Although I rarely use the search option on my site I noticed that my Contact page was being included in the search results. Not only did this seem pointless, it also looked strange slap-bang in the middle of the results page.
(more…)I recently had a problem with the WordPress.com Stats plugin I use. On reading the documentation for an answer I saw that, on an unrelated note, it’s possible to retrieve statistics, such as post view counts, using the WordPress.com Stats API.
I never did find an answer to my problem and it since appears to have rectified itself, but I thought I’d have a go at getting view counts for my posts using the API and including them on my blog.
(more…)I’m still relatively new to PHP and the one thing that continues to trip me up is the use of global variables. I cut my programming teeth many years ago on languages like C and Visual Basic and more recently JavaScript, all of which handle global variables differently to PHP.
(more…)A few people have been asking about the expandable lists I have in the sidebar, so I thought I’d share how I did this. The effect is actually quite easy to achieve and uses some simple JavaScript to change the CSS display property of the element containing the list. However, there are a few things to note.
(more…)I have several computers on my local network each with a local server environment provided by XAMPP. As it stands, the local server on each computer can only serve pages stored on that machine. This means that if I have a local site on computer A that I wish to access on computer B I have to replicate that site’s entire folder structure on computer B and on all other computers I want to access the site from.
No big deal really as I currently use ChronoSync to synchronise my site’s folder structure across computers. However, it is possible to have any computer on a local network serve pages that are stored on another computer on that same network. Here’s how.
(more…)You may have heard about Google’s recent release of Google Public DNS which, amongst other claims, aims to speed-up your browser’s interaction with DNS servers thereby making the internet appear faster. Well, that’s my interpretation anyway.
Google states that “…Google Public DNS takes some new approaches that we believe offer more valid results, increased security, and, in most cases, better performance.”
I was particularly interested in the possible speed increase after finding these benchmarks where the comparative speed of Google Public DNS (8.8.8.8), Level 3 (4.2.2.2) and OpenDNS (208.67.222.222) were tested.
Using these same DNS servers, here are my results for a handful of sites I visit regularly:
(more…)One small annoyance I have with the OS X Finder is its apparent inability to let me set a default Finder window size. However many times I resize windows with the mouse, the Finder will eventually reset them to some arbitrary dimensions.
If, like me, you find this aspect of the Finder’s behaviour particularly irksome then try this AppleScript.
(more…)I was recently looking to give my photo gallery an overhaul. I’m quite a fan of Adobe’s Spry framework, so I thought I’d give the Sliding Panels widget a try. There are several examples on Adobe’s site showing panels sliding vertically, horizontally and in any direction. The direction is controlled by some CSS and after successfully playing around with vertical and horizontal sliding I couldn’t figure out from the examples how to get the panels to slide in any direction. That is until I realised how the panels are laid out and the importance of one particular CSS declaration.
(more…)If you want your visitors to be able to send you an email from your site there are several options including mailto, sendmail or Postfix. There are also numerous sites offering contact forms for free. I was using the excellent swiftmailer which performed perfectly on both my local and remote servers for a while, but subsequently ceased working on my remote server – presumably because of some configuration change by my hosting provider which I never did get to the bottom of.
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