Now I don’t have to tell you guys about all the goodies that WordPress 2.5 brings, but I’ll name a few anyways:
New fresh Admin theme Nice Dashboard You can modify the link for “Incoming Links”. Technorati anyone? Finally included Tag Management Concurrent Post Editing Protection One Click Plugin upgrades. Oh yes. It’s about time. Built in Gallery Nice Flash Media Uploader There’s just ONE thing that rubs me the wrong way.
I can’t remember where exactly I heard about this web host, but InsaneGB.com sounded like a great deal. You can read their website for more details, but in a nutshell they got PHP 5, MySQL 4, and everything (Databases, Add-on domains, etc) is unlimited except disk space and bandwidth. They give you 5GB for disk space and 20GB on bandwidth per month. Which is great for a free host, if you ask me; heck, they even offer cron jobs.
One thing that has plagued me as a designer for many years is the ability to test my designs in multiple web browsers. Back in the day, computers came with Internet Explorer 5.5 and that’s it. Installing a later version would always overwrite the previous one, so it became difficult to test my designs properly.
The Easy Guys - Netscape and Opera Testing in Netscape is rather easy. You can download and install multiple versions of Netscape and they have no interaction with each other as long as you install them to different folders.
Now if you’re into Web 2.0 and haven’t heard of the Lightbox script, then you must be living under a rock. If this is your first time crawling out from under that rock, you can get a quick sample of the Lightbox effect here. Just click on the first picture and watch the magic.
The Lightbox effect is used to pop up a larger image into the forefront of a web page.
Poll results for What Do You Look for in a PHP Framework are in:
Most of you prefer a framework that is Quick and Easy. Hey, I’m totally with you guys on that. When deciding on a web development framework, it has to be easy. It’s no fun if it takes hours to learn and saves you minutes. For me, CakePHP definitely fits this bill. The bake routines save me so much time during initial development.
By now you’ve all either heard or experienced first hand the blow dealt to the Page Rank of many websites by the mighty hand of Google. They are basically targeting any websites that serve links, which are not natural. This generally includes any links that have been sold on the website.
PayPerPost is one of the largest companies out there that pay bloggers to post about different things. They are generally instructed to keep their reviews relevant to their content, but sometimes bloggers stray a bit.
The Problem I’ve had this problem for a while, but it’s become more of a problem since I started working heavily with CakePHP.
Here is my WAMP folder structure: D:\wamp\www\cake[various app]
Under this folder, I would have baked all the different applications that I’m working on at the time (app1, app2, app3, etc). So I could have my DocumentRoot set to my cake folder and access the different apps in my browser by:
Got The Cron Web Cron is a great method of automating tasks on your server if you’re not blessed with cron jobs. However, after writing this I stumbled onto something that may fit your needs a bit better; Remote Cron is that service. It’s everything Web Cron is and more:
It’s Totally Free It’s in English What more can you ask for? Yeah, I know, my standards are really low.
Introduction
It’s no new news to us that images hurt a page’s load time worst then anything out there. There are a lot of things you can do to try and alleviate some of the problem. You can use smaler images, you can reduce the quality on images, etc.
But consider this. You know that your website is going to a long one. Meaning that the user is going to have to scroll. This means that they don’t see the entire page when they first load. Wouldn’t it be nice to only load what they need? You could load only the images that are in view. This will give the user time to read the content about the fold on your page, then as he scrolls down, you can gradually load the rest of the images.
This is referred to as Lazy Loading. It’s exactly the opposite of preloading images. We preload images for a lot of reasons. The classic example is in those old school JavaScript (and even CSS) rollovers, where we preload the rollover image so that there is no delay when they are needed.
Enter Lazy Load Plugin for jQuery
Lazyloader is inspired by YUI ImageLoader Utility by Matt Mlinac. It simply delays the loading of images on the web page until they are within view. This gives the page quicker initial load time.
This works out great if you have a page with a lot of heavy images lower down and a lot of navigation links at the top. If the user is trying to get to a specific page using this plugin would be a great help.
I had some downtime tonight (well not really, but I figure that was a good form of procrastination) so I decided to take a quick look into my blog and see what the issue was with Internet Explorer 6.0 and my sidebar.
It turns out, as you may already know, that I’m an idiot. It wasn’t totally the browser’s fault. I was migrating (patching heavily) this theme from a dynamic/fluid width to a fixed width and I made a dumb mistake.