Shane Strong » Shane

jQuery Corner Page Peel

Shane — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 08:39:50 +0000

There are many different ways to make your RSS Icon jump out at people. Well why not have it peel at people. You have seen those ads that sites have in the upper right corner of there site that when you hover over them they just peel away. Well some people might think that must be flash at work or something that is so advanced I can never learn it. Well to let everyone know yes you can learn it and no it is not hard. I am sure that you could make a peel away corner with flash and I bet it would look good. But, I also bet that it would take a couple hours to create and then a few more to implement. Well with some jQuery and CSS you can create a peel away corner in about 20-30mins. All that you need to know for this is how to copy some code into your head and header area of your website. I am going to break down exactly what you need to do in 3 easy steps. If you would like to download the end product you can find it at the bottom of this tutorial.

Add Your jQuery Scripts

We are going to use Google’s AJAX Library to add our jQuery library to our header. You may ask why we would do this well including the jQuery library from a external source will make less stress on your server and we all know that Google’s servers can handle the stress.


//Google Hosted

//Your Script

Create Your Styles

These are your styles and can be changed up depending on where your image is and what size you want to start out with.

.cornerpeel {position: relative;}
.cornerpeel img {
  width: 50px; 
  height: 50px;
  z-index: 101;
  position: absolute;
  right: 0; 
  top: 0;
}
.cornerpeel .message {
  width: 50px; 
  height: 50px;
  position: absolute;
  z-index: 100;
  right: 0; 
  top: 0;
  background: #fffcf9 url(http://www.shanestrong.com/jQuery/cornerpeel/rss.jpg) no-repeat right top;
  text-indent: -9999px;
}

Create Your Corner Peice

This is were you create your hoverable corner piece. This will be placed somewhere in your header area or right inside your body tag.


   
      
      Subscribe To My Feed

Your Finished

Well that was it, that is all that you need to create your self a corner peel. If you would like to see this in action you can download my script at the bottom. There is a ton of things that you can do with jQuery that can make your site seem more flashy without having to find a flash developer. jQuery is one of the fastest growing languages around. If you have any tutorials that you would like to publish on my site please go to my contact page.

jQuery Corner Peel: Corner Peel Trial

Download: jQuery Corner Peel (1262)

Website Design , Development, and SEO Marketing

If by chance you are in need of any web design, web development, search engine optimization, or marketing done to one of your sites you can get in contact with me or you can contact Chosen. Chosen is a Lansing based Web Development, Web Design, Web Hosting, and Web Marketing firm. We are a small business but are growing in the Lansing Area for our Web Design and Development skills. We have done work for clients and companies. We prefer client work but we also take contract work. We have worked with most of the biggest web companies in the Lansing Area and all the way out to California. We would love to hear from you.

Website Value Boost

Shane — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 20:05:55 +0000

There are a ton of ways to get more traffic to your site but really there are only a couple ways to build your sites value. How is your site measured by the amount of traffic it gets, how much it makes in profit in a given month, what its PageRank is. There is a lot of different ways to make your site valuable. I prefer to do the easy way by how much your site makes in a given month. The reason that I consider this easy is because you have so many different ways to go about doing this. Most of these ways depend on how much traffic/popularity your site has. One of the easiest ways is to put ads on your site. You can choose from many different advertising companies. This is where it gets hard because if your site does not have the traffic/popularity then most of these companies will not accept you.

Google Ads

Google everyone knows them and probably everyone has seen multiple ads by them. They will accept every site. Not just because they have the money to do so but they can measure where the person who clicked on the ad came from. For instance If you put ads up on your site by Google. You have to register where you live with them. Now not saying that you should but yeah you could go to a neighboring town and click on your ads and yes you will probably get money for it. But, Google is smart if it finds a pattern in clicks and area of the clicks then it will suspect something and you can get prosecuted for it. What does this mean you will loose your ability to use Google ads and could be fined and possible jail time. In order to setup Google ads on your site all that you have to do is register with Google Adsence it is really easy to find just go to Google and search for Google ads or ads. You do not have to have a Google email to register. Once you setup your account then all you have to do is go through the tutorials inside Google Adsence to get the feel for how to go about making money. The really tough part about making money with Google is where to put the ads. For instance you want the ads in places that people are going to click them and they dont look like ads. There are different kinds of ads and ad sizes that you can choose from. I am using there rss feed ads and there regular ads.

Other Ad Companies

There are a ton of other really good ad companies but the two that I like the most is Chitika Ads and Text Link Ads. Both of these ad companies pay pretty good especially Text Link Ads. The only problem with these ad companies is you have to have a high amount of traffic to your site before they will accept you. A really good way to increase your traffic to your site is with Optimization. This can be done in many different ways the best is to get everything optimized. This includes SEO (Search Engine Optimization), SEM (Search Engine Marketing), Title and Alt Tags, Content Emphasis, Creating Ads For Your Self, and much more. The best is to do all of them but if you are looking for some quick traffic. Then you best bet is to create a ad with a high end company (Google). Google is extremely cheap for creating ads it would only cost you around $50-$100 a month for good ads and it goes up from there. Now even with creating ads for yourself this doesn’t mean that your site is going to get enough of a boost that it needs. That is why I said that it is best to get everything done. That way you are building traffic from multiple areas. Whether it be Search Engines, Advertising, or Keywords.

SEO Packages

If you are in need of any Search Engine Optimization I do have packages and I can teach people how to do SEO. My monthly packages for SEO all depend on how much you want done. I charge $25US an hour. With that my recommended package would be 20 hours a month this will give you the best outcome. Of course the more hours you do the better outcome you will get but at 20 hours a month I can really get enough done to your site that it will show improvement a lot quicker and will make you more money faster. I also have a bunch more different packages and prices for web based projects, you can go to Work Prices.

Website Design , Development, and SEO Marketing

If by chance you are in need of any web design, web development, search engine optimization, editing, content creation or marketing done to one of your sites please feel free to contact me or Chosen. Chosen is a small, but growing Lansing-based firm offering Web Development, Web Design, Web Hosting, Web Editing, and Web Marketing skills. We have done work for clients and companies, by preference, but we also take contract work. We have worked with most of the biggest web companies in the Lansing Area and all the way out to California. We would love to hear from you.

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WordPress Posts VS. Pages

Shane — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 23:05:54 +0000

The most asked question about WordPress that I get is on the difference between a WordPress Page and a WordPress Post. The two are often misused wrongfully. Here are a few pointers to assist in better understanding the difference. WordPress pages are just static or you could say the posted elements are not often moveable or changed. With the WordPress pages, you really don’t change them unless you have more information that you want to add to them, or, you wish to change something that is already there. For instance, a contact page is not going to change that often because your contact information might never change. But as for a page like a portfolio or a picture album you might end up adding, deleting or changing items monthly.

The main thing that you have to notice is that the WordPress page, whether it is a ‘portfolio page’ or a ‘contact page’, will be set for long term that is it won’t have a extreme change, and if it does, you are changing it up.

As for a blog post or post, you might be creating these every day. They are supposed to be informative and/or updates about the topic that you write about on your blog. For example, you are a school and on your main page is your blog. Well, you may want to keep talking about various things about your school, hence frequently posting updated information on the school. For instance, if this coming Sunday, the your school will be playing a team that they might just be able to beat, updates on the blog could include information about the people, the upcoming game with maybe stats on the players and other any other interesting stuff about the game. That way if the your school looses the game that post will not be on the school’s blog page for a long time. At least it is only there until another post update is made.

Pages Versus Posts

There are five real reasons why pages are different than posts.

They are not involved with the blog.
You can use different page templates with them.
Pages are static text, they don’t change often.
Pages can have a hierarchy
Pages can have sub pages inside there main pages.

So your pages really have nothing to do with your blog. They are static text and don’t change that often. They are not time dependent. Most of the time these pages include (about, contact, services, and other informative pages about your site).

Posts In View

Posts are primarily meant for updating and link building. You use your posts to gain traffic to your site through SEO, SEM, and other means. With posts you tend to make regular entries into your blog, unlike pages, you need to change your posts almost weekly if not a couple of times a week. Most of the time your blog post show up on your home page in a certain order. More times than not the order is constructed by date of the post. With the newest posts at the top of the page and the older get put to the back of the list. Blog posts use categories and tags to organize your posts. Given the categories and tags each are automatically given a RSS feed so that you may get updates on the groups.

Website Design , Development, and SEO Marketing

If you need assistance with web design, web development, search engine optimization, editing, content creation or marketing done to one of your sites please feel free to contact me or Chosen. Chosen is a small, but growing Lansing-based firm offering Web Development, Web Design, Web Hosting, Web Editing, and Web Marketing skills. We have done work for clients and companies, by preference, but we also take contract work. We have worked with most of the biggest web companies in the Lansing Area and all the way out to California. We would love to hear from you.

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Top 10 SEO Tools

Shane — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 20:52:48 +0000

What do you use for SEO? What do you consider the best tools? I have a list of SEO tools that I use daily. My list is a little more than 10 but I figured for simplicity I will give you the top 10 SEO tools that I use. The reason I am putting together a list of my top ten is because I see a trend from other SEO experts bot saying that I am a expert but I would like to be. There are a ton of SEO tools out there that are free of charge and these tools are evolving at a rapid speed. My big question with SEO is where will it go next. Well what everyone really wants is the list so here it is.

Top Ten SEO Tool List

What The SEO Tool Does

Search Engine Genie – This site is not well known but it has quite a few really nice SEO tools that are free to use and they have a ton of really helpful articles.
Website Grader by HubSpot – I use this site to get a good idea of where a site is and where it might need to be and get to. HubSpot has a paid version of this that has a ton of really great SEO tools. They have a free week trial of the system if I were you I would jump at the trial and see if you like it.
Google Adwords – This is a great way to find out how heavily a keyword is being targeted. I use this when ever i am looking for the really good keyword to get a site going.
Google Analytics – Great tool if you are not using it you are loosing out. My main use for this is to see what is bringing traffic into my site or my client sites. With the name Google behind this you know that you are going to 1 get it for free and 2 get something that is great.
SEO Quake – This is a plugin for Firefox that gives you a ton of really useful info that you need for SEO. I know a few different people that this is the only tool that they use for SEO.
Site Explorer by Yahoo – This is a useful tool for the yahoo search engine. I prefer Google’s Analytics over this because it has more to it.
Google Trand – Great tool by Google this lets you find the trends of the time so that you can find the really good keywords and SEO articles to write for traffic purposes.
Search Status – I really enjoy using Search Status because of its simplicity. I am a Firefox user and this is a Firefox plugin.
seomoz.org – These people really know what they are doing with SEO. They have a ton of free tools and they also have some really great paid tools.
Word tracker – I personally have not used this service but i have heard from a ton of people that they are great. It is a paid service but they do have a free trial.

SEO Packages

Website Design , Development, and SEO Marketing

If you by change need web design, web development, search engine optimization, or marketing done to one of your sites you can get in contact with me or you can contact Chosen. Chosen is a Lansing based Web Development, Web Design, Web Hosting, and Web Marketing firm. We are a small business but are growing in the Lansing Area for our Web Design and Development skills. We have done work for clients and companies. We prefer client work but we also take contract work. We have worked with most of the biggest web companies in the Lansing Area and all the way out to California. We would love to hear from you.

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SEO Optimization

Shane — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 18:47:06 +0000

What is SEO and how can it help me? That is the question you should be asking your self if you have a web site. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. How do you get your site to the top of search engines? Well this is a really great place to start. SEO optimization can improve the traffic of your site and the sales of your site. Basically SEO is what happens when you tell search engines what exactly you want people to search and find you as. Well some people say that this can be hard because there are so many sites out there that it is almost impossible to get to the top. Well those people are wrong. With some great planning and strategy any site can make it to the top of any search engine. For a example if you search the word Chosen in Google you will get 169,000,000 hits for just the word Chosen. Well one of the companies that I own is Chosen LLC. One of our sites is chosendevelopment.com you will find it at around 7 or 8 and rising. Now we just started doing SEO on our Chosen Development site about 3 months ago. Yes we spent a lot of time and planing in order to get to where we are now.

Practical

Now for a little practical look at SEO. If someone came to me and said I want to be number one for the word Google I would look at you and tell you to talk to this company called Google. Some things are not able to happen. One of the biggest things with SEO is that it takes time. Look at my site for instance I live in Michigan around the Lansing Area. Now I am trying to get to the top for Lansing Web Design, Lansing Web Development, Michigan Web Design, Michigan Web Development, and a ton of other Michigan and Lansing combination’s. Well I am finally getting there after 5 months of hard work. One thing that most people don’t understand is that in order to get to the top for a certain word or phrase you have to beat out the competition. That means you have to do research on what other people do, how they do it, where there flaws are, and how can you beat them.

SEO Consists

SEO and SEM are two totally different things people think that one goes with the other. Well they are kind of right in the fact that they both assist each other. SEM is Search Engine Marketing, this consists of stuff like Google Adsence, Post Writing, Building Backlinks, and a bunch of other things. SEO is mainly focused around Meta tags and search engine submissions. Meta tags are not a really big thing for SEO. That is what people say. Well I feel that they are still a very big thing. Meta tags direct search engines on what to index on your site. There are a ton’s of different Meta tag that you can use in SEO but the most important ones are Keywords, Descriptions, and Titles. The last thing that I will leave you with is that everyone can do SEO and SEM. SEM is a little easier for people because of all the social media places out there. SEO is really hard and takes a lot of planning. I would recommend everyone to leave SEO to the people that consider them self experts. I am not saying don’t try to learn SEO or teach your self SEO because you could become one of those experts.

SEO Packages

Website Design , Development, and SEO Marketing

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jQuery Hover

Shane — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 03:05:35 +0000

As a developer I hate the fact that Internet Explorer is not up to date with their web browser. For instance the w3 has approved that you can use the :hover selector on anything not just a tags. Now most browsers do support the :hover selector but IE. Why they can’t catch up with times and be like everyone else is beyond my comprehension. Well one really useful thing to fix this problem is jQuery Hover. You can use jQuery Hover to give any object a hover state and it will work in IE and all other browsers. Also you can have jQuery pull out the a tags href from inside any element. For instance if you have some blocks with different information that you want to link to a certain page all you will have to do is make a box and call the a tags href.

jQuery Hover State

So to show you how to do this I am going to use my site under my main post on the homepage I have some of my recent post. Now I want to have the full post area to have a jQuery hover state that changes the background. So I would do this.

$(document).ready(function() {
    //call the jQuery Hover Over and Out
    $('#YOURID').hover(over, out);
    //Tell the browser to change the background when hovered over
    function over(event) {
        $(this).css("background", "url('Path To Your Image')");
	$(this).css("cursor", "pointer");
    }
    //tell the browser to change the background to nothing when 
    //going outside the object area
    function out(event) {
	    $(this).css("background", "");
	}
});

jQuery Hover with a click event

If you want jQuery to do a hover state only then that will work for you but if you want to get the a tags href, so that when you click on the object area it will take you to that page. You would have to add this after your jQuery hover code. So now your jQuery code should be.

$(document).ready(function() {
    //call the jQuery Hover Over and Out
    $('#YOURID').hover(over, out);
    //Tell the browser to change the background when hovered over
    function over(event) {
        $(this).css("background", "url('Path To Your Image')");
	$(this).css("cursor", "pointer");
    }
    //tell the browser to change the background to nothing 
    //when going outside the object area
    function out(event) {
	$(this).css("background", "");
    }
    //This adds the click event to your object and tells it where to go
    $('#YOURID').click(function() {
	window.location=$(this).find("a").attr("href");
    });
});

This is very useful to get around the IE problem and if someone checks your site they can see that you know jQuery. If you need any help with this just let me know. I would be more than willing to help.

Website Design , Development, and SEO Marketing

If you by chance need web design, web development, search engine optimization, or marketing done to one of your sites you can get in contact with me or you can contact Chosen. Chosen is a Lansing based Web Development, Web Design, Web Hosting, and Web Marketing firm. We are a small business but are growing in the Lansing Area for our Web Design and Development skills. We have done work for clients and companies. We prefer client work but we also take contract work. We have worked with most of the biggest web companies in the Lansing Area and all the way out to California. We would love to hear from you.

How To Install Magento Themes

Shane — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 03:35:30 +0000

One of the biggest and best e-commerce shopping carts is Magento. Magento has a free version at Magento Commerce. This system can be quite confusing when you are trying to change your theme. It isn’t like most other systems where you get one folder and all you have to do is upload it and activate it. I have put together a walk through on how to install/change your Magento theme.

First off you have to go out and find a Magento theme. Some of these are quite expensive but come with much more than just your typical free one. The first place I would check for themes is ecommerce-themes they have quite a few really nice looking themes for you to download. After getting your theme, it should come in a zip file extract those on your computer. Inside the extracted folder you should get two folder called app and skin.
The next thing you have to do is add those folders to your Magento installation. This requires you to ftp into your site. The app and skin folders go in different places. The app folder needs to be uploaded to your magento/app/design/frontend/default directory and your skin folder needs to be uploaded in your magento/skin/frontend/default directory.

Magento CMS Manage Pages

Now that you have these folder in your Magento site we have to go through the admin to tell the site to use the new theme. First log in to your admin and go to the CMS tab and them manage pages.

Custom Design Pages

Inside there you will have to change every pages custom design to your new theme name you installed.

System Configure Design

Next you will have to go to the System tab and then Configure. Inside the Configuration section go under Design and change all of the relevant fields to your new theme name. Make sure you save everything and your theme should be up and ready to go.

Magento And Hosting

Something that I would recommend would be getting a server from peer1 hosting. They have managed private cloud servers with vm ware hosting. This will make it easy to work with multiple operating systems and have a great IT support team on call 24/7/365. For more information check out peer1.com private cloud documentation and pricing.

Website Design , Development, and SEO Marketing

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How To jQuery Toggle

Shane — Wed, 22 Jul 2009 08:09:48 +0000

jQuery was made to change the way that you write JavaScript. jQuery has tons of really nice effects that you can experiment with. One of my favorite things to do with jQuery is to do a toggle this is a really simple effect to do but will make people go WOW when they see it. You can use the toggle effect in multiple different way most of the time people just use the toggle up to down or toggle left to right. But some people don’t know that you can use jQuery toggle to go from your upper left or right corner to the opposite corner. Well here is some code that you can reference on different ways to toggle.

Lets do the easy toggles first

Top To Bottom

I am doing this for the comments section of most WordPress sites. First you have to give the identify what the outer most container is of your comments section. Mine is id comments. So just to the top of my comments section I need to create a button but you don’t have to use a button it is just the easiest to explain. So you should have something that looks like this.



//Your Comment Code

You will notice that I gave the button a id that is so that jQuery can find it. Next you have to create your js file. I would name it something like toggle.js. It should look like this depending on which way you want your content to toggle.

//Top To Bottom
$(document).ready(function() {
	$("#comment").hide();
	$("#comments_button").click(function() {
		$("#comment").animate({height: "toggle"}, 1000);
	});
});
//Left To Right Or Right To Left
//In order to do either you must float your #comment 
//the direction you want your content to come from!
$(document).ready(function() {
	$("#comment").hide();
	$("#comments_button").click(function() {
		$("#comment").animate({width: "toggle"}, 1000);
	});
});
//Upper Left To Lower Right Or Upper Right To Lower Left
//These ones you also have to float from the direction 
//they are coming from!
$(document).ready(function() {
	$("#comment").hide();
	$("#comments_button").click(function() {
		$("#comment").animate({width: "toggle", 
                    height: "toggle"}, 1000);
	});
});

Now all you have to do is call your jQuery script and a jQuery library and your toggle up to down should work. I use the Google library because of how quick it is. You can find more info about the Google library here jQuery Library

Other Ways To Toggle

There are a few other ways to do a toggle like from bottom to top and bottom corners to top corners. There is also some other things that you can do with toggle like fading. jQuery has a lot of really easy and light things that you can do to your site to make it just that much better. If I were you I would take a look at their site jQuery.

Website Design , Development, and SEO Marketing

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Build A Website Traffic Jam

Shane — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 19:05:35 +0000

Most people look at their website and go why am I not getting traffic to it. Well if you just look at the site it won’t build any traffic. My question to you is would you like to have a traffic jam on your website. I would because that means my site is getting so much traffic I am going to have to upgrade my servers. Wouldn’t that be great so much traffic that your server crashes. Most people have no idea on how to create traffic to their site let alone just doing that basics to gain traffic. Well I am going to give you a breakdown of some of the basics to building traffic. Just so you know building traffic takes time and sometimes money.

Traffic Meta Breakdown

Back in the day all traffic came from your meta tags and your keywords. Don’t get me wrong these are still very useful but they don’t build you as much traffic because of the millions of website out there. To give you an example I would love to be the number 1 site on Google for web design well that really isn’t practical it is possible but when you search web design you get 343,000,000 that is how many pages are being crawled with the words web design. Now I am not saying don’t try to get to the top of the list. Defiantly try but try for something a little smaller like for instance I am from Michigan and so I am trying to get top for Lansing Web Design and Michigan Web Design. If you search Lansing Web Design I am close to the top. Now if I use keywords like that and try to focus on a smaller scale my site will rise on the bigger scale.
Your keyword meta tag is important but you have two other tags that are even more important your title meta tag and description meta tag. Your title meta tag is different from your normal title tag because it is what the browsers look at first and way a lot of their decisions on. The regular title tag is also very important it should be used everywhere that it is possible.

Best Ways To Produce Traffic

Here is a list of some really good ways to build traffic to your site.
1) Submitting – You must submit your site to search engines.
2) Use a favicon.ico
3) Depending on what your site is about submit it to other sites with that kind of material.
4) Have a lot of content. This still has to be good content. Pictures really bring in lots of traffic.
5) Use your META tags effectively. META help
6) Advertise with google or other advertising companies.
7) Use Social Media by talking about your site.

Probably the fastest way to get traffic to your site is pay per click. Yes it is going to cost you but in the long run of things it will be worth it. Some people think that after doing these things your site will just magically appear at the top of Google or Yahoo but it won’t. Building a vast amount of traffic takes time and some times money.

Website Design , Development, and SEO Marketing

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Choosing A CMS

Shane — Thu, 02 Jul 2009 07:52:10 +0000

Website Planning

What is it that you are looking for in your site? What would you like your site to do? How often are you planning on updating your site? Would you like to have the ability to change your site? Well these are some of the questions that we ask a client that comes to us wanting a site. Most people don’t understand that their is much more to a site then just having a idea of “I need a site” or “my company needs a site.” With these questions that I have asked it starts me thinking would it be better for my client to have a CMS or not. A CMS is a Content Management System it is used to give the buyer the ability to make small changes to the site pages in case they may need to change some text or something little. Once I find out that my client may need a CMS then comes the point of giving the client a CMS that will work with their needs. For instance if a client came to me and said that they would like a site that has a blog area that they could update daily. The first thing that comes to my mind is WordPress. Let alone WordPress is very user friendly it has so many capabilities and plugins that are free. If my client came to me and said that they would like a site that they would only have to change about every 6 months or more. I would probably look at either building the site with static information or using a smaller CMS. My personal preference would be Frog CMS. It is easy to learn and is easy to customize because of its small size. Their are a lot of different opinions on what is the best CMS. I don’t really think their is a “best” I feel that it really depends on the situation and the developers preference. A short list of some of the free CMS’s out their:

Most Known

Not So Known

My Opinion

This is just a few of the vast amount of CMS’s out their that you can choose from. Note that all of these are free open source CMS’s. I have mt own opinion about these CMS’s and I believe even though Drupal and Joomla are two of the biggest CMS’s they are two of the most complicated. I personally would stick with WordPress for blog sites and for smaller sites I would go with Frog CMS but this is my personal opinion. I would say defiantly try out multiple CMS’s to see what you build a preference to. If you have tried out any of the CMS’s on the list or any that are not on the list please feel free to leave a comment about them.

Web Design And Development

If you by change need web design or web development done to one of your sites you can get in contact with me or you can contact Chosen. Chosen is a Lansing based Web Development, Web Design, Web Hosting, and Web Marketing firm. We are small but are growing in the Lansing Area for our Web Design and Development skills. We have done work for clients and companies. We prefer client work but we also take contract work. We have worked with most of the biggest web companies in the Lansing Area and all the way out to California. We would love to hear from you.

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New WordPress Features

Shane — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 16:12:03 +0000

New Release 2.8

With the new release of WordPress 2.8 the developers really took in what people had to say and made some vast changes to the content management system. One of the biggest changes that the team made that the end user and really the admin won’t really see is the database changes. The WordPress team made the database much more efficient and much faster that allows for faster page load in the admin and load for the site. WordPress added some much needed functionality that helps the developer perform much faster. Some of those changes include.

Functionality Changes

Theme and Plugin Editor
Theme Installer
Plugin Management

WordPress Changes

These are just some of the changes that WordPress implemented in the 2.8 release. All three of these changes speed up the development process on creating a theme for a site. I will be the first one to say that I use previously developed themes and recreate off of them because it is much faster just to use already created code. With using a already created theme it used to be a pain to have to ftp into your site and add the theme into the theme directory for your site. With the implementation of the Theme Installer you can upload a theme in its zip file or you can search the WordPress database for a theme. Much faster than having to go out and download the theme and then upload it to the theme folder. Now I have always been against using the theme/plugin editor that was built into the content management system but now that it is changed I have been using it for little changes but I still use a outside code editor. They made some great changes with it like the ability for line numbers and the function dropdown at the bottom of it. The new creation of how you manage plugins is great with the ability to deactivate each plugin individually and delete each one without having to go to the top of the page and click the dropdown and select delete. Probably the best thing with the plugin managment upgrade is the update feature that allows you to update each plugin right there.

Stuff Not Really Noticed

WordPress has implemented quite a few thing that the end user will not really notice but will be really affective like the ability to automatically update time when it is daylight savings time. Also the ability to control the columns on the dashboard page is also a plus for the admin so they can stay updated with whatever it is they have on the dashboard. Another little change that helps the admin users is the recreation of the widget panel. Now with more intuitive activity, it makes it easier to add widgets to the sidebars. One of my favorite things that WordPress implemented is a popup banner to inform the admin that they have not changed the auto generated password.

Your Questions

The only question about this new installation of WordPress is what could they possibly do to the platform next to make it even better? If you have any ideas and don’t want to submit them please leave a comment on the post and I will submit them for you.

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Windows 7 Release Candidate Download

Shane — Thu, 14 May 2009 19:57:04 +0000

Windows 7 Microsoft next operating system is out to the public yet again. Microsoft did something that was not normal when they released the different Beta versions to the public. Now Microsoft has released the release candidate to the public as well. This is normally something that only gets released to the MSDN users. When you download the release candidate it comes with a activation key that is good from when you activate it to June 1, 2010. This is almost 5 months after the actual release date is for Windows 7.

Windows 7 has came a long way from Windows Vista with a much smaller and faster system. The system requirements are almost smaller than what was needed for Windows XP. Here are some of the computer requirements necessary for Windows 7 to runs.

For the Basic Windows 7 -

1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
512 MB of system memory
20 GB hard drive with at least 15 GB available space
Support for DirectX 9 graphics and 32 MB of graphics memory
DVD-ROM drive
Audio Output
Internet Access

For the Premium Windows 7 -

1 GHz 32-bit (x86) or 64-bit (x64) processor
1 GB of system memory
40 GB hard drive with at least 15 GB of available space
Support for DirectX 9 graphics with:

WDDM Driver
128 MB of graphics memory (minimum)
Pixel Shader 2.0 in hardware

32 bits per pixel
DVD-ROM drive
Audio Output
Internet Access

If you would like to check out Windows 7 for your self you can go to:

Some of the new feature’s to Windows 7 are state of the art and very cool and creative. My favorite is the Aero Shake. Please take a look at Windows 7 and share your input about what could change and be advanced.

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About Shane Strong

Shane — Tue, 12 May 2009 07:39:36 +0000

One thing that you really don’t see on most blogs is a really good place to get to know the owner. Well this is because there really isn’t a easy way to do this. Yeah you have your about page and maybe people can contact the owner and get to know them. Well I know I wouldn’t do that, maybe read the about page but that is it. So in this post I am going to tell you some stuff about Shane Strong me.

I grew up in a little town called Olivet this town is about 30 min south west from Lansing Michigan. I went to school there all my life. I was that kid that everyone was friends with but I didn’t really have all to many good friend. Maybe this was because I only wanted two of three close friends. All through out school I was really good at math and science but I was not the greatest when it came to reading, spelling, or history. I started playing a lot of sports in 7th grade and found that I liked them quite a bit. I was playing basketball, track, and golf. Most of my child hood I was set that I would become a electrical engineer and build up to be a nuclear engineer.

Then high school happened. I was still into sports trying out for Golf, Basketball, and Baseball. Most of my school time was set to getting better at sports. I was really fixed on golf. It was a sport that my grandpa taught me before he died and I guess it was because of him that I became such a great golfer. I player basketball for my freshmen ans sophomore years in high school but couldn’t make the cut my junior or senior year. I played baseball my freshmen, sophomore, and senior years. Took off the junior year so I could get better at golf. That was my real charge in high school. I became a Varsity player my sophomore year playing almost every game and if I wasn’t playing on Varsity I was number 1 on JV. My Junior year of golf I dropped 2 strokes on my game and was driving the ball about 310 yards. Ending the season the number 1 player on the team and getting awarded all-conference 1st class. That means I was in the top ten of all the players in our league. My senior year rolled around and I was pumped ready to become the number one player in our league. I started the year up one stroke from the year before but driving the ball about 315 yards still not bad but that one stroke would kill me. I finished the year out in 5th place still getting all-conference first class and MVP of the Olivet team and Captain award. Both Junior and Senior year for some reason I would choke at the regional round and not make it to state. Not the worst thing ever but no one had ever went to state in golf for Olivet and I could of been the first. I really feel that my biggest set back was that I wanted the Olivet golf team to get bigger than just me and didn’t focus quite enough on my personal game. Well of all my high school year my senior year was the best I broke up with my horrid girl friend that was holding me back from quite a few thing. I took 2 college classes Calculus 2 and Intro to Information Systems. Then it was time to graduate and I really was still stuck wondering what am I going to do next. Of the two Colleges I submitted my application to three contacted me back. Michigan Tech and Ferris State University. Oh yeah the third Olivet College they wanted me to go there because of what I did in the two classes well I was there. I actually had the opportunity to take a course that wasn’t offered there and I would have my own personal teacher. I ended up choosing Ferris why that was I couldn’t tell you but that is for another day.

Well that was the start of my life in a quick nut shell. I will inform you next time how I became a Web Developer and owning a business.

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Shane Strong » Shane

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About Shane Strong