This is crazy. I’m not talking about managed sites here. BlueHost decided on their own to implement auto-updating of WordPress for all their shared hosting accounts using WordPress. And not just minor/security releases. I just discovered four sites I manage were updated to WordPress 4.3 without my knowledge or approval. I had good reasons for […]
Articles Archive
How to Create Tooltips with CSS (Only)
CSS is so big that unless we work with it diligently on a day-to-day basis — and live long enough, we’re likely to be dealing with just the tip of the iceberg. In this article, I show a simple technique for creating tooltips with nothing more than CSS (no JavaScript). Hat-tip to Travis Neilson, whose DevTips YouTube channel is very informative and a real hoot.
Side Effects of Rebuilding Web Sites to be Responsive and Mobile-Friendly
What drives many to rebuild their existing Web sites to be responsive and mobile-friendly are justifiable concerns about user experience and search engine placement. After all, the need to make Web pages look and act right on small mobile devices has only intensified as more and more people spend proportionately more of their Internet time on those devices. And then there’s Google, who, on April 21, 2015, started boosting the ranking of mobile-friendly pages on mobile search results. Yet it is a side effect of this rebuild process that may turn out to be the best reason of all to undertake it. In this article I share the insightful and unsolicited comments of a client with whom I am rebuilding his Web site to be responsive and mobile-friendly.
Traffic Does Not Equal Audience
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.
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.
Ferncliff Cemetery Website
This post describes key features of my rebuild of the Ferncliff Cemetery Web site: new responsive design; grave search; memorialization options; and backend CRM system.
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.