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Find out how Ross Creative helps circumvent the media controls in third world countries so the poorest citizens can access the news.
Posts Tagged ‘Tool’
10
Sep
2009
Sep
2009
Easy tool for new website owners
I came across a website last night while surfing around for a new photoshop plugin that I thought was kind of cool and wanted to share with you, it’s like an online photoshop for beginners and lets you make funny photos or apply a range of filters to your existing pics. Every day they add new funny pictures effects, which is really cool.
Here’s some examples of what I did just today to give you an idea how easy it is:
Take a look for yourself, it’s a lot of fun. http://en.picjoke.com
22
May
2009
May
2009
Easy Scheduled Posts for WordPress
While I was working on my new theme for thisismyurl.com I came across the need to publish a series of scheduled posts in the side bar and so I put together a simple plugin for WordPress. The tool works like most WordPress theme calls and features:
- Customizable number of links returned
- Customizable before and after to ensure you can display the results
- The ability to echo or return results
To use the plugin, install it to your WordPress website and edit your theme files by placing the following code:
General results
Without passing any parameters, the plugin will return ten results or fewer depending on how many posts you have.
[source lang="php"]<?php scheduledPosts();?>[/source]
Specific number of results
If you would like to return a specific number of results as your maximum:
[source lang="php"]<?php scheduledPosts(‘count=10′);?>[/source]
Altering the before and after values
By default the plugin wraps your code in list item (<li></li>) tags but you can specify how to format the results using the following code:
Echo vs. Return
Finally, if you’d like to copy the results into a variable you can return the results as follows:
[source lang="php"]<?php scheduledPosts(‘echo=false’);?> [/source]
Support forums are now online! If you have any questions, please visit http://forums.thisismyurl.com.
21
May
2009
May
2009
Easy Popular Posts Plugin for WordPress
While I was working on my new theme for thisismyurl.com I came across the need to publish a series of popular posts in the side bar and so I put together a simple plugin for WordPress. The tool works like most WordPress theme calls and features:
- Customizable number of links returned
- Customizable before and after to ensure you can display the results
- The ability to echo or return results
- Let’s you control how popular a post should be
To use the plugin, install it to your WordPress website and edit your theme files by placing the following code:
General results
Without passing any parameters, the plugin will return ten results or fewer depending on how many posts you have.
[source lang="php"]&lt;?php popularPosts();?&gt;[/source]
Specific number of results
If you would like to return a specific number of results as your maximum:
[source lang="php"]&lt;?php popularPosts(‘count=10′);?&gt;[/source]
Altering the before and after values
By default the plugin wraps your code in list item (
[source lang="php"]&lt;?php popularPosts(‘before=&lt;p&gt;&amp;amp;after=&lt;/p&gt;’);?&gt;[/source]
Echo vs. Return
Finally, if you’d like to copy the results into a variable you can return the results as follows:
[source lang="php"]&lt;?php popularPosts(‘echo=false’);?&gt; [/source]
Minimum Comments
To ensure you only return truly popular articles, you can limit the returned posts to posts with a minimum number of comments
[source lang="php"]&lt;?php popularPosts(‘comments=10′);?&gt; [/source]
Support forums are now online! If you have any questions, please visit http://forums.thisismyurl.com.
19
May
2009
May
2009
With much sadness, I must deactivate LinkLove
For those of you who don’t know about LinkLove, it’s a wonderful plugin for WordPress by Andrew Timberlake which automatically disables the nofollow attribute in links for people who’ve left at least ten links. I absolutely love the plugin and strongly believe in rewarding positive contributions to my blog but recently I’ve decided to deactivate the tool for a number of reasons.
First, I’m getting slammed with keyword spammers. These are people who constantly post comments using names like “Car Sales” and “Dog Treats” in hopes of generating back links from my website to theirs. In theory I don’t really mind but this week it’s become a significant issue so I’ve elected to deactivate the plugin for a while to see if it helps calm the keyword spam a little.
My second reason for deactivating the plugin is that I’m getting ready to make a few significant changes around the site. A lot of you may have noticed that my blog’s changed looks significantly over the past several months. This wasn’t an accident, I’ve been trying different design elements and marketing combinations to determine what designs and content works best for me. After a long period of experimentation, I’ve finally determined what I need from thisismyurl.com and so I’ve started programming a new theme in earnest to help build a better online presence.
What does nofollow mean?
When a person creates a link from one website to another, it’s voting for the second site and telling Google that site A believes site B to be of equal or greater value to the web. That’s great for people like me who post links to other websites because it helps Google know which websites I have faith in but the problem comes in that when people post comments on websites, they can promote their own content regardless of how I feel about it. That’s where the nofollow tag comes in. In effect, it tells Google that while I’m willing to link to the other site I don’t want to ‘vote’ for it.
The process of voting for a website gets more complicated when you take PageRank into account. Effectively, when I ‘vote’ for a website, I’m telling Google that I trust the website enough that I’m willing to stake my reputation (my PageRank) on the content of their website and that Google should transfer part of my reputation to them. Again, this is wonderful for websites that I truly support and read but not good at all for websites that I don’t actually read or support (such as those people who keyword bomb my site).
Is my website now only nofollow?
Not at all, in fact I believe my decision to turn off the fantastic LinkLove plugin will be beneficial to all my regular readers because it’ll cut down on spam comments but more importantly it’ll give me the time I need to start really focusing on helping others build their online reputations by reviewing and promoting websites I love to read.
If you’d still like a free, nofollow dofollow quality link from thisismyurl.com to your website there are a few easy ways to earn it:
- Invite me to be a guest writer on your website. Boy do I love writing and this can be a win-win for you! With the new design almost finished, I’ve included a special area for posting links to articles I’ve written around the web. These are prime, dofollow quality links that will be used to help promote websites I love to work with.
- Offer to be a guest writer on my website. I know it might not always seem like it but I do appreciate that I don’t know everything, so why not help me out? Contribute an article to the website and earn a strong link back to your site.
- Send me a Pingback by posting a link to my content on your website. Next time you’re writing an article, why not take a look to see if there’s anything here on thisismyurl.com that you could use to support your article? Pingbacks happen when your blog posts a story with a link to a story on my website and will always appear nofollow free.
- Sponsor the site by placing a 125×125px banner on the site, it’s a great way to help show your support as well as increase links back to your website.
- Do something amazing on your website and tell me about it on Twitter. When I retweet it’ll appear here on the site as well as travel out to over 1,000 followers.
11
May
2009
May
2009
How do I remove specific ads from my AdSense ads?
If you’re anything like me, running ads on your website isn’t just an option it’s a great way to make money but sometimes there are ads that I simply don’t want on my website so I need to tell Google to block them but how? Actually it’s really very simple, it’s called the Competitive Ad Filter from Google and it’s part of the AdSense tool.
To block an advertisement, you simply need to place the destination URL (where the ad is linked to) into the Competitive Ad Filter dialog box and within a few hours, Google AdSense will stop serving ads to that domain. Pretty easy right? Well there is one problem … how do you know where the ad is linking to?
Finding the desination URL of an AdSense Ad
First off, do not click your own ads.
Wait … let me repeat that again … do not click the ads. If you click ads on your own website, you’ll earn money from the program and violate your Terms of Service. Google will figure it out (they’re pretty clever) so just don’t do it.
Instead, you’re going to have to do a little bit of detective work but it’s super easy.
- View the source code of your webpage. To do this, right click or look under the View or Edit menus for an option
- Search for the phrase googlesyndication.com/pagead/adclick which is how every Google ad looks.
- After you’ve found the correct ad, look in the code and you’ll see a value titled &adurl= along with a domain name address. For example &adurl=http://www.thisismyurl.com so the domain name that you’d like to stop serving ads for is www.thisismyurl.com.
Now that you know the domain you’d like to cancel ads for, simply visit the Competitive Ad Filter and add the link.
23
Apr
2009
Apr
2009
How to center a header in HTML without using the center tag
The HTML <center> tag is one of those funny little tags left over from the early days of websites when designers often mixed the publishing of web content with design. These days, it’s much easier to separate content and design by using effective style sheets.
To center any text in HTML and CSS, we can simply add a couple of lines of code to our stylesheet file as follows:
[source lang="css"].center {
text-align:center;
}[/source]
This little code snippet will center the content within a block tag (such as a <p> or <h1>) but only if it already knows the width of the object you’re centering too! To get around this, we can simply add the display:block tag to our CSS:
[source lang="css"].center {
text-align:center;
display: block;
}[/source]
Now our code knows to center text.
To apply it to our HTML code, you need to simply apply the code to an object as a class. For example let’s turn a heading into a centered heading by applying the new class like so:
[source lang="html"]
<h1 class=’center’>This is my header.</h1>
[/source]
It is of course also possible to simply align all <h1> tags to the center by using the code:
[source lang="css"]h1 {
text-align:center;
display: block;
}[/source]
What about converting existing pages?
Luckily if you already have a bunch of documents which use <center> tags there’s fairly simple fix for you to clean up those files. Using a tool like Adobe Dreamweaver you can do bulk search and replace functions across multiple files.
The replace is a two step process. (please backup your site before doing this)
First, let’s replace the phrase </center> with </div> across the entire site. This will change the closing tag (remember all tags come in pairs right?) to be a normal div tag.
Now, let’s replace the phrase <center> with <div class=’center’> to turn the opening tag into a div tag with the center class assigned.
You can now add the .center details to your CSS file and presto, your website is now using the proper center formating!
18
Jan
2009
Jan
2009
Fresh Post at Getaway Graphics: Free WordPress Themes
WordPress is a popular website publishing tool used by millions of website owners around the world. It’s one of those great, free tools that’s helped change the way the Internet is powered but what a lot of small business owner’s don’t know is that WordPress can look truly amazing. It’s not limited to a boring blog template and in fact there are thousands of great designs people can download and install for free.
26
Dec
2008
Dec
2008
Fundraising Thermometer Plugin for Wordpress
Features
The fund raising tool is a true WordPress plug-in, testing with WordPress 2.7 and fully functional. It features:
- W3C compliant Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
- Dynamically updated text including target and current fund status
- Money formating options for use internationally
- Theme options, allowing designers to customize the look of the thermometer
- Call either the graphic or a formated number to display in text.
Admin Features
The new interface allows uses to set both the current amount (what has been raised) as well as the target amount (what you want to raise). The script automatically generates the ten steps in between and displays them for the user.
The plugin auto detects if the money_format() function is present and will use it automatically if found, otherwise it will display the currency using the number format function automatically.
How It Works
To display the current amount of money raised (in currently format) place the following code in your theme:
<?php echo show_ourprogress();?>
For a graphical version (by default the thermometer), include the following code:
<?php show_ourprogress_graphic();?>
Where to Get It
The plugin can be downloaded from the official WordPress repository:
How You Can Help
I love developing plugins for WordPress and do my best to always keep them free but of course it take a lot of time and effort to build these plugins so if you’d like to say thanks, the best way is to take a few moments and write about the plugin on your own website, include a link to my website from your posts or download and rate the plugin on the official plugin directory.
Support forums are now online! If you have any questions, please visit http://forums.thisismyurl.com.
08
Oct
2008
Oct
2008
Yahoo Launches Web Analytics Beta
In their ongoing effort to compete with Google, Yahoo has recently released a Beta version of Yahoo! Web Analytics. A few months ago, they acquired Hungarian based IndexTools so really it was just a matter of time.
In a weird twist of marketing, Yahoo! has decided to brand the website to look a little like a My Little Pony nightmare which I assume was done to help separate it from the highly successful tool from Google. As you would expect, Yahoo! Analytics is designed to have all the fun toys that Google has been know for, and it’s also designed to integrate into other Yahoo! flavored tools.
