If you use NGINX, you probably care about performance, and one of the easiest website performance wins is to Gzip http requests. Gzip can not only increase the speed of your website, but also save bandwidth. I’ll show you how to Gzip http requests with your NGINX server in this post.
NGINX is a great lightweight webserver, and the one this blog runs on. Having made many iterations including merging other blogs into it, and removing posts and entire sections, I’ve had to create a number of redirects for both user experience and search engine indexing. This post will show you how to create a variety of 301 Permanent redirects in your NGINX config file.
Today I was putting a Gravity Form in the footer of a site with long pages, hiding the form by default, and displaying it when a user clicks the contact link using a little jQuery. Since Gravity Forms shows validation and ( optionally ) confirmation messages on the form itself, this presented a problem when the form is submitted, and the page reloads, hiding the form again.
There are a ton of choices if you want to use web fonts on your website. With those choices come different methods of adding them to WordPress. Let’s do it right, and avoid problems later.
You don’t have to build websites to know what a dropdown menu is, and how common they are. Almost every website in the last decade with complicated taxonomy has a dropdown, and clients expect them.
If you’re going to use CSS3 properties in your designs, it’s a good idea to make sure you aren’t trying to apply them where they aren’t supported. Old browsers have a hard enough time trying to grok your newfangled HTML(5). Don’t confuse them with transforms and text shadow.
I always thought of my next door neighbor Ray as my grandfather. Ray was an old WWI vet, retired trucker, and junior golf instructor who had a stack of hardbound journals he had written in for decades. I remember one of the things he shared about his Parkinson’s, was the difficulty writing in his journal. It had become a very important part of his life. I wish I had started one then, when I was a kid. Ray told me as much.
So there you are, working away on your web server making something magical through ssh. You get a phone call, or check Twitter, read an article or something. It was only a few minutes!
If you are using Compass, you are probably also at least playing with media queries and Responsive web design.
WordPress has a few default classes used for things like image alignment, galleries and other html output by core features. This is a combination of the styles found in the default WordPress TwentyEleven theme, and some modifications of my own. Include this snippet with your css to save a bunch of time building your responsive WordPress theme.
I’ve bulldozed the digital hoarder’s house that was my filesystem, and sworn to clean up my act. Well on my way to a perfect workflow and code management system, I’d like to share what I’m doing with a series of posts. This first post will outline how I built the development cloud that is now making my life much easier.
I love a good framework. Just exploring different frameworks and trying them out for various purposes can teach you a lot. One of my side projects lately has been building my own WordPress theme framework, which uses Paul Irish’s HTML5 Boilerplate. Still, most of my projects and clients are using Thesis, which is a WordPress theme framework that does much of the heavy lifting in building custom sites. I’m on a mission to marry the two.
I’ve been meaning to begin using John Gruber’s Markdown to write my posts, I just never really took the time to find a plugin that is suitable until now.
Do you ever have trouble with finding the right color palette for a design, or just want some fresh ideas? ColourLovers the only website you need for finding them.
It’s been nearly a year since I saw the announcement of the Google Web Font Directory at Google IO 2010, and wrote the Google Web Fonts for WordPress Plugin. Today, at the 2011 conference, Google announced version 2 of the web font directory is on the way with a Developer API, and I’m ecstatic..
Normally I suggest keeping taxonomy out of permalink structure. I’ve found it to create issues when content takes new direction, or a site needs new architecture. WordPress Post formats offer a new way to sort our content, and they make sense for users.
Not many people in the world are as versed in new web development and design technology as Paul Irish. In this video, he runs through some pretty advanced optimization that takes advantage of modern browsers and hardware.
Here is my WordPress wp-config.php file starter. If you are going to use this as a template, make sure you read every line, and change things according to your installation.
It seems that I have turned into a salesman for a free plugin that I didn’t even write. This plugin is Joost de Valk’s WordPress SEO Plugin. I’m honestly tired of writing all the benefits in chat to friends, or in email to clients whenever the subject of the best WordPress SEO plugin comes up, so I might as well write a plugin review to just link to.
One of the cool features of WordPress 3.1 is the Admin menu bar. This is just like the bar at WordPress.com, for your self hosted site. Like just about every other part of WordPress, you can customize it with menus for your clients and/or users.
The number one complaint I hear about WordPress is blogs getting hacked because they aren’t updated. Until now, I’m not aware of a WordPress security plugin that is foolproof. Leave it to the creators of WordPress, Automattic, to find the perfect security solution. VaultPress.
Yesterday I got myself my first Android device(this is not a phone, but a handheld computer that makes phone calls). Naturally, one of the first Android apps I installed was WordPress for Android, developed by Automattic, who owns WordPress.com and manages WordPress.org.
It seems that many WordPress web developers are unaware that you can remove the blog slug a multisite installation. This will save you from having to redirect all your posts, spilling some lovely link equity.
I just ran in to a problem I’ve never had before. It cost me hours, even caused me to whine on Facebook about how much I hate Internet Exploder, but will never again. I had a css drop down menu that was losing focus and disappearing when I scrolled down over another element.
If you have ever been stupid enough to mess around with changing your slugs in WordPress as I do at times depending on what I’m doing with my them and architecture, you may have run into this message when you update them. – “Item Not Updated“.
If you ever find yourself moving wordpress or your whole website, moving it can break your permakinks, making all your links go to a 404 error. Here is how I fix this.
There are a number of ways to implement web fonts now, but there are still times when the perfect font has not been converted for use on the web. Thanks to Font Squirrel, you can convert any font to an @font-face web font kit.