Scripts, plugins, and small pieces of code that may help you out in one way or another. Covering all aspects of web development.
The 3.1 update to Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin brought with it a new feature—the ability to set a “Primary” category for a post. You’ll now see a “Make Primary” link when selecting categories (or a bold “Primary” label if one has been set). It's possible to use this primary category in a custom theme...
Yoast's WordPress SEO plugin will automatically "ping" search engines that your existing XML sitemap is updated. But what if you want to disable this? The plugin settings do not have an option for this at the moment, but luckily there is a filter that can be hooked into with a line of code.
Say you want to create a button whose background in the top left is one color, and a different color in the bottom right. The color is basically split with a diagonal line from the bottom left corner to the top right corner. It seems simple, yet a lot of the CSS techniques I came […]
Oh my Glob! BMO in the Web Thingey. All the visuals are done entirely with CSS. The buttons also do some mysterious things when you press them. The making of 3D BMO grew out of following a tutorial creating an old Macintosh Plus in 3D with CSS. I wanted to better understand the CSS properties that were being used for 3D, and create something myself. In doing so, I ended up figuring out some math to create some beveled/rounded edges.
Every site we build on the Rackspace Cloud ends up needing a lot of similar rules in the htaccess file. On my local PC I've collected them in a text file, that I copy paste sections from almost every day. Most of the below examples will work on your average Linux-based server with Apache and mod_rewrite enabled. A few are RS Cloud Sites specific (as noted). In case you've never messed with this stuff before, note that this isn't a single file to copy in its entirety. Each section has a different purpose.
Using Yii's implementation of ActiveRecord makes querying a database much easier for simple queries. For more complex situations, you will still find yourself having to write some straight SQL on occasion. In this case, using a custom query was not necessary. I was trying to add another search parameter, using the AR compare() method, to search a relation with a HAS_MANY relationship, and it was displaying an "unknown column" error. Without a proper example, it wasn't clear at first how to get this work...
Using the @media rule in your CSS allows you to target different media types, and screen sizes, from a single stylesheet. Using media queries with max-widths is integral to the current push towards responsive design. This can also be used to create your print styles using @media print. You'll notice this used on modern base-templates such as the HTML5 BoilerPlate:
For the last few weeks I've been collecting tiny morsels of jQuery and straight JavaScript that I've needed for building sites. I had found myself needing the same small scripts over and over. Rather than rewriting and checking an API/plugin reference, now I can just copy from this list. Most of these snippets are a few lines each. Some are simple. Some aren't.
If you're locked out of WordPress and can't reset your password, the official docs list several options that allow you to access your administrator account again. But what if you want to create an entirely new admin user? For blogs that I have FTP access to, but no working WordPress password, I threw together the following script to create admin users.
Most sites contain areas of text and HTML that are repeated throughout the site. Links in the footer, copyright information, a button or phone number in the header, or some other static content. If you're a developer working on your own site, then you may just keep this in an include file and edit the code manually. If you're using Wordpress as a CMS for a client, then it's a good idea to make these areas of text/images editable, so that they can have full control of their site.