The excerpt function in Wordpress is great when you only want to show a preview of the post and allow users to "Continue Reading" by clicking the link. I've found that it can be limiting when you want to customize the excerpt on an individual basis and not globally. In order to change the "Read… Read more »
Development
Finding fun public JSON feeds to experiment with is surprisingly difficult, so I thought I'd compile a list of as many interesting and useful examples as I could find. This list is for public feeds meaning they do not require an API key. I also focused on the REST architecture. My example usage snippets will… Read more »
Event tracking is an important part of web maintenance. Knowing what words users are copying from your pages is an incredibly useful dimension to know! Essentially, the text people are copying from your website likely contains the most important keywords you should be targeting. Tools like Tynt are available that add your URL to any copied… Read more »
Web design and development is a relay race where our job as artists and programmers is simply to go from the starting blocks to the finish line. My favorite nuance of the race is that we put up our own hurdles in order to jump over them. From frameworks to media queries, there are many… Read more »
This is a Wordpress plugin that adds advanced load timing to each page. Know exactly what is causing slow (or fast) page loading on every page. It's like doing a lightweight and fast speed test on every page! It does not require any settings and is displayed at the bottom-left of the page. The overall… Read more »
Post Admin Social Stats adds a metabox to each post and page that shows the like/share count from select social networks. A metabox is also added to the Dashboard for likes/shares of the top-level home URL. This plugin is designed to have a small footprint as to not interfere with the front-end of the site. Simply install… Read more »
The HTML5 API opens up the ability to utilize a device's vibration functionality. While from a user experience standpoint you'll want to be very careful not to abuse this feature as most people will not be expecting a website to vibrate their phone, it's also very fun to play with. Here is the basic vibration snippet.… Read more »
Since the release of the new Google Maps API, there are some really powerful ways to create links from your site. These links could be a simple location, or they could be directions or even local searches. Here are some ideas of how to link to the New Google Maps. There are multiple ways to link… Read more »
There are many plugins out there that allow you to easily add social media sharing links to you website, but most of them add more code bloat than they are worth. You can add social media sharing to your pages without any bloat at all by either using hard-coded href urls or tying in some… Read more »
This lightweight tool detects the capabilities of your web browsing environment. Using javascript and PHP detection methods, it determines useful information such as operating system, browser (and version), screen information (dimensions, resolution, color depth, etc.), flash support, and every feature that is supported (and not supported)! It will even detect your location to show how… Read more »
Chris Blakley is the digital design and development strategist at Pinckney Hugo Group in New York.
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