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Making it Easy for Visitors to Share Your Content with AddThis.com
With how common social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter are becoming, I wanted to make it easier for website visitors to share our (the organization I work for) content with their colleagues. Instead of developing my own solution, I decided to utilize AddThis.com, which provides a customizable widget that can be embedded within a website. According to their website, the widget currently allows visitors to share content with more than 300 services around the world. [Continue reading]
Remember, It’s 2011: Tips for Remembering the New Year
It's that time of year again. The time when people vow to change some aspect of their life. Maybe they want to get in shape, stop smoking, get out of debt, etc. Well, here is my suggestion for a New Year's resolution. [Continue reading]
Adding an Audio Player to Your Libsyn.com Hosted Show Notes
At work I was asked to solve an issue with the website associated with our podcast. The problem was that the default player provided by our host (Libsyn.com) wasn't meeting our needs. On several occasions the player wouldn't play the most recent podcast episode. We also didn't like that if you were viewing the show notes for an older episode the player would still play the most recent episode, which confused our visitors. [Continue reading]
Problems with Google Analytics Code for Tracking PDFs
After struggling for nearly a week to install the asynchronous code for Google Analytics, I thought it would be good to share what I've learned. Hopefully this will save you a few sleepless nights. When I switched to the asynchronous tracking code, everything appeared to be working correctly. But for some reason PDF downloads and visits to external websites weren't showing up in the analytics. [Continue reading]
Stop Fighting with Me WordPress
Writing last week's post (Future Proofing Your Google Analytics Code for Tracking PDFs) introduced me to one of WordPress' major flaws. If you want to display code (HTML, PHP, etc.) in your post, there is a good chance that WordPress will mess it up. [Continue reading]
Future Proofing Your Google Analytics Code for Tracking PDFs
A few years back, I started using Google Analytics to get a better idea of what people are viewing on our websites. To be prepared for future revisions of the tracking code, I thought all I needed to do was store the code in a file called "GoogleAnalytics.html" and import it into the pages we wanted to track. Then as Google releases new versions of the tracking code, I would only need to update the GoogleAnalytic.html file for each website. [Continue reading]
Test Pages in the Wild
I recently listened to episode 10 of The Big Web Show titled "Less Is Always an Option". In the episode Jeffrey Zeldman and Dan Benjamin interviewed Jason Fried, CEO and co-founder of 37signals. [Continue reading]
Creating Accessible PDFs with Word 2010
The other day I needed to post a Word document online as a PDF. After opening Microsoft Word to make the conversion I discovered that the Acrobat tab (used to create tagged PDF documents) was missing. The problem is that I'm now using Word 2010 and the process for making a tagged PDF has changed. [Continue reading]
Don’t Forget the Details
I recently heard an advertisement which said "Midnight movies are back starting this Friday with Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark." When I visited the theatre's website for the complete list of movies, I found out that Indiana Jones was shown a few weeks earlier. But there was some doubt in my mind since the website didn't list the year (see Figure 1); maybe I was looking at old information. However my confusion was cleared up when I heard the exact same advertisement over the next few weeks. [Continue reading]
Making Meetings Work
I recently attended an online seminar called "Making Meetings Work". The following points resonated the most with me [Continue reading]
