Twenty Ten and Featured Content Gallery
How to integrate the Featured Content Gallery plugin with the Twenty Ten theme from Word Press.
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Frugal/Catalyst Theme Review
No more wasting my time searching for the right theme to use. I have found the end-all theme that is now my go-to theme for whichever flavor site I am building.
I am sure many of you follow the same process I would follow when starting a new website.
1. Have an idea for a new site.
2. Install and configure WordPress and install plug-ins.
3. Search for the perfect theme.
Now number 3 would always take lots of web searching, downloading, installing, activating, removing, over and over, no theme ever seemed to be just right.
Then I found the Frugal Theme. I found I can really make this theme into any look and feel I want all from within WordPress. Just about every single detail can be changed with a few clicks. It also has SEO built right in (which eliminates the need for SEO).
I have discovered that the more I use and dig into the frugal theme the more powerful it becomes. You will find out that Frugal is actually much much more than just a WordPress theme.
Are you tired of searching for the right theme? Get the Frugal Theme, you will not regret it!
MySQL Query on timestamp using PHP
In this example I had to create a query only to display orders for the last 90 days.
The orders table is using a standard MySQL timestamp field to store the date of the order. I made timestamp indexed since we will be doing this query against this field.
I figured the easiest way was to only query those 90 days, that way I didn’t have to worry about looking at each row and comparing a date during output. All I had to worry about was creating the right query.
The first line simply is the number of days to go back in the query, in this case the number of days is 90.
The next 2 lines are used to create and format our new date 90 days in the past.
In the query we simply select all records that are newer than our 90 day old date.
$daysback = 90;
$accessdate = strtotime(“-$daysback days”,time());
$mysqldate = date( ‘Y-m-d H:i:s’, $accessdate );$myquery = “select id,ordernumber,timestamp from tblorders where (timestamp > ‘$mysqldate’);”;
CubeCart 5 Beta
When we opened our e-commerce store almost 2 years ago I spent a lot of time researching shopping cart software. Now I knew this would be both an important decision. Shopping cart software is a major influence on the success (or failure) of any e-commerce website.
Tasapspider/0.9
Just found this “bot” going crazy on a site that is on a dedicated server, took the entire server offline. This bot looks to be new and from China, so be on the lookout.
Other reports are saying it is ignoring the robots.txt file, so might not be good enough to deny it there.
It was coming from 218.28.29.236
Here are more details about that IP, and what ranges you might want to block.
http://whois.domaintools.com/218.28.29.236
I placed the following in my .htaccess file
order allow,deny
deny from 218.28.
deny from 218.29.
allow from all
Please post a comment if you this bot has hit your site.
Short Meta Descriptions Can Kill Your Website
If you look at the graph above you will see the nice steady growth of a website. Then suddenly a drop! The site in question dropped from an average of over 100 unique visitors per day down to less than 5 per day. Quite a significant drop! Once I was sure the drop was going to stick, I made a few minor changes and then just left the site alone for a long time. Yes, I was disappointed, but it was not something I had time or ambition to address at the time.
Note: you will see on the chart short regain of traffic, but this seems to be a normal “blip” that can happen as rankings are sorted out across Google data centers.
Fast forward a month or so, and I am looking in through the webmaster tools, and happen to notice the HTML suggestions section under Diagnostics. There I see a line that says: “Short meta descriptions x,xxx”, which is just about every single page of the site. Immediately I fix the problem with the meta descriptions.
The Google Word on Meta Descriptions
Tracking Email Marketing Results
Find out if users are reading and responding to your email newsletters. This simple method will determine a direct correlation between newsletter clicks and sales.
Website backups
How to automate website backups.
Follow this very simple procedure to schedule your website backups. You will be glad you did.
Spinn3r Bot
Spinn3r is a bot that indexes blog posts.
Looks like this in your log files.
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2.1; aggregator:Spinn3r (Spinn3r 3.1); http://spinn3r.com/robot) Gecko/20021130
The Webmasters Must Have Software Toolkit
The focus on this list is for the beginning webmaster starting out with all 100% free software and using a windows based PC.
FTP Client: The best choice here is Filezilla. Filezilla has now been around for many years and has the benefit of being free, and is continually being updated. I have used Filezilla personally for around 6 years and it has performed flawlessly for me. This is one great piece of software that happens to not only be free, but also open source.
Graphics Software: For graphics I would recommend Paint.net. Another really nice free program that is always being updated and refined. Paint.net has grown from a quite simple “paint” replacement into a powerful graphics tool. It is a light and fast program for simple image creation or editing photos. Paint.net also supports plugins that can enhance the functionality even more.
Text and HTML editor: A really nice simple text and HTML editor I would use Notepad2. For a simple no-nonsense editor that is miles ahead of the standard notepad.exe, notepad2 is a great choice for starting out with simple HTML and web-editing. It is one of those pieces of software that is installed right away on any new computer I use. Once installed, just be sure to active the line numbers feature.
Web Browser: Add a few great extensions to the Firefox browser, and you have an awesome browser and webmaster assistant all in one. So along with the basic Firefox install, this short list of extensions are ones that I use daily to assist in web design development and programming. (Just to note I use quite a few more, but those are great for getting started)
- The Web Developer Toolbar
- Search Status
- Live HTTP headers
WordPress image uploader crashing Firefox
If you are having trouble with Firefox crashing when you go to try to upload an image using the WordPress flash-based image uploader. Here is a quick fix.
Go into your Firefox addons. (Tools – Add ons).
Find the Google Gears entry.
Click Disable button, and restart your Firefox Browser.
Good Ridance Geocities!
Wow, talk about unloading a bunch of crap off the internet. This will be like cleaning the back corners of the internet that no one visits.
10 million spots now freed up in the Google index!
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