Category Archives: Tools/Services

3 free Mac applications for simple web work

July 11, 2008 – 12:15 pm

A colleague of mine recently asked me what software he would need to do simple updated to a web site from home on his brand new iMac. All he really needed to be able to do was update flat HTML files on an FTP server and upload an image or two. Oh, and preferably for [...]

By Chris Johnson | Also posted in Web design | Tagged , , , , , , , | Comments (1)

Setting up a Rails dev environment on Webfaction

June 13, 2008 – 2:07 pm

After purchasing the 3rd edition beta PDF of Agile Web Development with Rails, I wanted to jump right in to mucking around with Ruby on Rails on Webfaction’s servers. I ran into some silly problems that took me a good bit of time to work through.
In the hopes of saving you time, here are the [...]

By Chris Johnson | Also posted in Web design | Tagged , , , , | Comments (4)

Learning Ruby the crazy way

June 11, 2008 – 3:15 pm

As I noted in my last post, I’m learning Ruby on Rails and Django. That means I’m also being forced to learn Ruby and Python.
The Python resource I’ve been going through is a free book called Dive into Python which can be read for free. It’s written in a very clear and concise manner and [...]

By Chris Johnson | Also posted in Web design | Tagged , , , , , , | Comments (0)

Learning web application frameworks

June 9, 2008 – 5:34 pm

Lately I’ve been exploring different web application frameworks for creating websites that don’t fit neatly into the paradigm of content management systems. Generally that means websites that aren’t driven by traditional posts or pages, like news sites or blogs.
I’ve settled on learning what I can about three major players in the framework market: Django, Ruby [...]

By Chris Johnson | Also posted in Web design | Tagged , , , , , , , , | Comments (1)

A better meta menu widget

May 28, 2008 – 12:00 am

Recently I’ve been customizing the Media Grease sidebar. I’ve added a tag cloud widget, a recent comments widget and a manually updated “greatest hits” list. Ultimately, my plan is to move the recent comments, recent posts and greatest hits list to the top of the site using Javascript and CSS.
But I digress.
One of the things [...]

By Chris Johnson | Also posted in Media Grease, Projects, Web design | Tagged , , , , | Comments (0)

Using Sifr for nice fonts

May 24, 2008 – 1:14 am

There are just sometimes when you want to use a nice font on your website. Unfortunately, there is no easy way embed custom fonts using HTML/CSS. That generally means you’re stuck using ‘core’ fonts like Arial, Times, Verdana, Georgia, etc.
You could use images, or Flash movies, but both are labor intensive and break accessibility. With [...]

By Chris Johnson | Also posted in Media Grease, Projects, Web design | Tagged , , , , , | Comments (0)

How to test your new WordPress themes

May 4, 2008 – 3:34 pm

Before you change or update the theme of your WordPress site, it’s a good practice to test that theme first. That way your site’s visitors aren’t greeted with a broken site.
Unfortunately, WordPress offers no built in testing solution, so you generally have two options:

Try out your theme on a test version of WordPress running either [...]

By Chris Johnson | Also posted in Web design | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Added Google Analytics for stat tracking

May 1, 2008 – 8:11 am

Today I setup Media Grease to use the free Google Analytics service. Google’s system gives webmasters detailed statistics about how their website is used. You’ll know how people got to your site, how long they stayed, what pages they visited, where they live (roughly), and so on.
Stat tracking of this sort has been around for [...]

By Chris Johnson | Also posted in Announcements, Media Grease, Projects, Web design | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

FeedBurner feed setup

April 27, 2008 – 7:37 pm

I just setup a FeedBurner feed for Media Grease which you can access at: http://feeds.feedburner.com/mediagrease
Using FeedBurner helps in a couple ways. When people and bots check your feed, they are hitting FeedBurner’s servers and not yours. FeedBurner has a number of feed customization options that aren’t built into WordPress, like the ability to have one [...]

By Chris Johnson | Also posted in Announcements, Media Grease, Projects, Web design | Tagged , , , | Comments (0)

Just upgraded to WordPress 2.5.1

April 27, 2008 – 6:15 pm

I’ve just upgraded Media Grease to WordPress 2.5.1 from 2.5. I’m a little surprised they haven’t made upgrading easier. If you need to upgrade your blog, the upgrade instructions are here.

By Chris Johnson | Also posted in Announcements, Media Grease, Projects, Web design | Tagged | Comments (0)