Tips and tricks by Brian Shim for web developers, bloggers, and WordPress users
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 Gutenburg 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
Often times 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 … Read more