Web Design

Cyberduck and Smultron!

Tuesday, June 8th, 2010 | Technology, Web Design | No Comments

I’ve been doing a lot of HTML/CSS editing on my website and have been depending too much on WordPresses Appearance Editor located in the admin dashboard.  There was a lot wasted time put into editing HTML and CSS there.  As an alternative I’ve found the following open source solution:

cyberduck and smultronCyberduck

Smultron and CyberduckSmultron

Cyberduck is a pretty standard FTP client but what it allows you to do is edit files with Smultron and save them directly back to the server.  This really cuts down on uploading time.  To get it to work download and install both applications.  Then set up an FTP connection with Cyberduck and browse to the files you’d like to edit.  Then right click on a file and select “Edit With” and select Smultron.  Then edit the file and save it with Smultron and you’ll notice the changes are immediately uploaded via Cyberduck!  Woot…

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Gmail: Mark All Unread Mail as Read

Thursday, July 2nd, 2009 | General, Tutorials, Web Design | 2 Comments

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

gmail_mark_inbox_as_read

Step 2:

  • Click: Select all ### conversations in Inbox

gmail_mark_all_unread_mail_as_read

Step 3:

  • Click: More Actions > Mark as readgmail_mark_all_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:

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!

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