Bloggers Festival Guru

Facebook has been around for almost eight years now. Over those years, it has amassed more than 900 million users under its blue banner, which is a great achievement in itself, not to mention the impact it has had on people's life, especially teenagers. However, as a result of some developments, recent or otherwise, people have been trying to limit, or cut off Facebook altogether. Personally, I can think of many reasons why they'd want to do this. But in any case, if you're one of these people, then you might want to preserve some of your most important information before saying goodbye to Facebook. Even after quitting Facebook, you can still use some of the features it provides, so you wouldn't really feel left out.

Why would you want to quit Facebook?

As I said, recently, quite a few people have been either deleting or deactivating their Facebook accounts. Perhaps Google+ is to blame. But on a broader spectrum, Facebook itself is responsible for most of it. First, of course, is the enormous waste of time. Facebook is a void where no matter how much time you put, nothing productive is gonna come out, nor will that wasted time come back. Users might end up on Facebook for hours, looking through statuses, playing games, sharing funny images, and so on.


Then, of course, is the privacy issue. People get hacked every day, or get phished for sensitive information they do not want to divulge. Contact information is being leaked and people are being spammed. Photos are edited and spread, and scandals are being made. There's really no limit to what these hackers can do. We recently wrote a post on how to protect your privacy on Facebook. You can take steps to ensure your privacy, but there's never a 100% guarantee. Hackers always seem to be one step ahead of security engineers. So for some people who don't use Facebook very much, it might be a good idea to step off altogether.


There's also the competitive attitude associated with Facebook use. Users are competing with others, and comparing each other, and hence developing complexes. Rude posts and images are not only being liked, but also being spread, which is something one wouldn't do in real life. All of this could be contributing towards psychological instability. As Bertrand Russel says, if you can't provide an outlet to your emotions, they'll make you all the more weaker. And you definitely can't express your emotions in front of a computer screen.


The bottom line is, Facebook has lost a certain of its charm. And since I've been using Facebook for around 7 years now, I can safely say that. Anyhow, you get the point. Here are some things you could do to preserve your information before logging off for good.

1. Back up your Profile

Backing up Facebook profile is one of the best ways to preserve your information. You can download a copy of your Facebook profile, with all the photos and your statuses and wall posts, along with your contacts. To back up, simply go to your Account Settings, and you'll see an option for Downloading a copy of your Facebook Data. Click on that and you'll be guided through the steps. Facebook will send you an email once it has done creating a back up for you. You can download that back up. For more information, read the article below

• How To Backup Your Complete Facebook Profile

2. Sync your contacts

Android and iOS smartphones have apps that let you sync your Facebook contacts with your smartphone. iOS has SmartSync, while Android has AddressBook. These will fetch contact information from your Facebook friends, and add them to your phone book. Contact information include email addresses, phones numbers, home addresses (if available) etc. You get to choose which friends you want to Sync, and what information you want to sync. This is a really handy way of staying in touch with your friends.

3. Export Birthdays

You can also preserve birth day information for your friends. If you go over to your Facebook Events page, you will see a magnifying glass icon. Click on Birthdays, and it will appear again. Clicking on that will give you an option to export birthdays in a variety of formats compatible with major scheduling programs.

4. Organizing events

For organizing events, you don't necessarily need to use Facebook. There are other plenty of services that will create events for you. Once such is Doodle, while another is Evite. You can simply fill out the details for an event, and these services will send out emails to your friends, to which they can RSVP easily. This way, you can keep your events private. And sending out emails make them feel more personal and connected to you.

5. Back up your photos

Facebook does not allow you to transfer your photos to another site directly. But there are other indirect ways. First of all, when you back up your profile as we mentioned above, your photos will be backed up as well. But if you want to move your photos to another site, you will have to do that manually. You can, however, transfer them easily to Google's photo sharing site, Picassa. For this, you'll need a Google Chrome extension, Move Your Photos. This allows you to see all your Facebook photos as thumbnails, which you can sort or move over to Picassa.

What are Google Places?

How is a Google Place different from a Google+ Page?

How to get started?

Why Google Places?

When inserting codes into the Blogger template, page element, or blog post, you may have seen error messages that the code could not be parsed, was not well-formed, was broken, or that the elements were not closed properly. These errors can be corrected if you understand the rules that must be adhered to in XHTML documents. Blogger templates use the XHTML 1.0 Strict Document Type. In this article, we shall explain some of the XHTML syntax or rules, so that you may troubleshoot and resolve the problems if these error messages should occur.

XML, HTML and XHTML

We shall keep this short. Just so as you understand what we said about document type, view the Page Source or Source of your Blogger blog. You should see this document type declaration at the very top:-

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">

The terms – XML, HTML and XHTML - refer to the markup language used to write the web pages. Many of us would have heard of HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), invented by Tim Berners-Lee, and used since the early days of internet. XML (Extensible Markup Language) is a meta-language, used to create other markup languages. The traditional HTML was later recast to use the rules of XML and that resulted in a new XML application, called XHTML (Extensible Hypertext Markup Language). Because XHTML rules are strict and unforgiving, not conforming to them when attempting to modify the template would result in error messages. So, what are these rules that Bloggers like us should take note of?

Basic Rules of XHTML

1. Codes to be in lowercase

Since XML is case sensitive, all the element keywords and attribute names used in XHTML should be in the lowercase. For example, the template code is not this:-

<TITLE>Tips for New Bloggers</TITLE>

but this:-

<title>Tips for New Bloggers</title>

If you have noticed, the elements and attribute names between the lesser than (<) and greater than (>) signs have to be in the lowercase. However, the value, which in this case is “Tips for New Bloggers”, can be in the uppercase, lowercase, or mixed case.

2. Attribute values to be in quotation marks

All the attribute values have to be enclosed either in single or double quotation marks. The following examples are not accepted by XHTML:-

<div id=header-wrapper> <a href=http://tips-for-new-bloggers.blogspot.com>Text Link</a> <img src=photo.jpg/> <table width=200 border=0 cellpadding=2>

Instead, they should be written as such:-

<div id='header-wrapper'> <a href="http://tips-for-new-bloggers.blogspot.com">Text Link</a> <img src="photo.jpg"/> <table width="200" border="0" cellpadding="2">

3. Container elements must have closing tags

This is not correct:-

<p>A paragraph.

In XHTML, there must be a closing tag with a forward slash (/) at the end:-

<p>A paragraph.</p>

Examples of the many non-empty elements that have opening and corresponding closing tags are:-

<ul> ... </ul> <li> ... </li> <table> ... </table> <h2> ... </h2> <div> ... </div> <span> ... </span> <dt> ... </dt> <dd> ... </dd> <a href> ... </a>

4. Standalone elements to be closed

Some of the elements are empty or standalone. They do not have associated closing tags. Common examples are:-

<br> <img> <input> <frame> <hr> <meta> <link>

Nonetheless, in XHTML, these elements must be terminated or closed. There are two ways to do that. One way to terminate the element is to put a forward slash (/) at the end like this:-

<br/> <img/> <input/> <frame/> <hr/> <meta/> <link/>

The second way is to add a corresponding closing tag like this:-

<br> ... </br> <img> ... </img> <input> ... </input> <frame> ... </frame> <hr> ... </hr> <meta> ... </meta> <link> ... </link>

5. Elements to be properly nested

This means that elements must be closed in the reverse order. For example, this code is not accepted in XHTML:-

<form><table> ... </form></table>

It is improperly nested because the form was created first followed by the table. To close them in the proper order, the table must be closed before the form, like this:-

<form><table> ... </table></form>

6. Document to have only one root element

In the XHTML document, you will see that except for the document type declaration, all the codes are nested between <html> and </html>. This is the root element and all other elements or sub elements are in between. The document structure will look like this:-

<html> <head> ... </head> <body> ... </body> </html>

7. Attribute minimization is not allowed

In XHTML, all attributes should be in the form name="value". Even if the value is the same as the name, it cannot be minimized to one word. Hence, in our Add Text Box and Textarea article, the textarea code is not this:-

<textarea readonly>Hyperlink Code</textarea>

but this:-

<textarea readonly="readonly">Hyperlink Code</textarea>

XHTML Character Entities

Quite a number of readers had asked why they were unable to display HTML codes in their blog posts or why their codes were not well-parsed when inserted into the template. If you have noticed by now, the codes are wrapped in the lesser than (<) and greater than (>) signs. The moment these are posted, they will be interpreted as codes and will trigger an action by the browser. Should you want to display these as part of the text, use their character entities instead.

"	"
&	&
<	&lt;
>	&gt;

The next time you see an error message to the effect that the code is not well formed, not well parsed, not properly closed, etc., take a look at this guide, troubleshoot the problem and try out the possible solutions.