Updated 03-Aug-2025 Zurb's 21 Responsive Design Trends That Will Shape 2017 is useful reading. Of course not everyone will agree on 21 trends, and 21 isn't actually helpful to focus on. Nonetheless, many of these should/will need to be dealt with in 2017. Here are the one's I found most useful: Split Screen Divide a ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Yandex is likely the 4th most important Search-based provider, with Google, Baidu, and Bing being ahead in terms of overall traffic. Yandex is certainly like Google and Bing (and Amazon) in terms of offering a combination of email and file storage along with file sharing and file editing tools for organizations. Essentially it ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Spending time looking into AMI (Amazon Linux), it is as usual with the plethora of Amazon products, sometimes hard to get info about what it is. I take this not as a bad thing (though it does take time) but rather a feature that emerges from the *let's develop lots of stuff all ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Instead of a post about 2017, I want to postmortem 2016. It has been an enormous year of reckoning, being faced with previous decisions and facing them anew. Client chaos, a move into the suburbs, my son's development from months 2 to 14, and several injuries have made this a stressful year. In ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 When dealing with cloud-based office productivity applications (documents and spreadsheets), the main contenders are obvious: - Apple iWork - Google Docs, Apps, Drive, GSuite - Microsoft Office365 While Apple's offering is relatively unknown (little noted, therefore little discussed), the real sleeper is Amazon's WorkDocs and WorkMail The Kit and the Kaboodle Here I ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Colorblindness Colorblindness affects approximately 5-8% of the population, mainly males. The visualization of these kinds of colorblindness is eye-opening, to say the least. The most common form of colorblindness is deuteranomaly, which is red-green. The colorblindness simulations show the color red as indistinguishable from a certain shade of green. Actually to my eyes ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Telegram is my favorite go-to chat. Unfortunately people are invested in their use of Facebook messenger, Line, Hangouts, etc., and you have to be where they are to chat with them. I have one guy who is only chatting on the apps I don't use: Facebook and WeChat. Sure, I might see a ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Woocommerce is a fantastic, though complex, time-consuming, and/or expensive ecommerce system. That said, it is the most popular on WordPress, and has a lot of potential for the future. It is getting a lot of development effort at Automattic, and has a fairly extensive functionality set, and some loosely- and tightly-coupled extensions and ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 TPP and Copyright provisions There have been several developments regarding copyright law, the most profound being that TPP appears to be dead in the water. TPP copyright provisions would have negatively impacted many countries in terms of costs to consumers, including Canada, Brunei, Japan, Malaysia, New Zealand, and Viet Nam. A New Zealand ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 I've had some trouble troubleshooting a problem with a site. Regular browsers had no problem, and the certificate appeared fine. However, Bingbot was getting failure (503) on trying to access robots.txt. Once I allowed that to be available via http, the problem went away. Looking further I found some ideas: - Bingbot had ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 > This is as true today than it was more than five years ago when first posted. Due to the ongoing hacking of accounts and passwords on popular web services, it is a good time to consider the following suggested security practices. If you feel you do not have the time to deal ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Especially the first year for a child, there is an enormous amount of growth and development for a child. Parents of course will worry obsessively, and breast-feeding mothers will become anxious and paranoid about feeding. Here are a few guidelines to help. - WHO and CDC growth charts, use WHO for the first ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 scp, the secure version of cp, aka copy, is pretty great, since it is straightforward to copy one or more files or directories from any one machine to any other machine (and the command could be running on a third machine). SCP Syntax Note: it is best to use sudo, and full paths ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 I've reached the end of my patience for underpowered devices. I've entertained quite a few thin clients, including: Various Netbooks Chromebook Apple TV Chromecast Fire Stick Intel Compute Stick NEC MobilePro 770, 780, 790 (more on this below) Return on Investment The return on investment (ROI) of any device can be considered on ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Note: This started out as a page about MOSH, but I've moved on to AutoSSH, which is way easier without much configuration, and better at what it does. I had not been aware of Mosh (mobile shell), though clearly its own level of awesome is not a reason for that. Basically it replaces ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Site performance comes down to two issues: Perceived relevance Perceived responsiveness Actually, perceived responsiveness could be considered an aspect of relevance (but not the other way around). To be relevant is to be speedy and relevant. Catch 22 - Speed vs. Functionality For WordPress, the architecture is one where responsiveness goes down logarithmically ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 In Thailand, due to a period of mourning on the death of the King of Thailand, many websites have removed color and gone black-and-white (grayscale) for home pages, and some for all pages. There is a fairly easy way to do this with CSS, with the exception of images used as background images ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Star ratings, which indicate review averages, can be useful indicators of quality on search results pages. There are several tactics to include star ratings (or rather, rating/review stars). There may be an interesting use case for not having a root page / in a WordPress website. That is, forcing a redirect from root ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 Public video can easily be hosted and streamed on YouTube at no cost. But for those who want some restrictions on the video, YouTube has only limited options. Currently YouTube only allows sharing private videos with up to 50 YouTube accounts, via including their email addresses or Google+ account, in the video manager. ... Read more
Updated 03-Aug-2025 The WooCommerce team is introducing a huge amount of integrated functionality. WooCommerce must be considered a platform at this point (with WordPress as a much more generic, broader platform). Think of Windows and Office. Windows is a generic operating system and Office is a set of applications. While the analogies only go so ... Read more