MadClouds

Gmail: Mark All Unread Mail as Read

Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 | General, Tutorials, Web Design | 1 Comment

For the longest time I had 648 unread message in my gmail account. When I created the account, I didn’t use it as much as I do now, so it got polluted with unread messages that I never really planned on going back to read. I finally discovered a way to get my unread count back to 0, which delivers the impression that my inbox is clean.

Step 1:

• Log into your account

Please don’t make me include this…

Step 1a:

• Click: Select: All

Step 2:

• Click: Select all ### conversations in Inbox

Step 3:

• Click: More Actions > Mark as read

Improve Wordpress SEO

Monday, May 11th, 2009 | General, Technology, Web Design | No Comments

I’ve been reading articles on how to improve my blog’s search engine optimization (SEO) and have decided to document my findings.  First off, if you don’t have a content management system for your website, I’d highly recommend Wordpress.  It’s super easy to use and allows you to publish the important stuff – your content – without the need to code everything yourself.

Once you have Wordpress installed, you gain access to a ton of useful plugins!  To help improve your Wordpress blog’s SEO I recommend you install the following plugins:

• All in one SEO Pack
• Google Sitemap Generator

Upload the unzipped folders to your wordpress/wp-content/plugins folder.  Then log into your Wordpress Dashboard and navigate to the Plugins page.  There you’ll activate these plug-ins.

Once activated the All-in-one-SEO-Pack will start automatically optimizing all your pages for search engine indexing.  Have a look through the Settings > All in one SEO Pack options to customize your settings for your blog.  The defaults are optimized to Google’s liking.

Next I suggest you set up an account with Google’s Webmaster Tools.  Google offers a ton of statistical information on the automated indexing of your site.  Take careful note of any errors and try to utilize google’s suggestions.  After all… it is google…

Last but not least go into Settings > XML – Sitemap and make sure you generate your XML sitemap after installing the plug in.  After generating the sitemap the first time, this plug in will automatically update the sitemap and notify all the major search engines upon any content modifications, such as new posts, post edits or new pages!  Very useful.

Lastly I’d recommend you install some sort of statistical monitoring plug in to help track what people are interested in on your site.  I use Statpress Reloaded and love how it displays useful information, like page visits, search terms, referrers and more!

These steps should really help boost your websites efficiency!  Happy Blogging!

Tags: SEO, wordpress

Internet Explorer 6 Doesn’t Focus on ActiveX Controls

Tuesday, May 5th, 2009 | Technology, Web Design | 1 Comment

So I have a defect regarding an undesirable effect in IE6 where the initial focus on a webpage is not on our Flex/Flash application, but rather the parent HTML page.  Said differently, when you click on our “log in” link, it loads an HTML page with a layout that includes an HTML header, a Flash object and then a HTML footer, with the focus on the HTML header.  So when you type, or hit the tab key (to move from the username field to the password field) the browser scrolls south rather then changing focus.

In IE7 and FF3 this issue doesn’t exist, because they handle ActiveX objects differently.  Being an experienced IE user I instantly recalled experiencing this in older versions of IE.  I remembered traveling to certain pages and having to “click” or “activate” the Flash/WMP object before I could interact with it.  I surfed the internets for a while bouncing from forum to forum and found little covering this topic.  Then I searched Microsoft’s support site and came across this gem:

Internet Explorer 6 software update and its effect on ActiveX controls:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/912945

This page explained exactly what was happening:

Microsoft has released a software update to Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 [...]. This update changes how Internet Explorer handles some Web pages that use ActiveX controls and Java add-ins. Examples of ActiveX controls include the following:

[...]
Macromedia Flash Player

[...]

After you install this update, you cannot interact with ActiveX controls from certain Web pages until these controls are enabled. To enable an ActiveX control, manually click the control.

Great!  Explination! Gratification!

A little more digging and I came across a solid resolution to this problem.  Essentially the fix requires that you use JavaScript to activate the object upon the HTML rendering phase.  This page lists multiple different solutions.  Basically they all utilize JavaScript such as:

<!– HTML File –>
<html>
<body leftmargin=0 topmargin=0 scroll=no>
<script src=”docwrite.js”></script>
</body>
</html>

<!–  docwrite.js File –>
document.write(’<object classid=”clsid:6BF52A52-394A-11d3-B153-00C04F79FAA6″>’);
document.write(’<param name=”URL” value=”example.wmv”>’);
document.write(’<param name=”autoStart” value=”-1″></object>’);

This enables us to specify focus on our desired input field inside our Flex/Flash application.  Woohoo!