A short post with a handy tip, mostly for posterity but for those that may stumble across this post in the future. If you are using Firefox 3.6.3 (may work on older versions too) and on Windows XP (not sure about OS X), you may notice an annoying little quirk that was propbably intended to [...]
Author Archives: Matthew
Get the parent slug of a post in WordPress
June 21, 2010 – 12:00 pm
I’ve been doing a little more WordPress (v2.9.2) hacking as a new project required a little more CMS-like control over a website than WordPress by default provides. As a result I’ve resorted to extending WordPress and the results have been pretty encouraging already. I have to say, for the record, that the WordPress team has [...]
Do I need to hire a separate SEO company?
April 22, 2010 – 12:01 pm
While there are obvious merits to employing a specialist to perform a specialist task such as Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), it does not have to be your only option if your internet marketing objectives include better website rankings in search engines and more online referrals from prospective clients. The primary role of a SEO company [...]
Random Crashing in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop CS4
April 15, 2010 – 12:00 pm
Recently I came across this little or well known (depending who you talk to) bug in Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop CS4 (although it would appear that it has existed since CS2 too) on my iMac running OS X Leopard (10.5.8). The symptoms are immediate and sudden crashes when launching the application. You don’t even make [...]
Add/Remove www using mod_rewrite and .htaccess
April 8, 2010 – 12:00 pm
URL uniformity is important for Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) reasons because to a search engine, http://www.artofsimplicity.co.uk, is not necessarily the same website as http://artofsimplicity.co.uk and often they can be treated differently and attain different rankings. Where this becomes a problem is if you are engaged in SEO practices to improve your overall Search Engine Ranking [...]
In Brief: Google SERP Positioning
March 30, 2010 – 12:00 pm
There is no short answer to the question of “how do I get on the first page of Google”, but nevertheless I’ll attempt to give you the long and short of it. If you would like a more in-depth explanation on the technology Google uses to rank pages, you can find a slightly more detailed [...]
WordPress Auto-Upgrade Problems
March 22, 2010 – 9:05 am
As a little memo to myself and for anyone else who is having trouble getting the WordPress automatic upgrade feature working, particularly if your on a Linux (CentOS 5) VPS with 1and1. I have great admiration for the WordPress auto-upgrade feature particularly as it saves you loads of time especially if you administer a number [...]
Connect remotely to MSSQL with PHP on CentOS 5
January 6, 2010 – 6:07 pm
For some time now I’ve been looking for a solution for projects that are using PHP but are connecting to a remote Microsoft SQL Server database. As many already know, the webmasters ideal (or at least mine) is a LAMP stack which, for those that are not sure, is Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP. Why [...]
Moving WordPress Installations
December 7, 2009 – 1:00 pm
If you are managing lots of WordPress installations for different clients, or any other content management system for that matter (eg. Joomla!, Drupal etc.), you need a way to deploy changes quickly and easily.
Retrieving your most recent Twitter Information
December 7, 2009 – 9:51 am
During a recent project I needed a script to retrieve some real-time data from a Twitter account and display the results on the homepage. After a quick search I came across a helpful PHP script by Joost de Valk. Much of the code below is based on his original script, so all credit to him.