Every once in a while, we’ll stumble upon a site that deserves a mention on GT.   Today’s winner… SuppleWine.com.  This site comes complete with a clever tagline, videos, comics, music in the “bubble.lounge” and of course, wine reviews and wine pairings.

If you’ve followed us closely at all in the past, you’ll know that we have a serious issue with how wines are rated by the Wine Enthusiast, and all the snobbery and politics involved in getting a wine rated by a “respected” connoisseur.  SuppleWine has a “value grade” they use to give wine grades, which ranks wine on a similar letter grade scale as is used in school.. E.g. A+ is excellent, F means drink a beer instead. Read the rest of this entry »

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! Read the rest of this entry »

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.

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.

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. Read the rest of this entry »