For a long period of time we used Eric Meyers CSS Reset as a good CSS baseline.  For those of you that may be unfamiliar with his CSS Reset, it pretty much does what it says.  It resets the browser’s styling of tags such as H1, H2, etc to nothing so you have to go and define them all yourself.  You may ask why do this?  The easy answer is, different browsers render things differently. FireFox and Internet Explorer can render an H1 tag completely differently from one another.  The CSS Reset puts them both back to a starting point and puts it on the website developer’s shoulders to give the H1 tag styling that will render the same in both browsers.  The CSS Reset is definitely a good tool and I’m sure has gotten quite a bit of usage over the years.  However, just as I was mentioning above about HTML5 and CSS3, newer technology comes along that can potentially make our lives easier.

Here’s where Normalize CSS comes in to play.  Normalize CSS is a bit different than CSS Reset in that it doesn’t reset everything to a baseline.  Instead what it does is “normalize” browser inconsistencies so you get virtually the same styling across different browsers.  It also goes a step further and fixes some rendering issues in those let’s say a not so proficient browser such as Internet Explorer.  Although Internet Explorer 9 is much better than its predecessors, as a browser, it still has a long way to go to keep up with the likes of browsers such as FireFox or Chrome.  Normalize CSS also has a bit better documentation than CSS Reset does for those of you that may need that.

We’ve used Normalize CSS on several of our last projects and were pleased at the end result when it came to testing browser compatibility.  Although we don’t support Internet Explorer 6 (who does?) anymore, it was nice to see there was very little to go in and fix for Internet Explorer 7.

If you’ve been using CSS Reset for a while, give Normalize CSS a try and see if your end product requires less fixes for browser compatibility.

Coding: HTML5/CSS3

Compatibility: WordPress 3.0+

Browser Compatibility:

• IE 6,7,8,9
• Chrome 18+
• FireFox 7+
• Safari 5.1+

This simplistic theme was created from a free PSD by PSDStyle.  It makes use of many of WordPress’ functions such as Featured Images and Custom Menus.

Additionally the theme includes a small Theme Options panel which lets users set:

• A logo to replace the standard name and tagline
• The number of posts shown on the home page
• The category to be used for the featured image on the home page
• Widgetized Sidebar & Footer
• Search Function
• Comments
• Author Pages
• Background Image
• Background Color

You are free to use this free as you choose as long as our credits remain in place as well as it is not to be re-packaged and re-sold.

To install this theme, download and extract and upload via FTP or use the upload function in the WordPress administration area.

Looking for custom WordPress work or development?  Feel free to Contact Us, we’d love to hear more about your project and what we can  do for you!

We have known Mike Jackness for a considerable amount of time now and although our relationship started out as a developer/client relationship it has progressed into much more about friendship. Mike is one of those rare guys that takes a great deal of pride in his websites. A lot of time, energy and finances go into each of his projects. Most, if not all of his projects are of such a caliber that an extreme attention to detail is needed. However, Mike does come from a technical background which gives an advantage in that he understands the development process. We have been privileged to work on many of these high-end and widely popular projects of his. To see a small example take a look at Terran Marketing’s portfolio.

Mike’s knowledge of SEO and marketing is unparalleled. It would submit to you that our level of development has been just as high.

With that said, I am pleased to announce we are joining forces and are working on a project together that I’m sure many of you, especially in the WordPress realm will be interested in. Unfortunately I cannot share any of the details at this point due to the nature of the project. Within the next month or two we hope to unveil this project to the world.

Be sure to bookmark our site or Mike’s site for our announcement.

Over the last week I have been receiving phone calls from a telephone number: 1-999-910-0122. This particular number will show up on my caller ID at least 4 to 5 times per day. I already have both my house phone and my cell phone listed on the national Do Not Call Registry, however as you’ll see that will make no difference in this case. At first I was hoping maybe they were after some WordPress development.

After ignoring the call for several days I finally decided to answer. This was not before I threw the phone number into Google to see if there’s any information regarding this number. If you Google for this phone number you’ll see there are already posts indicating this is an attempt at a scam.

When I answer the phone I was greeted by someone named “Tom”. I could immediately tell this was somebody from overseas (probably India) who then proceeded to tell me he represented Microsoft. I had a few minutes to spare so I figured I would have myself a look at of entertainment at his expense.

Tom proceeded to tell me my computer was infected with viruses and the viruses were pinging their security site. Next he asked me if I was in front of my computer and my computer was on. Then the fun part began.

First he had me find my “C + T + R + L” key. I knew this was a bad sign when he had to spell out the control key. To save you all the exact steps of what he had me do, the short of it is he had me open my event viewer and look at all the error and warning messages under the administrative option of the event viewer.

He told me how all these errors and warnings were viruses and that if I shut down my computer I would never be able to restart again. More so they’re affecting my hard drive and I was infecting myself by opening my e-mail. At this point I was beginning to lose interest in having fun with him. I told him he was full of shit. However, he still insisted they were viruses. A few more expletives on my behalf and I hung up the phone.

The interesting part is the continued to call for the next several days. I try to have a unique scenario each time they called. I went from acting like a child whose parent wasn’t home, to having them call during a home invasion robbery in which I was pleading and begging for help. In most cases they simply became discombobulated and hung up.

The whole point of this post is this phone number is a computer generated phone number and cannot be added to the Do Not Call Registry. Your only choices depending on your phone provider to block the number.

Most importantly, I never found out exactly what they want me to do, but I assumed it was going to be signing up for some type of service. Do Not sign up for anything these people offer you. No one from Microsoft is going to be calling you from a 999 number.

Now I’m off to think of more scenarios for the next time these morons call…

It is very easy to set up an environment to run WordPress locally and/or other websites. All we need to do is install a simple program and we will be up and running in a matter of minutes.

Although there are several tools out there that allow you to run Apache and PHP on your local machine, the best tool I’ve found to do this is WAMP. You can download it directly from their website and either a 32 bit or 64-bit executable. You can visit their main page here: http://www.wampserver.com/en/

Once you have WAMP installed you’ll want to left click on the small red W icon and select start all services. Once you have WAMP running open a new browser window and type in “localhost”. If for whatever reason WAMP won’t run you may need to alter Apache port. In my case I needed to alter my Apache port to 81. So in my browser window I type in HTTP://localhost:81

Once I do that I will be greeted by the WAMP welcome page. From here we need to scroll down a bit and click on PHPMyAdmin. Next click on Databases and create a new database giving it a name of whatever you would like. You’ll notice that you do not have to create a MySQL user or pass.

WAMP will create a folder called “www” for you. You need to put all of your projects in subfolders under this directory. In my case I created a new folder called “WordPress”. I downloaded WordPress, extracted it and pasted the extracted files into this folder.

Now what we want to do is go back to our WAMP welcome screen and you’ll see a new folder called “WordPress”. Click on this link and you’ll be taken to a familiar set up screen which is the WordPress install screen. The process is identical to setting up WordPress on your local machine as it would be to set up an installation online.

Go to the WordPress installation as you normally would until you get to the database configuration screen. Enter the database name you previously created and when it asks for the database user simply type in “root”. Blink out the password section as you do not need this when you are running SQL locally.

Now you can go into complete the rest of the WordPress installation. Once the installation process is done, you can login and see that you have a working copy of WordPress running on your local machine. In the event the WordPress core needs to update or a plug-in needs to update, you will be prompted just as if you were running WordPress online.

Although we did use WordPress in this example, you can run any other script locally that is typically used online.

If you have any questions, or are in the need for a WordPress website developer please feel free to contact us. Additionally, if you’re looking for reliable WordPress hosting please check out our sister site BlueLayerHost.

The first thing to do is using whatever image manipulation software i.e. Photoshop, gimp, etc. is to create a 16 pixel by 16 pixel image that you want to have appear in your end-users browser.

Although you can save this image as a .PNG file broader compatibility is given when you save the file as a .ICO file.

Once this file is created and saved, using your favorite FTP client upload the image to your particular theme. Make sure to upload the file into the actual theme folder and not the WP-content folder.

Although many of today’s modern browsers will recognize the .ICO file without the need for adding additional code to your website, to be 100% sure you can add one additional line of code to your themes header file.

As long as you have followed all of the steps as outlined above pasting the below code should get your favicon to appear in browser. If you don’t see your favicon right away, make sure you do a hard refresh on your browser. Typically this can be done with Control + F5.

With very little work indeed you can give your visitors another visual indicator as to what website you’re visiting as well as a visual indicator they can use when bookmarking your website.

If you find yourself in the need for a WordPress developer, or have any questions regarding WordPress, feel free to contact us.

At this point I’m going to assume you already have your HTML and CSS set up.

The first thing we are going to do is give every body tag on every page and individual CSS ID. In the images below you will see that I used a CSS class. Either option is okay however you would probably like to stick with using IDs. In the image below I gave our homepage a body class of “home”.

I currently have my navigation in an unordered list. The next up was to give each list item individual IDs as well.

The last and most important step is to apply CSS to each of these individual list items. As you can see with the below image each individual list item is defined with the individual body classes. Now each time a particular page is clicked on that anchor tag will change color and give a different visual representation, so that a visitor is able to easily tell what page they are on.

So as you can see without the need of PHP or JavaScript and a very minimal time, I was able to give a little bit more flair to a static HTML website.

We always welcome any comments or questions and if you have some, feel free to contact us.

If you need assistance with learning how to turn your WordPress comments on off, check out this post which will walk you through how to do so globally and on a post-by post basis.

WordPress comes preinstalled with a plug-in called Akismet. This plug-in is not activated by default and it is up to you to activate and configure it. To activate this plug-in simply go to the plug-ins tab in your administrative backend. Click on “Install Plug-Ins” and you’ll see a list of plug-ins available to you. Click on activate underneath the Akismet plug-in and upon doing so you’ll be prompted to insert a key to allow you to use the plug-in.

You’ll need to go to the official Akismet website and register for a key. Upon registering you’ll receive your key which will need to copy and paste and insert into the options area of Akismet.

Once the key is pasted in place simply click save changes and you’re all set.

After a period of time you’ll see the number of comments Akismet has blocked from appearing on your website. This number will show in the main dashboard area of WordPress. It will also show you a number of spam comments that are currently awaiting your attention. It is a good idea to check these once in a while to make sure Akismet has not flagged anything as spam that should be.

If you’re in the market for a WordPress Developer, feel free to contact us. We would love to work on your next project with you!

These WordPress plug-ins are on “sale” sale from anywhere from $10.00 to $20.00. Not an overwhelming amount of money to spend especially if they do what they claim to do… I have my doubts.

In any event Google Rich Snippets uses something from HTML called micro data. This isn’t anything recently new, however people are starting to capitalize on it. I’m going to show you how to do it with a free WordPress plug-in at approximately 15 min. of your time at a cost of absolutely nothing.

A couple things we are going to need to do this.

• The Google Rich Snippets tool
• A PHP editor
• GD Star Ratings WordPress plug-in
• Some of your time

Yes that’s all that’s required. Now we may not be able to replicate all of their functionality exactly but we will be able to replicate the majority of it. I know one of the plug-ins in particular offered to pull in the featured image of each post. But really, who cares. It’s about getting more visuals on your Google listing.  I have a video below showing you exactly what you need to do visually in case you don’t feel like reading this post.

The first thing that you’re going to need to do is install WordPress GD Star Ratings in your WordPress website. I will assume at this point you know how to install a WordPress plug-in. If not there are a multitude of WordPress tutorials which show you how to do this.

Once you have WordPress GD Star Ratings installed you’ll need to go to the Articles tab and him take the five tick boxes that are checked by default. Once you do that click save settings at the bottom of the page.

That’s half the battle. Now we are going to have to mess with PHP. A word to the wise, be very careful when editing PHP in the WordPress theme editor. There is no way to undo what you do and as soon as you hit Update File your changes are permanent. It is quite easy to leave off a bracket or semicolon thereby rendering your WordPress site utterly useless. My recommendation is to either use a PHP editor or notepad++ instead of the WordPress theme editor.

The next thing to do is open up your single.php file from your WordPress themes folder and look for PHP code that references the author. Within that anchor tag you need to insert the following: rel=”author”. Now save that file.

WordPress utilizes theme files to render content. If you have a blog on your website WordPress by default uses index.php. WordPress will also use this file to render an author page if you do not have author.php in your theme.

An easy way to create the author.php file is simply copy the contents of index.php and paste them into a new file called author.php. From here you can edit author.php to include any additional code or information you would like to display on the WordPress author page. In this case we are going to need to add the Google profile link. Simply copy and paste the code listed below in your author.php file.

Now open your functions.php file and paste in the following code. This will allow you and your authors to link to their Google profile. Once there Google profile is linked you now completed the requirements for using Google Rich snippets.

Make sure all of the PHP files you have edited are saved and uploaded. Go ahead and give one of your WordPress posts a rating and copy the URL and paste that URL into the Google Rich snippets tool. Press preview and that everything was done correctly you should see how your post will now appear in Google as well as a green link below the preview let you know everything is set up accordingly.

So as you can see we were able to replicate a majority of the functionality the other WordPress plug-ins are providing for absolutely no cost. It took approximately 15 min. of our time to complete this and used one free plug-in.

If you’re stuck or have any other questions regarding web development feel free to contact us.

There are certain times with your WordPress website you may wish to turn off commenting. Other times, having a discussion with as many users as possible is very beneficial. There are two ways to control commenting in WordPress. The first option is globally. However, this global option can be overridden on a case-by-case basis for each particular WordPress post.

Doing this is relatively easy in WordPress and here is how.

WordPress commenting will be on by default. If you wish to turn this off globally you need to go into your administrator area, to settings and then discussion. Once you’re in this new WordPress menu, you’ll see an option for turning off were turning on WordPress comments on a global basis.

Controlling WordPress comments on an individual post by post basis is as just easy, at the option to do so is tucked away.

In order to control WordPress comments on a post-by post basis the first thing you need to do while viewing the all posts menu is click the tab in the upper right-hand corner called “Screen Options”. From there you will see a new menu with several tick boxes. What we are after is the one called “Discussions”. Enabling this tick box will now give you the ability to change if comments should be enabled for this particular post. The option to do this is right below the main text editor area.

Setting this will only enable wordpress comments for this post. If you need to go in and change other posts the process is just the same.

And now you see how simple it is to control wordpress commenting on a global basis or on a post-by post basis.