Author Archive
Enable Curl on Xampp
Wednesday, April 15th, 2009
I generally do my development work on a local windows machine with the latest version of Xampp installed. I was recently toying around with the tayst twitter feed, and was having trouble using curl with xampp.
The problem?.. curl was not enabled by default in Xampp. You receive the following error:
- Fatal error: Call to undefined function curl_init() in C:\xampp\htdocs\tayst\twitter\index.php on line 4
The solution? These simple steps! (more…)
Tags: curl, feed, fix, programming, tutorial, Twitter, xampp
Posted in Technology | View Comments
Amazing Sand Art
Monday, April 13th, 2009
I love it when I discover a new art online. Historically, this has come in the form of finding incredible new music, stumbling upon a battleship made of toothpicks., or just finding what may be an intriguing book.
Today, I found this video by Ilana Yahav demonstrating her work – “Let’s Get Together”. This is a dynamic “painting” using sand as a medium. Reminds me of my creative “struggles” with the etch-a-sketch when I was a kid. The coolest thing about this, is that unlike painting, or drawing, this is a very eco-friendly / sustainable art form.
Tags: Art, painting, sand, video, visual, youtube
Posted in Art, Culture | View Comments
Disable Google Search Wiki
Saturday, March 28th, 2009
To disable google search wiki, just add the following to the end of the url after doing a search:
&pws=0
You can also sign out of google’s personal web search program in your account settings. Even if you do not use the search wiki to vote results up or down, google does appear to be trending and custom tailoring results based upon your traffic patterns. In doing SEO, it is important to know that the results you are looking at are not biased.
Tags: information age, Marketing, Power station, Team, Technology, xampp
Posted in Technology | View Comments
Customize The WordPress Contact Form 7 Plugin
Friday, March 13th, 2009
I ran into an interesting problem the other day. I’m a big fan of the WordPress Plugin Contact Form 7. I’ve used it on many of the wordpress sites I’ve developed, and appreciate the plugin for its simple integration, nice admin interface, and the pretty ajax functionality.
Unfortunately, I recently discovered that the plugin does not allow you to specify custom landing page urls, or Thank You pages for the contact form. Some of you may wonder why I care about reloading the page to say thank you vs. the sleak Ajax popup confirming that your message has been delivered. The answer: Because I’m trying to measure performance of the contact form within my Google Adwords CPC account. (more…)
Tags: contact form, customize, development, edit, modify, plugin, programming, template, theme, wordpress
Posted in Technology | View Comments
Disabling Google Search Wiki
Monday, February 2nd, 2009
QUICK ANSWER:
add &hl=all at the end of your google query url.
For those of you out there who are Search Engine marketers, you may have been having some frustrations lately with the google search engine wiki. Typically, I keep several browsers running at once so I can be logged in to multiple google accounts (personal, business, client, adwords, analytics, etc..etc..).. so having to log out to see natural results has been quite frustrating.
What I have found really frustrating is that every once in a while, a stray mouse click has a detrimental effect on the virgin google results that I am looking at by clicking on one of the google search wiki buttons, and “BAM” a result disappears to the bottom of the page. This gets especially frustrating when I’m looking through the SERPS and I am not sure if the results I am looking at reflect those of the general population… or our clients. While I’m excited to see google search wiki, and I expect that at some point it will effect google search rankings, the inability to disable it seems appalling for usability. (more…)
Tags: google, programming, search, shortcut, techy, tool, wiki
Posted in Technology, Thoughts | View Comments
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