Not happy with current offerings, I created a plug to add an events calendar to my client’s sites.  You can check out the demo events calendar here. Read the rest of this entry »

SEO is an acronym that stands for “Search Engine Optimization.”  There are two items that generally affect your websites rankings in the search engine. On-Page Optimization and Off-Page Optimization. On page are any tweaks that a webmaster makes to a website than will positively affect organic search engine listings. They may not seem significant but when combined with a solid-off page SEO strategy, they can make a huge difference. Read the rest of this entry »

If you don’t already know, not sanitizing user input in your scripts is very bad.  It can lead to XSS attacks which I won’t get into here, there is plenty of info out there.  It is especially bad if you are saving the user input into databases as a evil hacker could end up deleting everything you’ve got.  Read the rest of this entry »

The other day, a client requested a member’s only area on their site.  They had a whole section they only wanted people who had an account to be able to see that will contain things such as forms and articles.  Luckily this is pretty easy to do. Read the rest of this entry »

So I’ve finally got around to completing my first WordPress plugin.   It’s a google analytics dashboard to get a nice overview of your site’s stats without having to go to the Analytics page.  The charts are all displayed using a very cool project Open Flash Charts 2.
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Often times you will have a contact form on your site. When asking for customer email addresses you may want to check for correctness to make sure they have not forgotten an important part that will leave the email useless. Below is the code that I use to check for valid emails:
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Every site I create, I always use the same basic css to get going.  It helps clear any default browser settings and levels the playing field between them.

There are a few notable css reset sheets out there such as ones from Eric Meyer and Yahoo.  I have tried both and think both are overkill for almost every site I create.  I have added to and adjusted my CSS starting point over all the sites I have built and am pretty comfortable with what I have now.

Heres the CSS code that I currently use:
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