Okay, well maybe top 10 is a bit of a misnomer, since these are just 10 free and public domain stock photo sites that I find useful from time to time, but the list still applies. Everything on these sites is free at no cost to you, though please do check the rights on each image, as they may be licensed under a Creative Commons license that requires you to give credit to the photographer.
Continue reading ‘Top 10 Sites for Free Stock Photos’
In my day-to-day SEO work, there are many sites I use that have a bunch of checkboxes on a single page. For example, in SEO, this is usually to check the box beside websites I want to trade links with. Well this gets tidious, so I went on the hunt for some kind of Javascript, Firefox-addon or mini-program that would do this with 1 click of the mouse. Here’s what I figured out… Continue reading ‘Javascript Select All/Check All Checkboxes (Updated)’
Wooooo! It seems the big 1.0 has finally be released, and is out of beta. From the Magento Blog:
To everyone who spread the word about Magento, told a friend, wrote in blogs, posted and commented in the Magento forums, subscribed to our newsletter, downloaded one (or more) of our 11 preview releases, reported bugs, participated in the Magento community, to the online merchants who waited for Magento 1.0, developers and designers who convinced their clients to wait for the product and our partners who recognized the potential — Thank you for believing
Looks like there are plenty of bug fixes and even some new features in this version! Hooray! Looks like it’s time to update the Dreamhost Magento Installation Guide.
I’ve been watching the Magento e-commerce project for about the last month and a half - since Ben sent me a link to it. It’s an open-source e-commerce package, that primarily aims to pickup and improve where OSCommerce, Joomla + VirtueMart, and ZenCart have left off - streamlining a CMS (Content Management Sytem) and E-commerce shopping cart. This also means built-in SEO (Search Engine Optimization), Google Checkout integration, varied customer groups, and much more…. straight out of the box. The problem appears to be that there are a lot of people on the Magento forums who are running into problems, and don’t have a clue on how to get it running under their Dreamhost hosting account. Unfortunately it also looks like the previous article(s) for Magento+Dreamhost installs have disappeared, or are outdated. And that’s where this article comes in… Continue reading ‘Magento Installation Guide for Dreamhost’
Wordpress is a funny beast, really it is. Usually, building a Wordpress site involves something like digging through a hundred pages of templates until you find one that’s merely passable. Once you do, you grab it and start hacking away at everything to make it your own - CSS, HTML, everything. And it’s fine. Really, it is - the internet’s built on sharing ideas. The problem appears once you start inheriting other people’s problems. In this case, I had to hit the refresh key just to get my divs to float correctly.
Continue reading ‘Floats, CSS, Divs, the Refresh Button, Firefox, and Frustration’
And I don’t mean girls in Google-brand bikinis on the beach, duking it out. Mmmm…
What I’m talking about here is the terrible, almighty Google, deciding that your site needs to stand in the corner for a 1-month timeout because it wasn’t playing well with others. Yes. That’s right. The Google Sandbox and Google filtering that everyone secretly fears, but publicly dismisses. How do I know about this? Because I recently fell victim to it. Although it was completely my fault, I’ve since learned from it, and now I’m sharing my tips here, so that hopefully other developers and SEOs can learn from my mistake of building inbound links too quickly. Continue reading ‘Tips to Prevent Google Sandboxing (filtering)’
I ran into an interesting problem today while considering how to find out where subordinate employees fit into an organizational chart. The problem was that I need to list every employee that was “under” a given employee, but could only really do this in SQL - if I were to try and do this from within PHP, it would have made a single exception case where we build an SQL query based on another query - something I’d rather not have to do. Let’s see if this little graph can more adequately describe what the issue was:
Continue reading ‘Creating Recursive SQL Calls for Tables with Parent-Child Relationships’
Need a color scheme, but suck at that whole hexadecimal - where - the - hell - is - the - next - shade - of - blue thing? No biggie, I’ve got you covered. From eyedroppers, to scheme generators, to color blindness tools, below you’ll find my latest list of color tools that make my “Web Developer Must Have” list. While you’re playing with these, please do me a favor and keep in mind that the level of contrast you come up with is directly proportional to how much I’ll probably hate your site. No excuses, really now, if you want me to go into an epileptic shock (which you very well may), you’ll ignore my warning.
Continue reading ‘Top 10 Free Color Tools for Web Designers’
I’m sure all of our readers can type 70+ words a minute (right?), so no one really cares to make writing any quicker. That is, except for the fact that we’re a bunch of lazy bastards that hate data-entry tedium and loathe trying to grab snippets out of our clunky IDE’s. Even Zend’s snippet IDE leaves a lot to be desired - and it’s one of the best we’ve come across. To help alleviate the problem, LifeHacker’s got a tool called Texter built on the Autohotkey framework.
What Texter does is fairly simple - you write a “function” in Texter that keeps an eye out for when you type certain keywords. If you type a keyword then hit the trigger key, your keyword gets replaced with the function you wrote in Texter. It’s fun, really!
Continue reading ‘Top 10 Texter Uses for Code Monkeys’
I recently ran into some problems with our Linux mail cluster after a bad power bump. (Electricity. Hmph! Sooo 20th Century.) Apparently servers don’t enjoy it when you tell them it’s not working out and proceed to find more servers to fulfill your needs. After three cases of Dr. Pepper and several hours of interweb searching, here’s what I found out about the NFS implementation in Debian. It’s actually quite simple… honest.
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