Kevinleary.net, LLC.

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Sensible approaches to build and maintain custom WordPress websites.

How to Setup All in One SEO for WordPress

All in One SEO for WordPress is a powerful plugin that will quickly make your WordPress Websites’ SEO (search engine optimization) rock solid. Here’s how you can begin to setup All in One SEO: Download, upload and install the All In One SEO pack. Go to Settings > All in One SEO Enter your settings…

Backup Everything in Your WordPress

One often overlooked, very important step to setting up a WordPress website is creating a solid backup process. Here’s a nice setup I’ve found to be the best for my circumstances. I wanted something that would backup everything, by everything I mean: Plugins Uploads Themes All Content (database backup)

Testing Websites in Internet Explorer 6, 7 and 8 on a Mac

One of the toughest things about developing a website on a Mac is cross browser testing. Luckily, a company called Xenocode has released an interesting browser based solution that works better than any other method I have seen. Check it out here With Xenocode’s Browser Plugin you can load: Internet Explorer 8 Internet Explorer 7…

Speed Up Your WordPress Blog

I’ve re-written a far better guide to WordPress optimization for speed. Most of what you see here is a bit out of date. WordPress is an amazing platform but sometimes it is on the slow side in terms of speed (or page load time); at list this is the case for kevinleary.net. I’ve decided to…

Advanced Content Management with WordPress Custom Field Templates

1/13/2011 – New and improved function used for retrieving custom field data for the current post called base_get_all_custom_fields(). This function will run a database query to get all custom fields attached to the current page, post or post type and store them in an array. WordPress is great for dynamically managing the content of a…

Design Inspiration From Space: Nebula & Star Clusters

While browsing around the web I managed to find some amazing photos published by the NOAO, or National Optical Astronomy Observatory. Design inspiration can be drawn from anywhere! These images remind me of the nice Leopard background that comes stock with any new Apple. They also remind me of designs like: Macalicious 45 Royale OS…

WordPress Custom Templating for Powerful Content Management

WordPress is well known as a blogging platform, but it can easily be turned into an incredibly powerful CMS if used right. Here’s a sneak peak of the tips and tricks I routinely use when setting up a WordPress (CMS) powered website. In my experience the most useful feature is custom contemplating. Custom Templates are…

How to Highlight Author Comments in WordPress

To highlight comments posted by the author in WordPress, add the following code to the comments.php file in your WordPress template: // Author Comments if (1 == $comment->user_id) { ?>

jQuery Animation & Distorted Text in Internet Explorer

While working on the Corporate Filing Solutions project I came across an issue with the jQuery scrolling quotes and Internet Explorer. What’s the issue? It seems that when you animate text with jQuery, particularly bold text, Internet Explorer will distort the text horribly. How do you fix it? To fix this, all you have to…

WordPress is_child() for Advanced Navigation

WordPress lacks one key feature for advanced developers using it as a CMS platform. That feature is the is_child() (or would be) function. If your familiar with WordPress Theme Development you have probably ran into the following Conditional Tags from time to time: is_home() is_front_page() is_single() is_sticky() is_page() If you ever want to have a…

Add Social Media Tracking Tools to Google Analytics

VKI Studios has created a FireFox Greasemonkey plugin to add social media statistics to your Google Analytics dashboard. The Social Media Metrics Greasemonkey Plugin For Google Analytics lets you track your social media stats for: Digg Sphinn Mixx Reddit StumbleUpon Del.icio.us Yahoo inLinks How to Setup Make sure you have Greasemonkey installed on Firefox. Download…

How to Add Google Analytics to WordPress

So you’ve signed up for Google Analytics and you want to set it up on your WordPress blog. Get the Ultimate Google Analytics Plugin Download and install the plugin, log in to your WordPress control panel, and then enter your Google Analytics account ID under Settings \ Ultimate GA. What is a Google Analytics Account…

Smart Forms Using GeoIP Location

GeoIP technology allows us to detect where a specific user is located based on their IP address. With MaxMind’s new JavaScript API it is easy to auto-fill any location form fields to make processes easier for users. This avoids one of the common user interface design mistakes we often encounter: the use of poor defaults.…

Killer Landing Page Designs

If content is king, it’s time we siege his castle, overthrow his vast kingdom and re-organize his army. I’ve been reading Gerry McGoverns’ Killer Web Content lately and he drives an interesting point. There is no doubt that content is king, it should be obvious to all of us that work on the web by…

Sync Gmail Calendar and iCal

Google Now provides an easy way to Sync your Gmail Calendar with your iCal Calendar using a Mac OS X application called Calaboration. If you’ve ever wanted to manage your Google Calendar from within the iCal interface, or vice versa, now you can without the need for an external expensive application such as Spanning Sync.…