Mar
11
2010
A favicon is a tiny image with a .ico extension and sized to 16 pixels by 16 pixels. The favicon is displayed alongside the URL in the web address bar of your browser.
Creating the image
The first thing you need to do is to create the image that you want to use as favicon. Don’t make your image too complex because small detail tend to get lost when resized to a tiny 16 by 16 pixels.
If you want to easily draw your own favicon, there is a great online tool called Favicon.cc. It lets you draw your own icon while the Favicon in the browser updates in real time to reflect your changes. If you use this tool you can skip the next step as the tool will handle the conversion to .ico as well.
Feb
28
2010
BuddyPress is a wordpress plugin that adds a social networking layer to an installation of WordPress MU. Many people like the idea of this plugin, but are unable to experiment with it because it runs only in single installations of WordPress rather than the multi-site WordPress MU.
To those people, good news! A little over a week ago Andy Peatling, founder and lead developer of BuddyPress, announced the release of BuddyPress 1.2, which can now be used on single installations of WordPress.
To keep your current theme with BuddyPress you can add The BuddyPress Template Pack directly from your WordPress admin, and it will walk you through the theme additions step by step. Now you can use BuddyPress with your single site installation of WordPress, and you can also keep your existing theme.
Feb
20
2010
In a previous article I talked about Google Analytics and the benefits of tracking your web stats and visitor activity. It’s a good tool, however there are better options if you have more than one site and you are looking for more control over your own stats. Google Analytics is based on JavaScript, which means that only single web pages are tracked when using the so called “out of the box” configuration. Any clients with disabled JavaScript will also be missed, as will any pages with the missing Google Analytics code.
If you have many sites and you want to track the whole server, the best option is to use a single web server script. These are easy to install and run. You can contact your hosting support and they will install it in a few minutes. Some hosting companies have a 1 click install of these tools. Others come with stats installed by default.
Many different free and paid web stats tools are available. I will show two of the best known free web stats tools. I tried both on my own sites and I will show you how they work, along with their pros and cons below.
Feb
13
2010
Hello everyone! I just wanted to let you know that Patagonia Theme has been updated, you can download the latest version below.
Download Theme
Changelog includes the following additions among other small improvements: Facebook Support was added. You can add your facebook profile and activate it from the admin panel. It will show up with Twitter and RSS. Another improvement is that options panel URLs were “sanitized” to avoid undesirable characters to display. This is to comply with the latest wordpress version security demands.
If you are upgrading Patagonia and your theme was manually customized, remember to save those changes before upgrading. Wordpress will probably release a feature to make theme upgrades easier in a coming future, specially for users who customize themes. You can also update Patagonia theme automatically from your dashboard. This is recommended if you didn’t change anything in the css or php files manually.
Have a great weekend everyone!
Feb
9
2010
Most webmasters and site marketers like using Google Analytics due to its conversion tracking and complete reporting and stats. If you want a simple, web analytics tool, Google Analytics may be just what you are looking for.
This tool has seen several upgrades and face-lifts over the past few years. Google didn’t start with Google Analytics from scratch. In fact, it bought the idea from another company. They describe the Analytics platform as “enterprise-class features delivered on Google’s world-class platform.” One of the advantages of Google Analytics is integration with AdWords and AdSense. Additional benefits include multimedia tracking, customized reporting and data visualization. Perhaps its most enticing feature is that it is completely free.
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Jan
29
2010
If you’ve read a lot about search engine optimization, you should know by now that link building is extremely important for your site. In fact, the link building concept is as old as SEO itself, because search engines have been using link analysis in their algorithm for a very long time.
By late 2001, Google was well on their way to claiming a dominant position in the search market, and everyone was looking for links. Because of the “link building arms race” that Google started back then, link building has changed a lot since 2001. Link building has become a discipline unto itself, and one short chapter isn’t enough. Bing has also been using a similar concept since 2009.
The first step in understanding link building is getting a sense of how the search engines see things. As explained in a previous article, all of the search engines use link analysis to help them determine page rankings and choose relevant pages.
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Jan
20
2010
2010 is the year Wordpress is going to dive into open source design. Here’s what you need to know if you want to get involved.
A list for all seasons: Wordpress developers have the wp-hackers mailing list to discuss core and plugin code. Sometimes UI/UX stuff comes up and gets discussed there, but there is a whole universe of discussion around navigation labels, gradients, button styling, templates, alignment, design in general and more. Designers need a list to call their own, and now we have one. You can sign up for the wp-ui list to discuss ways to improve the interface or user experience of WordPress, and to discuss progress on design-related projects for the open source project, like the design challenges we’re going to have.