Tips and tricks by Brian Shim for web developers, bloggers, and WordPress users
A while ago, I had to do a survey of the most popular commenting services out there so I could use it on my highest-volume blog. My “must-haves” as far as commenting systems are concerned were: For me, some “nice to haves” were: Only ONE commenting platform met all of my requirements! Here’s a rundown … Read more
Have you ever gotten this Linux “out of memory” error when working with your WordPress site? If you Google around to solve this problem, almost all of the advice you’ll get is to increase your PHP and WordPress memory limits, or add memory to your server, or to remove plugins. I didn’t want to just … Read more
I recently had a project where I wanted to stop the “Go” button on the Android and iOS popup keyboard from submitting a form on my web application. Why would anyone want to do this? In my case, I wanted to prevent accidental form submission (or “butt-dialing”) on my app. I had implemented a “swipe-to-save” … Read more
When I transitioned from being a career corporate cubicle-dweller to being a freelancer working from home, I wasn’t sure if I could pull it off. Would I be on Facebook and YouTube all day? Could I really get any work done? Well, after doing it for some time now, I can say that I love … Read more
I finally decided that it was time to move from my primitive accounting “system” based on Word and Excel to a modern cloud-based solution for my freelance business. I wanted invoicing, time tracking, and expense tracking. After doing some research online, I narrowed my choices to two popular solutions: FreshBooks and Harvest. I signed up … Read more
A client requested a “slot machine” hover effect for their social network buttons. When you hover on the icon, it moves up, sort of like in a slot machine, and changes color. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about: It turns out that this effect can be accomplished with some clever CSS! No JavaScript … Read more
My “go-to” desktop browser for doing web development is the Chrome browser. However, it has one annoying problem for people like me who do responsive web development: It won’t resize down to 320 pixels wide, the width of an iPhone. With my Chrome browser on Windows, the minimum width is 500px. On Mac, the minimum … Read more
This is a list of items to check before and after launching your site. It’s not necessarily an exhaustive list for every type of website, but it is a good starting point for most sites. Getting Your Site Known 1. SEO 2. Social Media Appearance With the importance of social media, you should check to … Read more
Here’s how to host multiple sites on your EC2 instance running the Amazon Linux AMI. Remember to make a backup of your instance before proceeding. Assign a Static IP Address The first thing you should do, if you haven’t already, is assign a static IP address to your EC2 instance. You can do this in the Amazon … Read more
I developed a website for a client that would display different photos based on a query string in the URL. An example of this type of URL would be “http://mysite.com/album.php?photo=ab12345”. But, that is an ugly URL. Not only that, some people claim it’s not ideal for SEO. Much better would be “http://mysite.com/ab12345”. Here’s how to … Read more
This article describes how to style the audio player in the WordPress Classic Editor (it uses MediaElement.js). Note, if you upgrade to Gutenberg, these styles will no longer work! The Gutenberg player uses the HTML audio element. If you want to style the Gutenberg player, check out this article. The Basic Shortcode You can invoke … Read more
Blogging can be a very personal experience. You’re baring your soul before the world. You are vulnerable. One of the worst things is to put yourself out there and receive critical or even mean or hateful comments. I’ve been blogging for some years and overwhelmingly, the response has been positive. But, one bad or mean … Read more
Here is the scenario: You’ve searched high and low and found the perfect WordPress theme for yourself or your client. But, there’s one big problem: it’s not mobile-friendly. With mobile web traffic soon expected to exceed desktop web traffic, being mobile-friendly is critical. I often have to go through the exercise of converting a non … Read more
We all want to protect the content that we create for our blogs and websites, right? Wouldn’t it be terrible if someone copied your site’s content and you later found out that your copyright notice was wrong and offered you no legal protection? Well, I thought I was diligent by slapping the standard copyright statement … Read more
Much has been written about the differences between Facebook Pages and Groups. When I needed to decide which to use for a project, I looked online and found lots of sites listing the features of each, yet I felt they missed the essence of which to use in actual practice. Furthermore, much of the info … Read more
The conventional wisdom is that you have no visibility on what goes on inside an iframe on your site. That is mostly true but it turns out that you can detect when a form is submitted inside an iframe. My Goal I was given the task to fix a website bug of the following nature: … Read more
One of my blogs reached a level of popularity and income where I started thinking about trademarking the name of the site. I figured that would protect it from someone trying to steal my URL by changing “.com” to “.info” or whatever. I hate legal stuff but I went ahead and did a bunch of … Read more
The little icon that shows up in each web page’s browser tab is called a “favicon”. Adding this tiny detail really gives your website a professional appearance in the browser. Here’s how to do it. If You’re Using WordPress… WordPress provides a way to specify the favicon. Log into your site and go to Appearance … Read more
Oftentimes you’ll have an image, perhaps a logo, that you want to use on a website, and you’ll want that image to have a transparent background. Here’s how to make an image have a transparent background using a free drawing program called Paint.net (note this solution works on Windows only). 1. Download and Install Paint.net … Read more