2BlueSolutions Developer Blog

I've created a few Wordpress sites now that I know there are a few tips to do right off the bat that will save you grief later. First tip: Time - I always seem to forget to set the time zone settings found under Settings - General .  Without this properly set, you get the annoyance of having your post times be set to UTC-0 which is fine if you live on London. Second tip: Remote Publishing - Within Settings - Writing , be sure to check the box for XML-RPC so that you can use Wordpress apps to post from your mobile device. Third tip: Media Settings - be sure to go into Settings -> Media and change the default sizing for thumbnails, medium, and large images so they better match the dimensions of your site.  I prefer to make large the largest size, medium exactly half and then keep thumbnails the same. Fouth Tip: Permalinks - Under Settings - Permalinks you'll find the settings for how your URL will be displayed.  The default sett...

I recently came upon a need for a way to take some screen shots of some of the sites I have created. There are plenty of tools available to serve this purpose, but I wanted something relatively quick and easy. Initially, I looked into a utility called webscreencapture . While it worked really well for most sites and you can make a nice batch file to run it all at once, it failed to capture some Joomla sites and Flash sites. So, next I figured I should try a browser solution. There is Fireshot for Firefox, but since Chrome is my browser of choice, I decided to find an extension for Chrome instead. What I found right off the bat was Awesome Screenshot and Annotation . It installs a button in the upper right of your browser which you can press to take a screenshot of whatever is on the page of your browser.  You can annotate the image, or like me, you can just click done and save it locally. Now that I had a screenshot tool, I realized that there is one more issue to re...

Some quick tips for when you are creating a user sign up form on your site. To help make the process as least frustrating as possible for a visitor to the site, you need to simplify the forms in some very easy ways. Don't make the visitor enter their email address twice.  There is no need to make someone enter their email twice in the off chance that they will write it incorrectly.  Users will know right away when their email address is entered incorrectly. Don't obfuscate passwords.  Nothing annoys users more than entering a password and then having each letter be replaced by those black dots as they write in their password.  Think about useability when creating your form.  When entering passwords on a phone or other mobile device, it is very important that your user can see the letters they are typing in.   Keep it simple.  Don't ask questions you don't need answers to (ie...Mr./Mrs.) and make it quick and painless. The easier it is for a us...

Ever run into a situation where you need to encode a bunch of different videos to a bunch of different formats? I ran into just that situation recently when I was working on www.barrydonlevy.com .  I needed to have a variety of formats for an HTML5 video site with Flash video fall-back.  I tried encoding on my own computer using one the many free online applications you can download.  Unfortunately, I wasted a lot of time with my code because I didn't realize that my encodings were not working properly with certain browsers.  Looking into the issue more, I realized it wasn't an issue with my coding, but an issue with the actually encoding program I was using and I was pointed towards Zencoder . Zencoder is an online encoding service that lets you upload your videos for encoding.  You have a slew of options to choose from and a variety of outputs to choose from.  Options range from file size and resolution to upscaling options and compression levels. ...