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Tools For Web Designers
The resources that have helped me most in my career, all of them free, open source, or offering a free version: Firefox extensions, web applications, and the print books worth buying.
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Creating Rich Anchor Tags
The anchor tag is the first thing anyone learns and the most undervalued. A short tutorial on writing links that are meaningful, accessible and well-formed, starting with never writing click here.
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Get Categories For Current Post
I wanted the current post’s categories as a drop-down that navigates on change, and could not find one anywhere. The function I ended up writing, for your theme’s functions.php.
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Host Your Own Website Tutorial
A favor for my roommate’s wedding became an excuse to host a site from a spare machine. In this tutorial I set up WAMP5, forward the right ports on a Linksys router, point a domain at the box, and add FTP and email.
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Using the Official Comments Plugin
I wanted my own comments to stand apart from everyone else’s. A short walkthrough of integrating the Official Comments plugin with the Glued Ideas theme.
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A Tutorial On Tutorials
A pointer to Dan Richard’s article on writing effective tutorials, and its blunt opening argument: if you are writing one for traffic rather than to teach, do not bother.
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De-Mystifying AJAX
AJAX looks intimidating until someone cuts through the jargon. In this tutorial I explain what separates a real AJAX request from an ordinary JavaScript effect, then walk through processing a form with MooTools.
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Utilizing WordPress As A Content Management System (CMS)
WordPress had grown well past blogging by version 2.0. Here are the steps I use to build a site on it as a CMS: choosing a theme that does not look like a blog, and the plugins I consider necessary.
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PHP Navigation with XHTML/CSS
A downloadable example of including site navigation dynamically with PHP, in both text and image versions, written to validate as standards-compliant XHTML and CSS.
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WordPress Customized Feature Post
How to give a WordPress front page one featured post above links to the rest, using the Limit Posts plugin, with a strip_tags() fix for the unclosed markup it otherwise leaves behind.