Once in a while, we may need to create a diagram and publish it to our website. Diagram.ly can be a tool for this purpose. You can access this drawing tool at www.diagram.ly, and it is free.  You will see all drawing tool icons on the left side of the screen and the drawing canvas on the right. Using this free online drawing application is similar to any drawing programs like Paint.net, Dia diagram or Visio.

Below is a demo video clip.

The following image is the PNG image of the diagram created by the demo.

flowchart demo

Links

• Graphics for your web pages: free clip art images on openclipart.org

A QR code is a modern bar code. It can store information in 2 dimensions which is better that the tradition bar codes. A QR code can store text, URL or other data.

One of the reasons that QR codes became more popular lately is due to the growing number of smartphones. Smartphone users can downloaded free QR code scanner apps for their phones. These scanner apps make browsing a web page very convenient. Smartphone users can scan the QR code of a URL and avoid typing the URL of that web page. Typing a long URL on a smart phone can be an unpleasant experience.

The image above is an example of the QR code of our corporate website, it21inc.com.

There are several tools you can use to create QR code image. My favorite one is Google Chart Tools: Infographics. You can get the image of a QR code generated on the fly by this Google API.

Here is the URL of the QR code image of it21inc.com, to get Google Chart to generate the image:

https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?cht=qr&chs=150×150&chl=http://www.it21inc.com

There are three parts in this image’s URL

• First part: ask Google chart to draw QR code image https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?cht=qr
• Second part:  specify the size of the image, (150×150 in this example)
  &chs=150×150
• Third part: specify the content to be store in this image; (in this example, it is http://www.it21inc.com ) &chl=http://www.it21inc.com
• These three parts are required. Other parts can be added relate to error correction and output encoding

Please read more about the syntax at http://code.google.com/apis/chart/infographics/docs/qr_codes.html#overview

Suggested links to read about QR code

• Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QR_code
• Denso-Wave: the trademark holder of QR code: http://www.denso-wave.com/qrcode/index-e.html
• Google search about QR code generator: http://www.google.com/search?q=qu+code+generator&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t
• QR code readers for smartphones: http://www.708media.com/qrcode/qr-code-readers-iphone-android-blackberry-windows-phone-7/

Some of our blog visitors are visual people and having a photo or 2 in our blogs can make the blogs more exciting to these visitors.

In many instances, we can use a photo that is on another website. The steps to insert an image from an URL are as follows:

Step 1: Locate the URL of the photo image

• Place the mouse at the photo image and
• click the right button of the mouse to access the short-cut menu.
• Select View Image option to see the image and URL of the image.

Step 2: login and go to Edit Post screen.

Step 3- Add the external photo:

• Place the cursor to the location in the blog that we want to insert and then
• click Add an Image.
• Click “From URL” menu.
• Now, we can add the URL of the external photo, a title and the correct alignment.
• Click Insert to Post to complete the adding.

Step 4 – View the post to verify that the photo is displayed.

Here is the video of how to add an external photo to a blog