Making coffee this morning with one of the network news shows on in the background, I caught the tail end of an interview with Michael Wolff. Wolff, the provocative essayist, author, and columnist, was promoting his latest book, "Television Is the New Television". Something he said reminded me of Pamela Anderson.
Articles Archive
Sort Multidimensional Arrays with PHP array_multisort
Without question, the most common operation in the Web applications I build is retrieving gobs of structured data and displaying that data in some order. In most cases, the data comes from database tables. But not always. In this article, I share what I’ve found out about how one can use the array_multisort function to sort multidimensional arrays.
Customizing WordPress Using Vendor-Built Child Themes
While the child theme method works well for many WordPress Web-site builds, sites based on vendor-built child themes require a different strategy. This article describes my current favorite approach and invites discussion on the topic.
Everything can be gamed
Everything can be gamed. Broadcast emails can use merge codes to make you think you’re the only recipient. Views and likes and mentions can be bought. Introductory offers can hide the small print so many layers down that you forget to even look for it. But these games — and the traps within them — might say more about the game creators than about those who accept the invitation to play.
How to add an About Us blurb to every WordPress blog post
While WordPress has functions and template tags for displaying “About the Author” information on single blog post pages (in fact, many themes innately support this), there’s nothing similar for displaying “About Us” information. This article offers a simple method for adding an “About Us” blurb after the main text of every single blog post. And I hope it gets your wheels turning about ways to add customized content to your WordPress Web site.
Underlining for Emphasis: How to un-underline text on a Web page with CSS
No matter how loudly and often we tell our clients who maintain their own Web sites (via WordPress and other CMS-driven platforms) that using underlining for emphasis on the Web is a very bad idea, many of them do it anyway. This article explains, first of all, why this practice is a bad idea, and then it offers a simple CSS solution for removing underlines that shouldn’t appear on Web pages.
Lessons Web Developers Won’t Learn in School
When I was interviewed recently for a blog article about “lessons Web developers won’t learn in school”, I knew without blinking what I’d say. If you’re a client of a Web developer, you might find what I had to say ostensibly arrogant. If you’re a fellow Web developer, you might be emboldened to let your cynical side run free. I hope neither is the case.
Yet Another Facebook Survey
If you’re not already “surveyed-out”, we’d appreciate your taking this short survey about Facebook. Yep, ANOTHER Facebook Survey: just what you need, right? I’m not going to go on and on about how THIS survey is better than any other you’ve ever taken. But I will tell you that you’ll be entering a drawing for a $25 Amazon Gift Card simply by submitting the survey (and including your email address, which is otherwise optional). And if that’s not enough incentive, has it occurred to you that by taking this Facebook survey, you might just be contributing to making the Web a better place? Yeah, I didn’t think so. So there’s still the chance of winning the gift card.
Don’t use the admin username in WordPress
This screenshot should confirm that using the admin username in your WordPress installation is a bad idea.
One suggestion for writing blog articles that don’t suck
If you write, edit, or publish blog articles, you probably don’t wake up in the morning hoping your blog articles suck. But let’s face it: so many blog articles DO suck. In this short article, I’ll share my extremely simple and fundamental rule for writing blog articles that don’t suck. (If it weren’t for all the evidence to the contrary, this advice would be so obvious as to be unnecessary.)