at the Facebook widget to the right here (on my blog) – it’s essentially the same code as the one on my static webpage (here), except they are different sizes. Here is the code for the Facebook widget on my website…

<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/plugins/likebox.php?id=277458983320&amp;width=200&amp;connections=15&amp;stream=false&amp;header=true&amp;height=520" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" style=
"border:none; overflow:hidden; width:200px; height:520px;"></iframe>

The red numbers are the physical dimensions, which I changed for the Facebook widget on my blog here, thus making it a different size. The green number refers to the number of faces displayed in the widget. You can keep changing these values and checking it until you get it right for your site… at least that’s what I do! It’s all guesswork, trail and error.

This technique is how I make all the widgets fit snugly on my sites. Sure, some are more complicated than others, but it’s usually pretty simple to make them fit perfectly.

Another thing I have found is that, often, in some of the text boxes that ‘create’ a widget, you can embed HTML tags. A good example of this is on our Indiegogo campaign for the Production Office LIVE. For most of the campaigns I saw, the ‘perks’ list were a cluttered paragraph of stuff and not a list, like the one pictured here Right above)…

But by simply adding code to the text box, I was able to create a bulleted list, like the one right (below – and from the Production Office Indiegogo campaign).

Here is the code I used for this bulleted text.

<ul>
<li>Special thanks LIVE on the show</li>
<li>Your choice of a Production Office Mug or Baseball Cap</li>
</ul>

Remember, HTML is just simple text tags such as this…

<STRONG> Test for bold text </STRONG>

Which would display like this…

Test for bold text

It’s really that simple. You don’t need any programming knowledge, just a little know how and the will to give it a little trial and error.

Anyway, have a crack.

And if you want to sign up to the discounted Gone Fishing World Class Short film workshop, you can do that here.

There is more info on that workshop on yesterdays blog here.

Onwards and upwards!

Chris Jones, Film Maker and Author

www.livingspirit.com
mail@livingspirit.com