Open Waves

Over the last year I have gone from a web designer to a “WordPress” designer. For a long time I was very hesitant to commit to a CMS, for fear of an extensive learning curve and loss of control over a web site. Then I starting blogging on WordPress. I found that I didn’t really need control over every little detail, and that most times I spent way too much time setting up a site before I really got to “the fun stuff”.

With WordPress, the installation process literally takes me less than 5 minutes. I can now take a Photoshop design and slice it into HTML, then plug it into WordPress in a matter of a few hours. I have been only too happy to adopt WordPress as my CMS of choice, and use it on every site I am currently working on.

Is WordPress the best CMS? Maybe, maybe not. But it’s the one I know and am comfortable with, and that means a lot going into any new project. I’m not against learning new things, and I think it’s great to have a bunch of tools in your tool belt, but for now I’ll take WordPress over any blogging software or other web site creation tool. In a nutshell, they take care of all the stuff you don’t want to worry about so you can focus on what matters: creating your web site.

Ever wonder if your web site is down? Now, you don’t have to worry whether it’s your own personal blog, or a client’s site. You can offer fast and easy checks as part of your web design services by using this free site, AreMySitesUp.com! I originally signed up for the free account, then recently moved up to the paid upgrade so I could monitor all my sites and get an iPhone app free!!

Sign up now, and let me know what you think. I love being able to instantly check all my sites without having to load them all separately. What will YOU use it for?

Do you want a little security in your form? Well, there is a tag that you can use to turn off the autocomplete feature in browsers, which keeps users from being able to store private information such as passwords or credit card numbers. This is useful if you are a web developer trying to create a more secure eCommerce site, or a business trying to keep your users from saving their password on a public computer.

<input type=”text” name=”password” autocomplete=”off” />

Let me know what you think and if you try it out, as well other things you use to increase security in forms.

This article would have been really helpful…YESTERDAY!  It goes into great detail giving you 3 different ways to change your short username on a Mac with Leopard.  I ran into a problem where I was setting up a new computer for a new employee and had it all done for them for their first day.  The first thing she then says to me when she comes in and sits down at her computer is, “They got my name wrong”.  So, not knowing I could change the short username (I had already spent too much time trying before without any luck), I just deleted her account and created a new one.  The problem with that is while it doesn’t take too much time to create a new account, I had to set up all our user preferences again from scratch.  That meant adding applications to the dock, setting up bookmarks in Firefox, and adding the network printers to her Printer list.

The other obvious time this would come in handy is if someone changes their name, such as when a female gets married and has a new last name.  Instead of having write down all their personal settings and redo everything on a new account, now I can just change the username along with the account name.  In short, it makes my job a heck of a lot easier.

- Thanks Dan Frakes, from Macworld.com

Now you can create a FREE iPhone interface from your RSS feed!

Link: http://www.thesmespace.com/smeutils/feed/

I tried it for this site and loaded it in Safari on my iPod Touch. Then, I created a bookmark and selected “Add to Homescreen” to give my site it’s own icon. Now I can easily reference my site if I want to recall a recent article I just wrote. The first image is the main page, then what you get when you click on one of the posts. Finally, clicking on the title takes you to the full article on the website:

While I’m at it, here’s a picture of my home screen with the bookmark icon to open this site in Safari (bottom/right), taken by pressing and releasing the power button and home button together:

So what does your iPhone or iPod Touch home screen look like? Take a snapshot and post it if you dare!