HeadsetOptions Web Design, SEO, WordPress, Etcetra

YouTube is the greatest video-sharing site of all times. The popularity of the site is immense. You can also download YouTube videos using certain services. It is estimated that the daily average bandwidth bills of YouTube amounts to one million dollars. People may start wondering how Google is able to keep the site online especially under such high costs. Advertisements are the main revenue source for YouTube. The sheer amount of users accumulated in the YouTube database makes the advertisers yield to the demand. It is also estimated that 74 million active YouTube accounts are at present available in YouTube. People enjoy the videos present in there. Many videos are also saved offline for watching …

Mirror sites of “Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers” or ICANN, the organization that is responsible for assigning unique addresses so computers know where to find each other, was cracked by Turkish hackers. Within hours from the first crack, the organizations WordPress v2.5.1 powered blog was compromised. Although I believe version 2.3 was the worst, vulnerability issues are not strictly limited to any one version or blogging platform. So the only way to keep you site safe is by checking on it regularly for changes outside of what you authorize and keeping a good backup of your site!

Video embeds like the ones from YouTube can be valuable to tell a story. Though the built-in options for such videos allow the user to resize the video, it is not dynamic and is more than often a manual (irreversible) process. Say you would like to keep the video at it’s full size in the single post page but display a thumbnail in your sidebar, you can. A simple CSS and Javascript fix for IE would do the trick, here’s how:

Jonathan Zittrain, professor of internet governance at the Oxford Internet Institute, who is also the author of “The Future Of The Internet And How To Stop It“, says that from 1998, hacking exploded. It is now all about making money. Listen to his interview on BBC Radio 4.

Earlier, we studied how we can easily display a continuous list in two columns using just CSS. Today, we will use a similar technique to present a continuous list in two rows within a finite width. A common usage of this technique can be found in galleries such as CSS Mania or wpSnap, where the post is replaced by a thumbnail image in the home page. We can tackle this need using simple CSS magic.

Let us assume you are using WordPress to power your site where your typical blog post is generated using WP Loop as shown below. This will usually render a simple list of posts as shown in this image, click the image to view a live demo.

<?php while(have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<div class=”post” id=”post-<?php the_ID(); ?>”>
<h1><a href=”<?php the_permalink(); ?>” title=”<?php the_title(); ?>” rel=”bookmark”><?php the_title(); ?></a></h1>
<h5>//<?php the_time(‘m.d.Y’); ?> at <?php the_time(‘g:i a’) ?></h5>
<?php the_content(‘Read more…’); ?>
<?php edit_post_link(‘Edit’, ‘<p>’, ‘</p>’); ?>
<p class=”entry-meta”>
<span class=”cat-links”>Filed under: <?php the_category(‘, ‘) ?><?php if (function_exists(‘the_tags’)) { ?><?php the_tags(‘, ‘, ‘, ‘, ”); ?><?php } ?></span> // <span class=”comments-link”><?php comments_popup_link(‘Post a comment’, ’1 Comment’, ‘% Comments’); ?></span>
</p>
</div>
<?php endwhile; ?>

We then replace the tag that generates the post, in this case, it’s the “the_content” tag with a source to a image file that is labeled identical to the post ID, for example, post ID 11 will have a corresponding image called 11.jpg in a select.

During a recent site redesign, the client required the site dynamically generate a unique promotional banner (in the sidebar) on certain high profile writers “about the author” page.

Before WordPress version 2.5.x, we had to rely on conditional tags such as is_page() or is_category() and numerous lines of code to accomplish it. For most parts it worked well, especially when you had only one or two conditions to satisfy, but when the number of such exceptions increased, the code became bulky and was prone to err.

With WordPress version 2.5.x, you can simplify the task by applying the conditions over an array of pages (categories, tags…), here’s an example:

Our conditional tag was required to automatically generate a banner when the author page of specific authors was queried.

If your site gets any traffic at all, chances are your RSS feed is scraped and misused by some one trying to score on SERP for the work you have toiled on. This very blog is constantly ripped by sploggers who have no regards to intellectual property rights or just plain simple dumb to realize they are stealing. Here are three sites where you can find the entire content of our blog scraped/ripped/stolen and posted as their own. Of course I did not link to them because I really don’t want you to visit them:

myblogmix.com (this m^*&*0 f$%*r even uses one of our themes on his splog!)
frenzygraphics.com
urlfan.com

How do you stop them?
Jonathan Bailey, a security expert (Plagiarism Today) who also writes on Blog Herald, lists 6 steps to identify and fight content theft. We religiously followed the suggestions for months now (that post on BH was from last November), but none worked thus far. Google is yet to acknowledged our letters (used his cease and desist letter templates, which is a good source, thanks!). I even took solace in thinking maybe they have a backlog or that they will eventually write back, but nothing really happened.

Here’s a quick and easy way to present a continuous list in two or more columns without having to hard code it. A recent project required a list of authors across two columns; the author names and links were auto generated using a WP tag so listing them in 2 columns required some simple CSS magic.

When a client of mine upgraded to WordPress 2.5.1 from WordPress 2.5 she encountered an issue where the database will not upgrading, resulting in the “WordPress 2.5.1 is available! Please update now.” flashing in her dashboard and every other admin pages. On initial search of the WordPress support forum, we found the following strings that pointed us in a certain direction:

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/172004
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/168964

Neither strings suggest solutions that are easy or safe, however, I urge you check these posts and then search your install via file manager/FTP/WebFTP to ensure you do not have files with the following extensions anywhere within a writable …

For good SEO, it is preferential to open your comment authors URI in a new page. Why you might ask? Google and other search engines track sites you visit, they can tell what that site contains (obviously), how long you stayed there and where you went next. The intended use of this information is to find if the sites you visited were relevant to your search keyword and/or if all the sites you visit are related. That could also work against you if your site get a lot of spammers commenting on it. Here’s how.

Let’s say you get a comment on your site that look legit, so you want …