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How To Burn Lion To DVD From App Store

December 5, 2011 in How To, Software with 4 Comments

Doing a clean install of OSX Lion on my MacBook Pro!

OSX Lion Clean Install

So Lion has now been out since late July of this year and I have been slow to jump on board. My reluctancy has mostly come from being busy Mon – Fri at work and not wanting to lose productivity, and then not wanting to even open my laptop on the weekend. It’s always a process to reinstall / upgrade an operating system in any environment.

I’ve been trying to ease this burden more and more over the years by using applications such as dropbox, google apps, evernote and other syncing and cloud services. It does get easier but there is also the plethora of software suites and licensing fun and all that junk.

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Maintenance Mode For WordPress

November 30, 2011 in How To, WordPress with 0 Comments

How to put WordPress into “Maintenance Mode”

How to put WordPress into "Maintenance Mode"

One thing that many people don’t know about WordPress is that it comes with the built-in ability to put itself into “Maintenance Mode”. This can come in super handy while you’re developing, switching, upgrading, or troubleshooting your WordPress site. It will give you (or any user with the ability to sign into the admin area of WordPress) the ability to sign into WordPress and see your site as you normally would while your visitors / users see a completely separate splash page or even a completely different site. For the sake of this tutorial, we’ll just stick to a splash page.

Below are the steps to put WordPress into, and easily get it out of, “Maintenance Mode”. For this tutorial, you’ll need to make sure that you can see / edit hidden files (files that begin with a “.”) in your file system or FTP client.

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301 Redirect WordPress site to New WordPress Site [video demo]

October 11, 2011 in Bloggers Handbook, How To with 0 Comments

I moved my wordpress posts from an old site to my personal blog.

Wordpress 301 Redirect all posts to new site

So after a lot of thought, I decided to ditch the “Scattered Blogger” website I created about a year ago. The idea was to create a more focused blog about blogging techniques, tutorials on WordPress, plugin reviews and just about anything on the topic of blogging. Well, I started off strong about 20 posts, and things were moving along fine, and then life happened. I am sort of making an excuse but the bottom line is, I just became overwhelmed with updating multiple properties.

So I decided to move over the posts I created on Scattered Blogger to my personal blog here. I wanted to make sure I didn’t lose any of my links and SERP rankings to the key to success is the proper use of a “301 Redirect” from the old blog to this one. This is a quick blog post with a video demonstration on how I managed to do this.

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Load content using AJAX

December 13, 2010 in How To with 2 Comments

Use the jQuery AJAX objects to call another page after a user action

One of the best elements of having a JavaScript framework such as jQuery available is the browser abstraction. No longer do web designers and developers have to worry about targeting specific browsers, and instead we can focus on enhancing the user experience. It’s generally a good idea to take a progressive enhancement approach despite the wide browser support offered by the framework, however, and this article does exactly that.
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HTML5 New Tags

November 24, 2010 in How To with 3 Comments

Notable new tags you can use – HTML5

HTML5 New Tags You Can Use

HTML5 is still undergoing standardization right now, but that’s no reason to not start using it right? :) Well, you’ll have to decide how much you use now and where. But I wanted to write a quick post on the cool new HTML5 tags and their feature. You can start using these now, but of course they will only work with HTML5 compatible browsers.

Let’s get started with the most important additions and how CSS3 is used in conjunction with HTML5 to perform some really kick butt functionality.

Border Radius:

border-radius

The border-radius property allows you to define rounded corners on a chosen element. Who doesn’t love rounded corners? Rounded corners are sessay in my opinion. Yes, “sessay”.

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jQuery Collapse Menu on WordPress

November 19, 2010 in How To with 4 Comments

Using  jQuery Collapse-O-Matic plugin to create an awesome collapse effect

jQuery plugin for WordPress

jQuery is teh sessay

Have you ever run across a site that has a very cool looking collapsable menu and thought to yourself, “that’s pretty pimp, I wish I had that feature on my WordPress site?” Well, even if you haven’t you can now enjoy the same functionality on your site with ease. Below is an example I have created for you to try out, it is just for a demonstration. Say you wanted to list SEO services on a single page, and had niche’ services but didn’t want them all listed on a long page. You could use the example below instead.

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Promoting a wordpress blog – 02

November 18, 2010 in Bloggers Handbook, How To with 4 Comments

Part of the Bloggers Handbook Series

SEO Slugs / Permalinks and tricks for WordPress,

Promoting your WordPress blog with SEO techniques

SEO + WordPress = FTW

WordPress allows you to change the “slug” or permalink of your post so you can pull some SEO juice. Sometimes you may have a title that is creative but may not be the best at attracting the search so you can create a custom URL or “permalink” to make it more search friendly.

The title of any post should be concise, relevant and contain keywords to make it more search engine attractive. Preferably any keywords should appear near to the front of the title as possible. For example “Atlanta Falcons Win Again”. This gets two keywords right at the beginning of the title, drawing people in immediately.

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Promoting a wordpress blog – 01

November 16, 2010 in Bloggers Handbook, How To with 3 Comments

Part of the Bloggers Handbook Series

Permalinks

By default WordPress creates URLs which comprise of question marks and numbers. These aren’t search engine friendly as they don’t contain keywords. So, let’s go ahead and change that, it’s very simple. There are also a number of ways we can have the URLs displayed and or created.

Clean URLs is a great way to organize, and attract traffic from particular search engine keyword searches. If I was going to write a review blog post about a movie and wanted the best chance of people landing on that page it would make sense for the URL to have relevancy to the search.

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jQuery: Infinite carousel

November 16, 2010 in How To with 2 Comments

jQuery is BOSS

Automatic, infinite carousel with only five lines of code

1. Create an unordered list, each with an image inside

2. Animate the overall position of the list

3. Place the first list item after the last item to make and endless loop.

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Customize admin dashboard in WordPress

November 4, 2010 in How To with 0 Comments

Modifying the admin dashboard in WordPress is pretty easy. In the above video I demonstrate the initial dashboard after a fresh install of WordPress, and then how to modify the look of it. There isn’t really much to it. The “Screen Options” tab in the upper right hand side will initialize a dropdown when clicked. From there you can un-check which boxes you want displayed, and how many columns you want to use.

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