Cascading Style Sheets
In the past, I haven’t done a lot of CSS work; my interests lie more in the areas of SEO and content. We needed a WordPress programmer, though, and before I could start programming WordPress themes, I needed to brush up on my CSS and PHP. Fortunately, I had a decent book sitting around: O’Reilly’s CSS: The Missing Manual. After a few hours reading the book and playing with the CSS in some WordPress themes, it all makes sense; my only hesitation in recommending the book comes from the fact that, because it was released last year, it contains less than a hundred pages on...
Read MoreGoogle Adsense and Smart Pricing
You may have noticed that we don’t run advertisements on this blog. The main reason for that is that we don’t think it looks professional on a business website; also, we don’t want you to click an ad and go elsewhere. We want you to stay here and hire us! That said, we do own other websites which are monetized with adsense and make about a buck fifty per click. This brings us to another reason we wouldn’t want to put adsense on this blog: it could drag down what we’re making elsewhere! Why? The answer lies in Google’s “smart pricing”...
Read MoreThe Google Sandbox
You may have heard people speak of the Google Sandbox as a dreadful place to be avoided. But what is it, exactly, and how can you avoid going there? Google’s goal is to return the best possible search results. They have a number of rules for webmasters that basically boil down to: don’t screw with the search. For example, Google will penalize your site if they catch you buying or selling paid links. Suppose you have a brand new site, just registered within the last few months, and it has thousands of links to it. What’s the most likely explanation – that this site is...
Read MoreWordPress and .htaccess
Having installed a number of WordPress blogs lately, one thing I frequently find myself doing after a new installation is editing the .htaccess file. What is .htaccess all about? On an Apache server, .htaccess files allow you to make configuration changes to a directory (and its subdirectories); multiple .htaccess files can be present in your directory structure, with lower ones overriding higher rules where they conflict. They’re often used for access control, helping to keep the wrong people from poking around in your files. Today we’ll talk specifically about how they interact...
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