Archive for How-To

LR-Blog Plugin Test

By Brett · Comments (0)
Wednesday, November 24th, 2010

I’m loving Photoshop Lightroom 3 and all the publishing add-ons. This post was actually created within Lightroom during the “Export” process. I thought it would be interesting to show you the image I created today for my client Christmas Cards. I got the idea from a Planet Photoshop Christmas Lights Tutorial. I have both PS Elements 8 and PS CS3. I could do everything in the tutorial with Elements except vary the angle of the lights as they were drawn in with the brush tool. Cool effect. I think it’s fairly convincing. Let me know what you think.

Original Image


After Christmas Lights Photoshop Tutorial

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Categories : How-To, Photos, Software
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What Makes for a Good Blog? | 43 Folders

By Brett · Comments (0)
Saturday, November 20th, 2010
This is Merlin Mann's take on what makes up a good blog.  The takeaway for me is that blogs are the product of "Attention times Interest".  I heard Merlin make this point on a Mac Break Weekly episode during my walk this morning so I was glad I found the article. Enjoy. Brett

If you have time for more, here’s Merlin’s talk on Attention and Interest:

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Categories : How-To
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Customize Your WordPress Theme On A Live Site

By Brett · Comments (0)
Monday, November 1st, 2010

If it's time to give your WordPress site an overhaul you can develop locally or "live" on the site.  If you are a "live" kind of developer but you don't want everyone else to be able to see what you're doing, then you can do that.

 

My preference is to use a theme switching plugin.  There are several plugins in the repository that allow users to select different themes from the front-end, but for simple administrator control I recommend  the Theme Test Drive plugin.

 

I had used this plugin once in the past, but forgot the name.  I had trouble locating it using Google search or the WordPress.org search, so hopefully this will help someone else looking for the same thing.  Ok so now for the how-to:

 

Theme Test Drive (TTD) provides a handy theme installation tool.  Just paste in the url to a theme zip file and click install theme.

 

The main use for TTD is to select a theme that will only be seen by logged in administrator(s).  It's as simple as selecting the theme from the drop-down menu.  Once you have the desired theme selected,  click the "Enable Theme Drive" button.  If you're logged in and browse to the site you should now see the alternate theme.  Log out and you get the view that everyone else sees, which is the "real" activated theme according to WordPress.

 

So here are the steps after loggin in to your WordPress site:

 

  1. Install the Theme Test Drive Plugin
  2. Install the new theme that you will be customizing
  3. Click on "Theme Test Drive" under your Appearance menu in WordPress
  4. Choose the new theme from the drop-down menu
  5. Click the "Enable Theme Drive" button.
  6. Customize your new theme "under cover".

 

Once you have the new theme finished, just activate it so the rest of your visitors can experience it!   Don't forget to return to TTD and click the "Disable Theme Drive" button.  You may forget you have the plugin installed and wonder about the strange behavior otherwise.

Brett

Middle TN Web Design

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Categories : How-To
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Add a Facebook Like Button to your WordPress Site

By Brett · Comments (0)
Saturday, October 23rd, 2010
If you have a WordPress site or blog, it's really easy to integrate the Facebook "Like" button.  My recommendation is to use a plugin.  You will find several plugins if you search in the plugin repository, but the one I chose is simply called Facebook Like Button.

After installing the plugin you'll get a new Admin menu for the plugin (it appears outside the Settings section).  The second image above shows a screenshot of the settings.  Here's all I had to do to get it working:

1. Register an App with Facebook. Just click on the "Don't have one?" link on the settings screen.  The prompts on Facebook were easy enough that I don't think I'll detail those.  
2. Copy the AppID from Facebook into the AppID field.
3. Chose the XFBML radio button to use that version of the code.
4. Checked the appropriate boxes to have the button appear on WordPress Pages and Posts. (Your preference)
5. Click the Save settings button.

That's all you have to do, but as you will see there are several other options, one of which is that you can choose the verb on the button.  You get either "Like" or "Recommend".  I almost set mine to "Recommend", but I think most people are used to "Like" now, so I stuck with it.  No use swimming upstream!

One other note.  The plugin requires that your host be running PHP 5.  Another plugin that makes it easy to verify what your environment is, is ServerBuddy, a free WP plugin to check hosting & security. So you might want to check that out also.

Have fun with the Facebook Like button!

Brett

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Categories : How-To
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Hyla Vacuum Cleaners Maintenance

By Brett · Comments (0)
Tuesday, July 6th, 2010

I received a question recently about Hyla Vacuum Cleaners maintenance. My other post about Hyla maintenance focused on the Electro Brush. This question was regarding how to access the main on-off switch without breaking anything. I didn’t have a lot to loose since the carrying handle on our unit broke a long time ago, so I did some disassembly and again made photos so that others can benefit from the experience. Read More→

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Categories : How-To

Hyla Electro Brush Cleaning Maintenance

By Brett · Comments (2)
Friday, January 29th, 2010

A “down and dirty” look at disassembly and cleaning of a Hyla Vacuum Electro-Brush.

A couple of weeks ago I was being a good hubby and was helping out with some household chores. We have a Hyla NST vacuum and Amy got it out of the closet to start cleaning the floors.

There are two main attachments for the Hyla NST. One is for hard/smooth floors and the other is for carpet. I noticed that she was running the smooth floor sweeper on our rug in the living room , so I asked why? “The [Electro-Brush] is throwing white dust when I use it, so I just use this one.” Wha? This is a thousand dollar machine and it’s not doing any good using the wrong attachment.

So I decided to investigate. Read More→

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Categories : How-To
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WeBeJeeping! Are you?

By Brett · Comments (0)
Friday, September 11th, 2009

webejeep-postI just finished the “1.0″ version of my third official client website. You can read about the other two by clicking on the “WordPress Design Services” button at the top of the page. This new site was for Gilbert Jeeps and 4×4′s, a used Jeeps dealer in Athens AL. This was one of those fun projects where the niche was fun and the current needs were just big enough to create a challenge, but small enough to get my arms around.

The problem to be solved was basically a website that hadn’t had a design update since about 1998. It was still doing a pretty good job of presenting the inventory of used Jeeps to visitors and was ranked very good (#2 at Google at the time of this writing) for the main keyword, “used jeeps”.

Although the old design was very long in the tooth, it was just the tip of the iceberg shaped problem. Read More→

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Categories : Business, How-To

Top Five Tips for Picking the Perfect Domain Name

By Brett · Comments (0)
Tuesday, August 25th, 2009

domain-names
I was recently asked for my opinion on choosing a domain name. This case was a personal site, but a lot of the considerations are the same whether the site will be used for personal or commercial purposes. I ended up putting quite a bit of thought into my answer so I decided to share it.

Here are my personal priorities and considerations for picking domains: Read More→

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Categories : Advice, How-To, Tech
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