Over a year ago, Google released a tool called Page Speed which gave simple suggestions to developers interested in speeding up their sites. Typically these suggestions were not too difficult, and if you were already aware of many front-end best practices (as relating to HTML, CSS, and Javascript) you likely implemented such suggestions to begin with, or soon after hearing about this tool. But, some of the recommendations, particularly relating to server configuration may have been too complicated or possibly inaccessible if on a shared hosting environment.
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When it comes to image preloading, developers have a couple of options to choose from. The easiest and most popular is typically a combination of CSS properties. Some approaches load the desired image as a background-image for a hidden element. Some make use of sprites and background-position. But sometimes CSS won’t suite yer’ fancy. For instance, images loading to a page dynamically which originate from a CMS. In this example, it would be extremely difficult and not very useful to use sprites. You could potentially use hidden background-images but if you need a higher level of control over that image in the DOM this technique may be for you.
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I’ve been with MediaTemple under their shared and acclaimed grid service for almost two years. In the beginning it was great. And even though it was on the high end of pricing it was still reasonable for the support they gave. As a beginner I don’t regret using them as my first hosting company. However, after implementing nearly ten sites that all require their own database the server became increasingly slow. It got to the point where email accounts and entire sites just wouldn’t be served up, and part of the reason was heavy weekend traffic on the grid.
If my websites are down because Ma’ is taking a sunday drive through google town, I’m probably not going to attract too many new clients. So, I decided to jump ship. Considering that I needed private hosting and the ability to heavily modify the server’s configuration I chose to go with one of these new fangled “unmanaged” hosts (do it yourself) http://linode.com. I end up paying less, but getting much more powerful hardware.
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This will be cut and dry. Drag and drop. Show this to a client, and they will be happier. Guaranteed.
This changes the WP Logo to an image of your choosing, and alters the link and title of that node.
Smiles all around.
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Optimizing and refactoring jQuery code is not as difficult as it seems. You do need to be aware of the most currently available methods though, so below we’ll examine the new to 1.4.2 method .delegate().
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This post will explain how to add a custom Twitter widget without all of the Twitter branding. Below you’ll see an example containing clean style-able markup without all the birds flapping around.
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This is a quick tut for the fastest way to install Magento. You’ll need SSH access and the wget utility if you don’t already. First step is to visit Magento and make a note of the latest stable release. At the time this post was written, the latest release was 1.4.1.1 Next, log into your root directory via SSH and run the following commands:
wget http://www.magentocommerce.com/downloads/assets/1.4.1.1/magento-1.4.1.1.tar.gz
tar -zxvf magento-1.4.1.1.tar.gz
mv magento/* magento/.htaccess .
chmod -R o+w media
./pear mage-setup .
./pear install magento-core/Mage_All_Latest-stable
touch var/.htaccess | mkdir app/etc
chmod o+w var var/.htaccess app/etc
rm -rf downloader/pearlib/cache/* downloader/pearlib/download/*
rm -rf magento/ magento-1.4.1.1.tar.gz
After that all it takes is to point your browser to the URL associated with the root directory and follow the simple web based install.
Note: This article is for the latest version of the tracking code. If you are using the older version, please read the following article.
To determine which tracking code you are using, please see Which version of the tracking code am I using?
It’s easy to have Google Analytics track clicks on links that lead to file downloads. Since downloads generally do not lead to a pull page that would contain the tracking code, we have to make notifying Analytics of a special event. We do this through _trackPageview(). The following code will assign a pageview to the specified link so Analytics will treat clicks to it as a a view of this pseudo-page.
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It is our legal obligation to make our websites accessible to everyone, including those with disabilities. Organizations who fail to comply with accessibility standards have been sued for such offenses. In the case of Maguire v. Sydney Organizing Committee for the Olympic Games, 2000 the website was found inaccessible. The committee was ordered to comply with such standards while failure to do so would provide Maguire with cause for further litigation; including monetary compensation.1
But avoiding lawsuits and fulfilling these moral duties to the disabled in not the only reason to include affordances like these in our designs. There are over 60 million disabled Americans, over 500 million worldwide. According to of 2010 census that’s nearly 25% of Americans2. With such a huge percent of the population, Fortune Magazine has cited this market to be one of the largest, and most forgotten about demographic to target. Collectively, the annual gross income of disabled Americans is over $1 trillion.
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Working with custom fields is really great. It gives you an opportunity to integrate complex dynamic content into a site with proper planning and development. Setting up custom fields takes a little though, but when planned well this technique brings great power to all users of the WP site without too much “techy stuff.”
One of the problems with WordPress’ custom fields is that they are pretty bare bones, not user friendly. There are no instructions for a user, and more importantly if any given field is no longer is use by a page or post IT GETS DELETED! C’mon WP, get with it.
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