I recently installed some search engine optimization plugins on the WordPress back end of this site. In the main, these are fairly simple tools with straightforward benefits. However, even in the first day of having them installed on my site, I recognized that there are some significant potential pitfalls in even having these tools present on my site. When every post has beneath it a tool evaluating the search engine efficiency of a given post, there is a significant danger of writing content to the search engines, instead of writing content to your audience. Read on, intrepid explorer →

I was recently hired to do some back end work on Church of Christ the King’s website. (Note that the site design is not mine.) In this case, the initial change I needed to make was small – trivial, even. However, I noticed as I made the change that the site was running WordPress 2.8.4. Unfortunately, that meant I was going to be upgrading WordPress manually. Read on, intrepid explorer →

Occasionally, I’ll be reading a website and just wish I could use another, better font. I can, of course… I can go look up the element on the page that I want to change, use the developer tools to dynamically alter the page, and go back to my reading. This is a pain in the neck, though, and sometimes I want to use fonts that I don’t necessarily have on my computer – like “Athelas,” the font that Readability uses to display its body text, and which they get using Typekit. Read on, intrepid explorer →

In the last few years, there has been an explosion of development in the HTML and CSS specs, much of it driven by browser innovation. As early as 2007, Apple began pushing out vendor-specific prefixes to support CSS properties not yet in the open specification. Other browser developers have followed suit, so that there are now each of -o (Opera), -ms (IE9+), -moz (Mozilla/Gecko rendering engine), and -webkit (Safari and Chrome). Read on, intrepid explorer →