Apparently a pretty, smiling face is a good idea in anyone’s marketing campaign, even if the face has nothing to do with the product or service being sold. Don’t get me wrong; I’m not trying to say that there are no attractive women in IT, or that women shouldn’t be associated with technology careers. I was just struck today with how abruptly the marketing ploy ended at PrepLogic.com. (more…)

The hosting market is a jungle. There are tons of hosts offering unlimited bandwidth, unlimited storage space, unlimited email accounts. But when the rubber hit the road, all I wanted was small-scale service I could count on. (more…)

If you’re only dealing with a simple Web site that you develop and deploy in one iteration, you may never have to worry about updating it, or you may be able to get away with hot fixes, straight to the live site. However, once you start dealing with a project of considerable complexity, and one with multiple development iterations, there’s no way around some sort of tiered system for update deployment—unless you write perfect code, in which case you should stop reading my blog and go make a million dollars. (more…)

Thumbnails are really handy, depending on the type of site you’re designing. The nice thing is that WordPress automatically generates several thumbnail sizes of uploaded images.

You likely noticed that the title uses the term Snippets as opposed to Plugins. These could be put into plugin form, but they can also be added to a WordPress theme’s functions.php file. I’m not sure of the version compatibility of the code; it’s been tested with WordPress 2.7. (more…)

I was trying to install Robert Plank’s Action PopUp plugin on a WordPress MU blog today. The plugin would activate, but when I tried to update any of its settings, I would get an error message:

Error! Options page not found.

At first I wondered if the plugin was not compatible with the 2.7 version of WordPress, but it seemed to work fine on one of my vanilla WordPress 2.7 installations. Must be an MU problem. (more…)