Design Assets: you can never have enough arrows!

So you are working on an interface design and you need an arrow style for the gallery slider buttons... well this site is just what you need, Shapes4Free - in particular this page with 850 arrow shapes!

Knock yourself out!

Word Press White Screen of Death... Fixed!

Word Press... I have mixed emotions about Word Press. It's free, so it's hard to get upset with Word Press, and there about a gazillion plugins. However, the admin side can be a bit complicated for clients - and for developers, Word Press cans sometimes cause you great pain, like when you get the dreaded "W-SOD" (White Screen Of Death).

Well, this is how I fixed the problem on one site recently. I'm telling you this to save you the day I wasted on the problem.

BEFORE YOU STUFF AROUND WITH UPGRADING WORD PRESS, SWITCHING THEMES OR DISABLING PLUGINS - DO THIS:

If you, like me had not recently made a code change, it's highly likely to be hosting related. Now, you may not be able to get the hosting company to agree with you at first, you need proof.

1. Check server logs, review errors and warnings.
   You should be able to get to these from Control Panel.
   Here you will see indication of the error below.
2. Turn on error checking in your config file.
   Edit wp-config.php and change "false" to "true"
   define('WP_DEBUG', false);
3. Now try to edit the post that shows a white screen, what do you see?
   If you see something like:
   Fatal error: Out of memory (allocated 26476544) (tried to allocate 122880 bytes)
   Then you need to:
4. Send error to your hosting company and ask them to increase PHP memory allocation
5. Then edit your config file again... and increase the size limit. (I made mine max of 512).
   define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '16M');
6. MAKE SURE THEY REBOOT SERVER!

Now, this fixed my issue - but it took me a day to get there, because first up I was sure it was a plugin issue after reading heaps of forum posts. I disabled plugin and it seemed to mostly work again - but as I was using Types I could not check Posts because they were not showing. With the error - I could not even check Custom Types settings. I also switched themes back and forth, changed permalinks, upgraded Word Press..... but turned out to be a simple hosting issue. DEBUG is your friend in a white out!

While you have the log files and debug turned on, check warnings and fix some of the small issues that may be kicking around too like deprecated features - will post about a few of these too.

I hope you can be lucky with a fix this simple too!

How do Google "Site Links" work?

As most of us do, we search for things in Google... some results show expanding related links from a site referenced. These are called "Site Links".

So as a business owner or web developer, you may wonder, how can you set this and control it?

Well, there is good news and bad news... The bad news is that it's automated by Google. "We only show sitelinks for results when we think they'll be useful to the user." "G" does suggest if your site structure is good, you will see these site links when relevant.

The good news is that you can remove (demote) links you don't want to show.

Google does say they are working on this tool - so maybe in future there will be more you can do with Site Links.  Read more about it here: Google Site Links.

Free Fonts, Web Fonts & Font Smoothing

OK, I have seen quite a few free font websites in my time, but this one is quite good:
http://www.font-db.com/

If you are planning on using web fonts in your site, this is a good Google reference site:
http://www.google.com/webfonts

This site has a great layout of some of the best of Google webfonts:
http://hellohappy.org/beautiful-web-type/

Now, how do you use web fonts?
It's actually super easy... but there are a few things to consider.
This is a good place to start:
https://developers.google.com/webfonts/docs/getting_started

For the more advanced front end coders out there... this is a great discussion on font smoothing or not... http://www.usabilitypost.com/2012/11/05/stop-fixing-font-smoothing/


Happy fontlicating!

Nifty IE CSS3 Transforms Translator...

Exactly as per the title, this is a great little tool for getting around CSS3 IE transform issues!
http://www.useragentman.com/IETransformsTranslator/

Setting up a Facebook "feed" on your website

OK, so our team regularly adds Twitter and Blog feeds to websites.  Often we get aksed to add a Facebook feed... thing is, Facebook is not really a "feed" as it's made up of posts and info from you and other users.  So to add the Facebook "stream" to your site, what you need to do is add a customised view of the "Like Box" social plugin.

To do this, follow the instructions on this page:
http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/like-box/

Happy coding!

You Tube Poster Frames & Thumbnails

If you have ever uploaded a video to You Tube, you'll know that You Tube gives you three choices for a poster frame which is also used as the search thumbnail.  Google just calls them "video thumbnails" to make it easy I guess.  However if you embed your You Tube video on a website, the initial frame before video plays (Poster Frame) is also the thumbnail.

The thumbnail image can have a big impact on whether people actually click on your video in search results and also the look of your web page if embedded.  So how do these thumbnails work and can you modify them?

If you are a You Tube partner - you can now upload custom thumbnails... cool!  To become a partner, you need to enable monetization on your account... not so cool.  If you don't want to do that, then read on.

How to edit your video thumbnail:
1. Visit your account page
2. Click the Uploaded Videos
3. Select Video
4. Click on Edit
5. Click the thumbnail you want, and Update

How does You Tube select the thumbnail?
Well according to one website, it goes by a simple time formula:
X = Video length (in sec.)
Y = X divided by 4 or X/4 (in sec.)

Y is the 1st thumbnail.
2 times Y or 2xY (in sec.) is the 2nd thumbnail (poster frame).
3 times Y or 3xY (in sec.) is the 3rd thumbnail.

So it is possible to create your video with these time codes in mind and actually get a thumbnail and poster frame that is exactly what you want!

I will post an entry soon on You Tube Vs Vimeo!