Grayscale Web Pages with CSS

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 in CSS ... Read more

Private Video Streaming Options

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. In addition, ... Read more

Mad WooCommerce Development

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 far, WooCommerce ... Read more

Email Marketing Automation

Update 03-JUN-2024 - I'm migrating off most of this (Woocommerce -> Stripe links) the only functionality that seems important is a simple newsletter. The Alo Easymail Newsletter was great but hasn't been updated in 4 years which means it is out of step with the latest PHP / MariaDB used in WordPress these days. Mailbluster ... Read more

CLI vs. GUI

The Command Line Interface (CLI), aka shell, aka command prompt, is a powerful, key, and underlying interface to most operating systems. However, there are huge usability problems. The main issue is one of recognition vs. recall which has to do with human memory. While there are endless comparisons between GUIs and CLIs most of these ... Read more

Paypal Checkout Options

> Updated July 2019 - I no longer use Paypal, as it is roughly twice as expensive as Stripe when looking at $100 USD/month in transactions (more than 10% with transaction fees and currency conversion), and without currency conversion it is still 30% more when only looking at transaction fees (usually because of the international ... Read more

Rise of the Chat 'Bots

In February 2016, I wrote about the Coming of the 'Bots. Now it is September, and indeed there are more on the horizon, as well as a few I missed from 2015. However, bot utility is fairly constrained now and likely into the future, mainly because the mental model is one around artificial intelligence which ... Read more

Progressive Web Apps

Apparently Progressive Web Apps are a thing. (Thanks Leon!) Anyone know of any agencies who've developed #ProgressiveWebApps esp. with service workers? We have a work project for you...— Leon Paternoster (@leonpaternoster) September 12, 2016 While the technology was announced (apparently) in 2015, in the March 2016 Google I/O there were many training and presentation events, ... Read more

Import Adwords to Bing Checklist

This is a handy checklist since Bing conveniently forgets a few settings, and also doesn't fully support a few features (and so generalizes, naturally). - Currency differential in bids and budgets. Bing treats a number as a number, even when Adwords campaigns in Thai Baht is imported into a US Dollar Bing account. Use the ... Read more

Search Crawler IP Address Blocks

Whitelist these CIDR IP blocks to not accidentally lock out or block spiders. These are for the following search engines: - Baidu - Bing - DuckDuck - Facebook - Google - Yahoo - Yandex 100.43.80.0/24 100.43.81.0/24 100.43.85.0/24 100.43.90.0/24 100.43.91.0/24 107.21.1.61 111.13.102.0/24 114.111.95.0/24 115.239.212.0/24 119.63.196.0/24 119.63.199.0/24 122.81.208.0/22 123.125.67.144/29 123.125.67.152/31 123.125.68.0/24 123.125.68.68/30 123.125.68.72/29 123.125.68.80/28 123.125.68.80/30 123.125.68.84/31 123.125.68.96/30 ... Read more