Archive for General
Exposed to the Elements – Grand Haven Event Recap
The Exposed to the Elements snowboard and ski competition at the Ski Bowl at Mulligan’s Hollow in Grand Haven on Sunday provided the opportunity for several children to showcase their winter sports skills on the slopes. The event, sponosored by Buffalo Bob’s and Element Design, was a part of Grand Haven’s Winterfest. Exposed to the [...]
How to Fix Timthumb using a Virtual Directory (URL contains tildes (~))
The timthumb tilde issue has been discussed for almost a year now on the official timthumb site, and the developers have yet to do anything to provide a fix for users in development environments. The issue is that when developers are developing sites using a URL structure such as: http://127.0.0.1/~mysite/images/dog.jpg, timthumb does not correctly parse [...]
Re-enable Vertical Tabs (Side Tabs) on Google Chrome 16
My previous post “Using Side Tabs on Chrome and Firefox” outlined steps to switch website tabs from stretching horizontally across the top of your browser to a vertical stack on the side. The post outlines the many benefits of using this layout of tabs, however recently the Chrome team decided to take this feature off [...]
The Best Web-Based Online Image Cropper
Element Design has recently released a brand new version of it’s online image cropping service, Croply. Using the latest HTML5 specifications, Croply is the fastest and most accurate image cropping service available online. Other web-based image cropping services have you upload an image to their server before you can begin working on it. One major disadvantage [...]
Using Side Tabs on Chrome and Firefox
When it comes to website development I find myself constantly multi-tasking. It does not take long for the top of my browser to fill up with 15+ tabs, showing only the website’s favicon with no description. This makes it difficult to find the tabs I’m looking for. Some may argue it makes sense to open [...]
Email Integration with a Project Management System
While many people feel it is important to have your email hook directly into your project management system, I strongly disagree. I feel it is much more effective to have them separate, even if that means adding an extra step when creating new tasks. I’ve found that by creating tasks manually I take and manipulate [...]
Gmail Preview Pane Extend (v0.4.2)
Gmail’s latest feature, the Preview Pane, allows you to simultaneously preview emails while reading or replying to others. After several hours of use I’ve found this to be one of the best improvements to Gmail in years. The only issue I found with Preview Pane was how the “People” widget and advertisements on the right of [...]
Chinese Characters Showing as Blocks on Windows 7
I recently ran into the issue with my development machine where all Chinese characters displayed as blocks. I tried restarting the computer to fix the issue, however it only fixed several Chinese characters. The solution to fixing this issue is to delete your system’s font cache file. Deleting your Font Cache File Delete the file [...]
Grand Haven Social Media Workshop: Friday 2E
Chad Huntley will be presenting at the next Friday 2E session in Grand Haven, MI. Using his experience in the advertising field, he will discuss basic psychological principles that can be used in your social media, website, and physical advertising. Understanding how your customers process information is a very important step to increasing leads. This [...]
Ajax Page Loading & Google Analytics Tracking
I recently completed a website that handled all page loading through Ajax. Even when using an Ajax Bookmarking script (jQuery BBQ) the entire site was still only considered one page. This became an issue in Google Analytics, since as people browsed the site, it only counted the first time they hit the site and not [...]
