Thoughts on technology
The default WordPress excerpt length is 55 words. Sometimes we need to change this, and sometimes we need multiple excerpt lengths depending on where we are. For example, we might want a short excerpt on the home page and the default excerpt for everywhere else – archives, author pages, etc. The example above changes the … Continue reading
bbPress doesn’t offer an option to disable the breadcrumb navigation, but we can easily do it with a single line of code. Add this to your functions.php or to a simple plugin to turn off bbPress breadcrumbs.
Contact Form 7 is a great contact form plugin for WordPress, but it loads its Javascript and CSS on every page on your site, even when you don’t have a contact form there. Let’s fix that by loading the scripts and styles only on the pages that need them. Add the following code to your … Continue reading
A few months ago there were reports all over the news about companies demanding the Facebook passwords of prospective employees, and still today I find people talking about it. There are various opinions about this practice; some people are for it, and some people are against it. My position is this: you should NEVER give … Continue reading
If you’ve used WordPress for any period of time, you know it has the annoying habit of adding extra paragraph tags when you don’t want or need them. This can cause problems with the way your content is displayed. Luckily, this is easy to fix. Add the following code to your theme to prevent WordPress … Continue reading
The admin dashboard widgets in WordPress are handy and informational, but sometimes you don’t need or want them on a particular deployment. WordPress allows you to hide them by clicking the Screen Options button at the top right and deselecting the ones you don’t need. This is nice and easy, but it only hides them. … Continue reading
Sometimes it’s nice to display a PDF embedded on a page without forcing the visitor to download it. Using the Google Docs PDF viewer, we can easily do that with a shortcode and this snippet of code. To display the PDF, insert the shortcode in your page or post using the following syntax: If you … Continue reading
On many systems using the default WordPress configuration, emails originating from a WordPress site will likely have some undesirable traits. These are: From: WordPress wordpress@domain.com Return-Path: apache@mail.domain.com It’s likely you’ve seen this before. It’s pretty much the default. The problem is, it’s useless most of the time. Let's fix that. Change the values in the … Continue reading
Have you noticed the ads in newspapers, magazines, on television and even on actual product packaging, where instead of companies listing their own web site, they say “Find us on Facebook”? It’s almost universal at this point, it seems. There’s a trend in marketing that puts all the Internet marketing eggs into the Facebook basket, … Continue reading