Toluu

Aaron Russell

Freelance web and graphic designer, Swindon

Improving WordPress’ the_excerpt() template tagNovember 13 2008

Are you having trouble with your excerpts? Is WordPress misbehaving and making your theme look downright shoddy when all you want to do is use it’s native excerpt function? You’re not alone so read on.

Wordpress’ the_excerpt() template tag is used in most themes for browsing the archives and categories of a blog. Rather than displaying the full content of the post, the excerpt displays a short snippet of the content. Unless you manually enter in an excerpt when writing each post, WordPress grabs the first 55 words of the post and uses that as the excerpt.

So far so good, but there are problems with the way WordPress does this. These include:

• Word count - 55 words is a good number, but what if you want more or less?
• Formatting - WordPress strips out all HTML tags. This gets rid of images and links, but can also get rid of paragraph formatting, making the entire excerpt one long paragraph without any line breaks.
• JavaScript - Unfortunately JavaScript isn’t stripped out, which can result in some plugins’ messy script appearing in your excepts. Not only does this look rubbish, it can be a vulnerability too.

There are ways to fix these problems, and I will show you how. Better yet, these changes can be

Epuron advert: will make you smileNovember 11 2008

Every once in a while I come across something that just makes me smile. Today, courtesy of Ad Goodness, it comes in the form of an advertisement for the German energy firm, Epuron.

I don’t want to give anything away, so just watch it… and then watch it again.

[See post to watch Flash video]

The advert was also a winner at the International Advertising Festival in Cannes this year, picking up the Golden Lion award.

This article was originally published on miLienzo.com on 10 July 2007.

Is search engine optimisation unnecessary?November 10 2008

How does your site fare in the search engines? Have you ever thought of hiring a search engine ‘expert’ to improve your site’s search engine positioning?

Friend of mine, web designer-developer, SEO consultant and all-round good guy, Eggman John (who from now we’ll just call John) recently posted an article outlining seven reasons why you don’t need SEO. John’s article caused a bit of a stir amongst the SEO community, but there is a lot of sense in what he says.

To summarise, these are John’s seven arguments:

1. You don’t need ‘link building’, you need great content which people want to link to all by themselves.
2. You don’t need ‘content optimisation’, you need a great writer for all your site’s copy (a copy writer).
3. You don’t need ‘viral content creation’, you need a head of marketing who’s read Seth Godin’s ‘Purple Cow’.
4. You don’t need ‘internal link analysis’, you need a web designer who codes your navigation right the first time.
5. You don’t

Real men don’t drink and driveOctober 28 2008

As we rapidly approach the season of merriment, so too we will start seeing the annual public service advertisement campaigns demonstrating in increasingly graphic ways all the bad stuff that can happen when we drink and drive.

When flicking through my feeds earlier today I happened across this clever little poster campaign by Russian Bear Vodka.

As a social responsibility initiative, Russian Bear Vodka “propoganda” posters were placed on walls facing mirrors in the bathrooms of pubs and clubs. At first glance, the posters seemed to be in Russian. But when patrons looked into the mirror, the Cyrillic letters were reversed to read in plain English “Real Men Don’t Drink and Drive”.

Very clever! I spotted this Russian Bear Vodka campaign over at adgoodness - a site well worth bookmarking for your regular dosage of clever advertising campaigns.

How to achieve cross-browser support for inline-blockOctober 27 2008

The CSS display property can be the bane of the web designer’s life as support varies from browser to browser, making it all a bit more complicated than it should be. In this article I will show a quick and simple way to get the display:inline-block declaration rendering consistently across all major browsers.

Quirksmode offers a very useful summary of browser support for the display property. As you’d expect, Internet Explorer is the main cause of problems as support for the inline-block value is ‘incomplete’ (read ‘flakey’). Surprisingly, Firefox 2 also causes unexpected problems as the value is not supported at all.

Firefox 2

I know most Firefox users actively upgrade and so started using Firefox 3 long ago (which supports inline-block with no issues at all). However, that’s what makes this little problem all the more difficult to spot as chances are you don’t have Firefox 2 lying around for testing any more?

Whilst Firefox 2 doesn’t support inline-block, what it does support is the Mozilla specific -moz-inline-box value - which to you and me and all our end users is exactly the same. So this is easy to fix.

#mydiv .myclass { display: -moz-inline-box; display: inline-block; }