I've been working on this new website, and rebranding The Hartsook Letter. By the end of July 2017, the Hartsook Letter will forward to this site. I won't add any new material to the Hartsook Letter site. The new site includes all the posts from The Hartsook Letter site, but the new site is focused on the following three areas
I hope the new site will be better organized, more up-to-date, more informative, and more useful.
Let me know what you think.
Q: Why build a website?
A: It’s an extension of your business marketing, reaching new customers and new markets.
Your website and other internet properties are part of your business marketing ecosystem, and an extension of your brand on the internet, and should be viewed in that context and not as isolated objects. You website design should be reinforcing your brand and extending your marketing messages to reach potential customers on their terms.
To help with your website design it’s useful to know what your goals are for having a website and how the website fits with the rest of your marketing.
Here are seven questions that will help you understand what you need for your website:
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If you don’t use the Excerpt field in your posts and rely on WordPress to grab the first few dozen words of your post content what you usually find is the excerpt when displayed on the front end (usually in some sort of archive or post grid display) will have most of the html tags removed leaving you with a single block of plain text.
If I go to the bother of formatting my post content to make it more interesting and easier to read and understand I’d like that formatting to be preserved even in that post’s excerpt.
RSS readers are somewhat old school in 2020, but the RSS feed that is part of WordPress is used by email services like Mailchimp and Mailerlite to create automated email updates when you add a new post to your website.
If you have custom post types though, they are not included in the default URL:
https://yoursite.com/feed
For some client projects I needed to embed javascript code in a page (Post). I used a custom field textarea to insert the code when creating the Post. The problem was the default for text fields was to run them through a sanitizer.php to strip out any type of code that might be malicious. This is a good thing. But in this case it defeats the purpose.
So how to disable the sanitizing for just this field without breaking the default?
The client wanted to display a list of past events in a scrollable column. This was easy to implement using simple css. The page layout was done with Beaver Builder, but the solution should work for any html container.
Sometimes you want to present a navigation menu as a horizontal “mega-menu” instead of a hierarchal dropdown menu. This is really simple if you are using Beaver Builder. The mega-menu feature is built in, but is unfortunately hidden. You have to know the secret to turn it on.
I needed to format a number field (999,999,999), coming from a custom field number-format (no other characters permitted in the number entry field). No “$” no commas or decimal points, etc. to output as a normal currency format.
When displaying the number I could add a “$” in front of the number, but couldn’t find a way to format the number since you can’t do that with CSS.
I came across an Elementor vs Beaver Builder comparison review that was published in August 2020. While I am pretty biased in favor of the Beaver Builder platform the reviewer seemed to favor Elementor.
If you are trying to decide which page builder platform to use I’d encourage you take a look at the review
Ever want to provide your readers with email updates to your website? WordPress’ built in RSS feed functionality provides an easy way to provide the content to email newsletter services like Mailchimp or Mailerlite.
But what if you want to create email updates that don’t include all your new posts, just specific post categories? Well that’s pretty easy. According to
I made an animated gif screenshot recording to demonstrate a code snippet, but I wanted to resize the image and make it loop. I found a useful website that has
click the green switch at the top of the screenshots to compare the WordPress vs the Static HTML versions of the same website
the static version is live at: http://halcyonlearning.com/
Master Roofing Company is a family-owned and operated Oakland roofing contractor with nearly 40 years experience of servicing residential and commercial clients in and around the San Francisco Bay Area. They had a Yelp page, but they didn’t have their own website.
The ProcessAfter a phone call
I've been working on a new website, and rebranding The Hartsook Letter. By the end of July 2017, the Hartsook Letter will forward to:
I won't add any new material to the Hartsook Letter site after this post you're reading.
The new site includes all the posts from The Hartsook Letter site, but is focused on the following three areas:
I hope the new site will be better organized, more up-to-date, more informative, and more useful. Let me know what you think.
WordPress is an award-winning web software, used by millions of webmasters worldwide for building their website or blog. SiteGround is proud to host this particular WordPress installation and provide users with multiple resources to facilitate the management of their WP websites:
Expert WordPress HostingSiteGround provides superior WordPress hosting focused on speed, security and customer service.
Google has started rolling out filtering for Google searches from mobile devices. If you site doesn’t meet the criteria for mobile-friendly,
Jetpack Photon should helpI recommend Jetpack-Photon module (deactivate all the other Jetpack modules you don’t use). Photon is an image-only CDN solution using Automatic’s servers. All your images are uploaded to their servers
BackWPup plugin developer, Daniel Huesken has decided to begin offering a “Pro” version beginning with version 3.0 of the plugin.
Another in a series of painless upgrades from WordPress. Double thumbs up for WordPress.org.
One big advantage of this version of WordPress is that now I can create
Relevanssi – A Better Search plugin breaks the search function in the “Media Library’, “Insert Media panel”, and also the ‘Insert link to existing content” in the hyperlink panel.
No news is good news! I applied the WordPress Upgrade 3.4 from 3.3.2 and so far I haven’t found any conflicts with my themes of plugins on this site. And
Someone at our recent Weekly WordPress Support Group at TechLiminal in Oakland CA asked about
But, if I deactivate Simple Facebook Connect the Grunion forms show up in the post.
Response :
(here’s the current discussion thread on the Simple Facebook Connect support forum that I started)
Pieter Hartsook:
Simple Facebook Connect still disables the display of
While I was configuring options in the Weaver theme (Weaver II-Pro) in preparation for my presentation at the Configurable Themes presentation for the Oakland WordPress Meetup the other day when I discovered a strange behavior when selecting one of Weaver theme’s most useful page-specific options: selecting the One column: No sidebar option.
The website you are looking at right now is using the WeaverII-Pro Theme. In order to
I just pasted the URL of a Picasa album below (http://picasaweb.google.com/107310476656218787840/PieterSUkulele)
Using the raw URL doesn’t does work, but making it a link will take you to the album at Picasa
Using the Photonic “shortcode” will also make it work. The general shortcode format is:
[bracket]gallery type=’picasa’ user_id=’abc’ album=’ablum_name'[closebracket]
So I’m going to use
[bracket]gallery type=’picasa’ user_id=’107310476656218787840′ album=’PieterSUkulele'[closebracket]
And here’s
There is a great post on the background of this problem by Mark Maunder that I recommend you read to understand the severity of the issue:
Technical details and scripts of the WordPress TimThumb.php hack
But even better,
The best free backup plugin, the one I’ve been using on my site and recommend and install for my clients is BackWPup. It
I thought I’d try out the upcoming version of WordPress since it’s now already rolled out on wordpress.com. I want to see what plugins and themes break before I recommend upgrading to my clients.
So far everything seems to be working with RC2, RC3 3.2 (with one exception….*)
* BackWPup plugin is currently busted, but there is an interim workaround
I use the Hartsook Letter blog as a testbed for WordPress themes, tools, plugins, and extensions. I need to see how these work and ferret out potential interactions among the various extensions before I recommend them for a client’s site.
So when
This presenta–tion just won 3rd prize on the "Worlds Best Presentation Contest 2010" at SlideShare. It's worth the look.
I first became aware of the Referrer Spam problem after installing and using the WordPress plugin Stat Surfer. One of Stat Surfer’s statistics categories is Top Referrers. I noticed on a business-client’s site they were getting referral traffic from porn sites and other
Eels by James Prosek
My rating: 4 of 5 stars
I just finished reading “Eels”. This book is on the order of Rachael
I wanted to display a slide show that was hosted on Scribd.com (see Mary Meeker’s slides on theBrilliant analysis of current internet marketing trends post). There is a lot of good content on Scribd that you may want to share with your audience, and it should be one of your choices in
Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley has created a really great presentation for the 2010 Web 2.0 conference here in
StatSurfer dashboard widget doesn’t use Google Analytics.
StatSurfer is the evolution of StatPress and StatPress Reloaded, the plugin is therefore consistent with the data of the two StatPress systems.
I like the aggregate display graph and the alternative view of the site traffic that doesn’t run through Google.
So you want to spice up your posts with Flickr, Picasa, or iPhoto, images from your computer? You can just insert one or two using the Upload/Insert button on the post editor. But what if you want to have a dozen photos, or have
I’ve been looking for a new hosting vendor. My account at GoDaddy.com is up for renewal and I think I can do better.
July 2017 update: The Lightbox Plus plugin is no longer available. I’ve replaced that on this site with Responsive Lightbox by dFactory. This plugin has lots of options for lightbox libraries and display. I’m currently using the prettyPhoto library setting,
This is a demonstration of the Lightbox Plus plugin. Click an image below to
Limit search for phrases by using " " around the phrase
Get notified of new Blog posts from WordPress Website Coach. We only send these out once on the 1st of each month.
If website loading-speed and security are important to your business, these guys at Sitedistrict really deliver! I switched my hosting over to them. They let you create and test sites for free. Once you enable billing to launch your site, you start your 30-day trial. Click the links to check out their free performance analysis of your website.
The Simple History plugin default history period is 60 days. The log includes not only user initiated changes to the
Read MoreIf you don’t use the Excerpt field in your posts and rely on WordPress to grab the first few dozen
Read MoreRSS readers are somewhat old school in 2020, but the RSS feed that is part of WordPress is used by email
Read MoreThe client wanted to display a list of past events in a scrollable column. This was easy to implement using
Read MoreSometimes you want to present a navigation menu as a horizontal “mega-menu” instead of a hierarchal dropdown menu. This is
Read MoreI needed to format a number field (999,999,999), coming from a custom field number-format (no other characters permitted in the
Read More
The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean
