Jim F Munro

Banner Ads For The Google Fiber Project In Boulder

March 4

The latest Boulder Denver New Technology meetup had a panel discussion on how Boulder could get access to free beer a larger network pipe.

The idea being that it could spark more innovation, more jobs, etc. as a result.

From the Boulder Fiber website:

So you’ve heard of Google, right? The single largest search engine in the world. They are offering to build an experimental network in a community with speeds up to 100 times faster than current internet speeds at an affordable price. It will change how communities access information and the interact with the world. Also, the City of Boulder is known the world over for our forward thinking, progressive and cutting-edge policies, trends and companies. Outside of having a ridiculously fast internet connection – this project will propel the city, community and business efforts to the next level through increased economic growth, improve health care, and advance education. Boulder is already on the map; help us make that pin bigger.

It sounded like some graphics were in order so put in a few ideas for banner ads. I haven’t really created banner ads before so this is my first attempt. I even through in an animated GIF for fun. Hopefully they’ll help.

See The Ad Graphics

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Removing Page Titles In Thesis

February 2

Updated Nov 12, 2010:

There is a better way! I suggest checking out the newer article on the topic to learn how to remove page titles in thesis using filters.

There were a couple of threads in the DIYThemes forum about removing page titles. Lots of solutions were thrown out including hiding the title with CSS rules like:

    h1 { display: none;}

While this does work, it’s not really a recommended solution because of the possibility of being construed (by the search engines) as a nefarious, evil, black hat technique. Oooooh hand waving.

I suggested that the easiest way is just to chop the titles straight out of the PHP code and be done with it. No need to hide, align, obfuscate or anything tricky on the presentation end. [Update 10/04/2010: I am not sure I would worry too much about hiding text for presentation purposes affecting your rankings.] On To The Tutorial →

Thesis CSS Map

January 24

I haven’t found a lot of great resources for adding basic CSS customizations for the Thesis theme so I created one of my own.

Note: If you’re looking for a Thesis theme hooks map, you can find one here.

I didn’t drill down to every single child element, but if you’re looking for the basic container divs on the main default page or need some place to start here it is.

View the Full Post →

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Add A Useful Post Footer With The Open Hook Plugin For Thesis

January 13

People go to a lot of effort to get people to visit to their site. Once you get them there, why not encourage them to come back?

Since my blog is kind of new, I’m doing all I can to encourage people to come back and read all this fantastic, brilliant and inspirational content day after day.

Assuming you’re actually creating content regularly, one way you could get more readers to your blog is to give them a way to keep up-to-date on your latest content. By giving them options to follow your updates, you are lowering the barrier and making it easy for people. This is key.

The problem with a lot of the default RSS feed, contact form and social bookmark links is that they live at the top-right corner of your blog theme. Once you read down to the bottom of a post, they are long gone, but this seems like the perfect location where you should be asking your reader to follow you, the assumption being that if they got the end of an article, they might very well be interested in future articles.

My post footer box.

They just need to know where to find it and you will show them.

One great method you can use is a single post footer, which provides your readers several ways to subscribe to your content — RSS, email, Twitter, etc. This will be displayed at the bottom of every individual post page on your site.

Let me show you one easy way to add a post footer to your blog.

Read The Full Article

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Motivation For 2010

January 12

Perspective

So Matt Mullenweg, the creator of WordPress, just turned 26. Motivation.

Most of the people I consider young are almost 10 years older than that! Motivation.

It seems like our lives are always a work in progress. Patience required.

If you don’t like where your career/life has taken you. Don’t complain about it, do something about it. (You can complain about it, but don’t let that be the steam-vent. Let the pressure move you forward.)

In spite of the economy, there are plenty of opportunities — if you’re motivated.

Expect changes, some good, some bad. Use those changes as new opportunities. Embrace change.

These are a few things I have grokked from the people who have inspired me. I hope they serve as a spring-board for you.

Why 2010 Is A Great Year For Change

Making great life or career changes in 2010 is a good idea. Not only will you make the changes you’ve been thinking or dreaming about, but when you tell people about these changes, you’ll make the changes during 2010. 2010 sounds more impressive than, say, 2007 or 2003.

“Oh yeah, I started my new career in 2010.” you’ll tell them. ”Wow! That’s impressive,” they’ll say.

Sound good?

Now go do what you’ve been dreaming about.

Don’t wait.

You don’t turn 26 a second time.

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Got speed? Updated site hosting for 2010

January 9

As promised, we’ve got speed. About 300% faster than my previous host which shall remain un-named. You can email me if you want to know who to avoid.

The winner was Bluehost and if you are looking for a good place to host your next website, I give them a thumbs up.

Speed and Performance Do Matter

Given that website performance is on the radar for Google’s ranking in 2010 and future, if you take Matt Cutts’ informed opinions into account. So switching now made sense to me.

It already matters to your user experience anyhow. Users leave sites where the pages take a long time to load. Unless you’ve got a site people are drooling over, you may be losing traffic already.

It’s not 2002 when people might have waited forever for their favorite sites to load. Peoples patience levels have dropped considerably and they may never come back.

Are you really saving money with the cheapest web host?

Who doesn’t want there site up 100% of the time? If you generate any money on your website, dead air-time can cost you big. It’s amazing how some people will look for the cheapest hosting solution, only to lose money in the end when their reliability and performance costs them sales.

Cheaper isn’t always better.

I will admit it’s time consuming work to move a website, particularly a blog, to another host. But the satisfaction I get out of working faster and saving time is all the reward I need. Let me know if you have a better solution, but for now I’m staying here for awhile.

(Starting your hosting by clicking on the following link will help support this site.)

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My Favorite Tools For Information Overload Management

January 6

Does this sound familiar?

You read a 140 character tweet from your favorite Twitizen…
Which leads you to a post on their blog where they comment on another blog with a link to the original post… (They also refer to a book you might be interested in.)
You now have 4 browser tabs open where each one has at least one other link to a topic you might want to read…
Pretty soon your in over your head, it’s lunch time and you haven’t done a damn thing.

At least it was fun and maybe your learned something.

It happens to me all too often. Here are a couple suggestions you could try to manage this problem.

Give in and read it all

Of course in a perfect world, I would indulge myself and consume it all. If you had enough time, money and an infinitely large bladder you could just sit and read posts all day, but few of us have that luxury.

Unless you choose to live like Howard Hughes, there has to be a limit. Fortunately, there are other methods you can try.

Pull the plug

Paul Graham, author, startup founder and angel investor has a great essay which describes his approach to this problem. He solves it by maintaining a secondary computer which isn’t connected to the internet –a work computer where he actually Gets Things Done. He forces himself to get up and walk over to a separate computer where he checks email and internet browsing.

Overall, it’s a good idea, but also has the flaw (for me) that you might just as easily sit at the wired computer and get sucked in, rather than ever return to the unwired one. It requires discipline. If I had any of that, I wouldn’t have this problem to begin with.

Save for later

There are a bunch of ways to save your post. You could bookmark it in your browser, but that takes a few seconds to direct it where you want and it may saved only on your local computer. I started using XMarks to alleviate the second problem, but it still takes too much time at the rate I go.

Posting it to a bookmark site like Delicous, same problem. I reserve this for technical stuff that I may want to use over and over, like reference type sites.

A great tool I love is Instapaper which allows you to easily save any page using by simply clicking a bookmarklet. It’s fast and easy. It’s great when you have 5 or more tabs open but have to go do something else or actually get some work done.

The interesting thing is when you return to some of what you saved, you might find yourself better able to pick and choose what you actually want to invest your time reading rather than feeling compelled to take it all in.

Stem The Tide

If you hadn’t noticed, I provided a fair number of links in the post. So I guess I am a bit of a hypocrite. Sorry.

Rather than cursing me, maybe you can try to practice some of the tips above. Please leave a comment and let me know how it goes.

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Happy 2010! We’re Moving To A Faster Host

January 5

Thanks to all my visitors during 2009. I appreciate the traffic and feedback. Every time I hear from you, this blog gets better so please consider leaving comments if you found something useful or not.

Look for a lot more, better and more useful content during 2010.

Most Importantly

The performance on my original webhost was bad. To be honest, it sucked.

I am in the process of transferring over to a new, better, faster web hosting provider in early January 2010. I expect much better speed and reliability.

Possible Downtime

I’m doing my best at moving my blog with no downtime, but there may be glitches here and there so please be patient. I’ll do my best to make it pain-free!

Thanks again!! I’ll send out an update when everything is final.

If you want fast updates, you should be following me on Twitter here.

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Add A Favicon To Your WordPress Blog

December 16

Visual appeal helps when trying to get readers on your blog. You don’t need to add animated logos and flashing text to do this. There are more subtle ways that have become quite easy to implement if you are willing to invest a few minutes to use the tools available. If you are looking for an easy way to improve your blog’s image for your readers, consider adding a favicon. Continue Reading This Article…

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Thesis Theme Review

December 14

I’ve been an avid WordPress user since I started blogging. This is due in part to the large user base, ease of installation and use, and the cost of software (Free!). Like a lot of people, I was excited about WordPress because of all the free custom themes available. I confess I have spent way too much time playing around with new themes I’ve found. But you have to be careful about what you download or you could end up with something unpleasant.

As a website designer, I created websites for others, but I just had a hard time finding the time to get my own blog up and running and after a lot of work, I wasn’t happy with the free theme I had chosen, in spite of all my customizations.

I had already seen a lot of positive reviews about the Thesis theme and had considered it early on, but I hadn’t wanted to pay for a theme [horror!] — yet. Only after spending a bunch more time working with other themes, did I decide to make the purchase. After all, how much is my free-time worth? The irony of feeling like I was actually losing money just doing “research” on all these “free” themes irked me, so I finally plunked down the cash. I’m happy I did.

Thesis theme has enough included bells and whistles that it seems to be that it’s worth it’s cost right “out of the box”. Once you get into customizing it, it shines even more.

Frameworks Versus Themes

If you download a theme, often times it was designed the way the author wanted to use it, so they’ve tweaked column widths for their layout, altered button sizes to match their headers, hard-coded single-row navigation bar because they have three pages on their blog. I’ve even seen navigation bars hard-coded, requiring you to name your pages exactly like the original author did in order for anything to be displayed. These all add up to more work.

The solution: use frameworks. Thesis is a framework, which basically means it’s flexible enough to allow you to use it how you want to. Most of the design is general enough that you can have the freedom to create your blog with confidence knowing that long category names, many sub-menus and such will all be handled gracefully.

Cut Your Development Time

If you’ve spent any time laying out web pages, you know that making column changes can be a headache. But Thesis allows you to switch between 1, 2 or 3 column layouts and select the widths of each at the touch of a (save) button. This is great if you decided later you want to add a new widget, or display adds in a different place. Great for A/B testing and just convenient if you want to try out a new look without investing any time.

Much of the work that isn’t handled in the main Thesis control panels can still be done through the control panel Custom File Editor. Just make a change to the custom.css and hit save. Presto, you’ve got your updated change. No uploading .css files or FTP needed. (Especially helpful if you’re ever behind a firewall.) It’s also great for prototyping designs.

Batteries Included

If you are not interested in spending a lot of time maintaining or updating the look and feel of your blog, you still get a great looking design out of the box. You can basically not add anything and you will still end up with a good system for getting ranked in the search engines due to all the built in optimizations included by default. You don’t even have to know what that means and you will still get the benefits when you write your first post.

Of course, I personally know very few people who don’t spend copious amounts of time getting everything just right. For those of us, there are many customized sidebars and a system of hooks that allow you to customize every inch of your screen.

Your Biggest Support Group

Another benefit of getting into Thesis is that it already has a huge base of existing users. Good luck finding that with most other free themes out there. Not only are your most frequently asked questions already answered most of the time, but you’ll be able to get support from the authors of the theme if you can’t find a specific answer.

Which Version To Buy?

Since I have several websites and thought it would be a good solution for my clients to use I purchased the developer license. This allows you to remove the attribution in the footer as well as use it over an unlimited number of sites. Perfect.

Perfect in the sense that it can be used as a default theme framework for new clients, and that I can get something up and running immediately that works.

If you found this article useful and helped you decide to get Thesis, I’d love it if you bought it through my affiliate link here. But if not, at least drop me a comment on your experiences.

Now, don’t even get me started about plugins.

Note: This is not a paid review. I was not given anything free to write about Thesis, I just like it. I hope someone who found this review useful might follow the affiliate link above to purchase their own copy.

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Banner Ads For The Google Fiber Project In Boulder