Have you ever had the need to create a custom template for a specific page on your WordPress-controlled website? Maybe you have created a page on your site that needs to include a customized sidebar, or maybe you want to create a custom archive page for specific categories of blog posts? Whatever the reason, it’s something I am constantly doing within my WordPress websites. So…  Read More →

If you’re anything like me, you have traditionally used javascript alert boxes to try to identify and diagnose bugs in your javascript code. There are two major issues with this process, though. It’s extremely inconvenient for your users if you’re trying to debug a live application. It can be a real problem if you end up in some sort of long/infinite loop and end up outputting multiple alert boxes. There is a better way, though,... 

As you may or may not know, Boxee (a cross-platform media center application) went into public beta a while back. Today, they released an all-new version of the beta . This new version apparently includes access to four different movie libraries (as well as all of the other features that were already part of the app). If you haven’  Read More →

For those of you that haven’t heard, Twitter has released an official bookmarklet to allow you to tweet about just about anything you find online. While I appreciate the fact that Twitter is moving forward with tools to make it easier for its users to share information through its service (the official Twitter iPhone app, the official Twitter “Tweet” button for websites and blogs, etc.), I wish they’d put a little more... 

With all of this talk lately about CSS3 and how amazing the Web will be once it gains wide browser support, it got me thinking about how well CSS2 is supported. Sadly, there are still a lot of really cool features that were introduced in the CSS2 spec that we can’t use yet, thanks to the overwhelming market share held by Internet Explorer 6 and 7. In this article, I’ll take a quick look at some under-used CSS…  Read More →

I honestly have no idea when this was announced, but Twitter will start disabling its “Basic Auth” on Aug. 16, 2010 (the system will be completely unavailable by Aug. 31). For Twitter users, this doesn’t really mean anything. However, for Web developers that use various interfaces and plug-ins to share information on Twitter, this is big. The majority of API libraries and classes that were (and, as of this writing, still are)... 

In my previous post, I outlined how you can add support for the new custom menus that were enabled in WordPress 3. Tonight, I will briefly review the process of creating and organizing those new menus from within your WordPress administration area. To start with, make sure you’ve activated the theme into which you added the custom menu support. Once you’ve done that, you will see a “Menus” link in the “Appearance”... 

One of the cool new features that was unveiled as part of Wordpress 3 is the ability to create custom menus with a drag-and-drop interface, similar to the way widgets are added to “sidebars.” However, documentation for this new feature is still extremely sparse. After reading a handful of tutorials explaining small bits of the new feature, and performing a lot of trial-and-error testing, I finally got these new custom menus working... 

I am taking John Allsopp’s HTML5 Live course offered by SitePoint (a great deal, by the way), right now, and he shared a neat little tip that I wanted to pass on. You can use many of the new HTML5 elements (header, article, section, etc.) right now, even in older browsers like Internet Explorer 7. All you need to do is add an extra “…  Read More →

I’m sure there have been times when you’ve wanted to link to a particular part of a YouTube video but, if you’re anything like me, you had no idea how to go about doing so. Well, you have two options: You can link to the video on YouTube and specify the minute and second at which you want the video to start playing. You can embed the video and specify the second at which you would like the video to start playing. Linking to YouTube... 

Earlier this evening, I was trying to figure out how to make “private” Wordpress pages available to all of the registered users on one of my particular blogs. Unfortunately, user capabilities is still one area where Wordpress is seriously lacking out-of-the-box, and there are very few plug-ins that actually seem to work properly for this purpose. However, after a bit  Read More →

One of the great new features coming with CSS3 is the ability to use native gradient backgrounds. In addition to saving server resources (no need to call an external image), the gradients tend to be more vibrant and faithful to the original colors than any external images. So far, none of the modern browsers have agreed on which method to use to implement the gradients, so you will need to utilize a few different methods in order to get it to work... 

A while back, I decided to start setting up some filters in one of my Gmail-based accounts to help organize my messages. I was accustomed to the way filters and rules work in traditional e-mail systems, so I was surprised to find out that I still received copies of the messages in my Inbox, as well as the folder (label) I’d set up. I can completely understand the value of a setup like that, but it wasn’t what I’d wanted at... 

Using the standard query_posts() method with Wordpress, it’s extremely simple to dictate in what order you want your posts and/or pages displayed when they are being shown together; as long as you only want to sort them by a single criterion. However, if you want to sort them by more than one criterion, then you have to do a little more work. Sorting by One Field To begin with, I will…  Read More →

One of the new features coming in HTML5 is placeholder text for form inputs. The concept of placeholder text has been around for quite a while, and is fantastic for usability. Basically, placeholder text is text that appears inside of a form input when the page loads, but disappears when the user places the cursor in that form input. Because HTML5 is still only partially supported, it’s still necessary to use javascript (you could conceivably...