There are many plugins available that handle this, but sometimes a simple solution works best. For most of the WordPress sites I design I implement this basic Google Analytics function into functions.php to keep things lightweight and not dependent on plugins. The only extra feature added to Google Analytics is 404 error tracking, which I…
Before launching a new WordPress site it’s your responsibility as a developer to ensure that the URL structure currently indexed by search engines is preserved for SEO value. 301 redirects will tell search engines that a page has been moved permanently. I use this handy function by Scott Nelle which been pulled and modified slightly…
I was recently tasked with researching SEO best practices for YouTube videos. I’ve gathered the following information that should help improve your YouTube video search visibility. I hope this helps with your current project! 1. Keyword Analysis Determine what relevant keywords your target audience will be searching for. Be open-minded here, this is often not…
The average web user doesn’t know much about search optimization and will usually enter a person’s name as expected (“kevin leery”) with no quotes or spaces. This makes it very important to tag and label your Flickr photos in the best way possible to ensure that they are found by users searching the service. Kevin…
Steve Sonders outlines essential rules for speeding up websites on the front-end in his book High Performance Web Sites. He strongly advocates for developers to load JavaScript at the bottom of a page. When a website is loaded in a browser using HTTP, scripts don’t allow parallel downloads. This means that it may take 4…
At the most basic level WordPress requires PHP 7.4+ and MySQL, with Apache or nginx. Beyond that there are numerous other things you should take into account before choosing a host for your WordPress website. Traffic volume, speed, security and ease of can all vary greatly depending on the host you choose. I’ve worked with more…
It is surprisingly difficult to do this share a page link from iPad Safari to Twitter. The best solution seems to be the Twitter Share bookmarklet, which isn’t as simple as you might expect. How to Add The Bookmarklet Add this page as a bookmark by tapping the “+” icon Select/highlight the entire Twitter Share…
Just about every server language out there allows you to work with URL parameters. Surprisingly JavaScript doesn’t have a straight forward way to do this that’s full accepted by all browsers. This simple function will allow you to parse URL parameters with JavaScript, returning a JSON object of all parameters and values or retrieving a…
Hulu.com has a stylish, fully-featured content slider on it’s homepage that was built using Flash. I set out to re-create this using HTML, CSS3, JavaScript and jQuery. Here are the results. See the slideshow source in action! Requirements Slide left to right, and seamlessly restart at the beginning from the last slide Slide the full…
Automatically formatting currency fields for users can improve usability, and make things easy to process for form administrators. This problem/solution approach will show you how I automatically formatted currency form fields using a small bit of jQuery and JavaScript, improving form usability while standardizing form submissions.
The jQuery cookie plugin makes it very easy to create, update and access information using cookies. I’ve used this plugin to handle smart email newsletter sign-up notifications on the Openview Labs website. Download jQuery Plugin The latest version of the Klaus Hartl’s jQuery cookie plugin is available for download on the Github. After you have…
WordPress has built-in the SimplePie RSS parsing engine, making it very easy to display the content of an RSS feed in your theme. The fetch_feed() function provides access to SimplePie in WordPress, but it’s not that re-usable. I frequently used this handy function for parsing RSS feeds within WordPress themes (or plugins).
I’ve been curious about the possibilities of leveraging public API’s to create applications, so I decided to create a small application to make my life easier. How it was built Similar Sounds leverages the YouTube API and the Last.fm API to provide an easy way to discover new artists similar to ones I already like.…
Once you have a 16px by 16px PNG, GIF, JPG or ICO file adding a favicon, or favorite icon, to your website is easy. On the other hand it will take a few extra steps to comply with all browser’s. If you need to convert an icon to .ico I’d suggest the Project Fondue Favicon…
This snippet will add values to an associative array. Normally I use array_push() for this, but that function doesn’t work with associative arrays in PHP.