YouTube stores several image thumbnails for every video. These are used for video previews and can be extracted and used elsewhere with one of several different web addresses (URLs).

In each of these web addresses, replace VIDEOID with the eleven character long YouTube video ID...

The reason YouTube video views get stuck around 301 views has been explained fairly well in this 9 minute YouTube video. In case you don't want to watch a video, here are the basic points:

• When a video has less than or equal to 300 views, YouTube counts each view normally, with low validity checking. These videos are usually low-impact videos intended for small audiences like family and friends, so making sure views are legitimate isn't super important.

Installing Adblock Plus on the desktop Google Chrome browser only takes a few clicks. First, go to the Adblock Plus install page while in your Chrome web browser. You must be in Chrome and not Internet Explorer, Firefox, or any other browser...

When a video is uploaded to YouTube, several versions of the video and audio data are saved at different quality levels. The video resolutions are 240p, 360p, 480p, 720p, 1080p, and Original, and the video becomes sharper as you go higher. YouTube also plays higher quality audio as you increase the video resolution. This post lists which audio quality is played for each video resolution...

Due to the extremely high resolution of many new mobile devices like the iPhone 4 and Galaxy Nexus/Note, low width websites may be displayed zoomed out or with large empty margins. These three meta tags will allow most mobile browsers to properly display your mobile website in full screen...

Want to see how well your web server is performing? It's a good idea to have some sort of 3rd party monitoring program that regularly pings your web server and logs the response time and timeout events. If your server is not being nice (or not meeting their claimed uptime), you can use this data as leverage for negotiating or just to inform them that you're seeing more downtime than you'd like...

You can spoof the user agent on your Android phone fairly easily, using Firefox and the Phony plug-in. This allows you to make websites think you're browsing on a desktop computer, iPhone, or something else.

The Phony plug-in interfaces directly with Firefox's settings panel, and gives a convenient drop-down list for user agents (so you don't have to know the actual user agent string). I use Firefox with the desktop user agent spoof, which allows me to browse sites as if I were on a desktop PC...

The style of a text link on a web page (hyperlink) should do two things effectively. It should clearly distinguish the link from normal text, so that users can see it at a glance, and it should create a clear hover effect, so users know when their mouse is hovering over it and that a click will activate the link.

The default link style in most browsers is blue with an underline. There is usually no default hover effect, other than the mouse pointer turning into a hand. The blue color and underline are widely recognized as links, so when designing your links you will want to keep that in mind. You don't have to stick to these conventions, but you can design very intuitive links by building off of them...

In the first part in this series you will learn very basic HTML and how to make a simple text-only website. This guide is focused on the absolute beginner, though you should be proficient in general computing tasks such as file and folder creation, navigating, and changing file extensions (on Windows, be sure to show file extensions).

You'll need a text editor to edit HTML with. Notepad or TextEdit will do for now. As you get better you will want a robust IDE such as TSW WebCoder or Adobe Dreamweaver. There are also free HTML editors such as CoffeeCup Free HTML Editor and Notepad++...

Reducing the file size of the images used in your web design can improve loading speeds, which will keep some visitors from leaving prematurely, and can reduce the load and bandwidth usage on your server. Large reductions in file size can be achieved by selecting the right format and quality, and taking the time to optimize each and every image that your design uses, no matter the size. I'm going to cover how to reduce the file size of both JPG and PNG images, and how you can do it without sacrificing the clarity of your images...