Category Archives: Code

Oooh, Shiny! All the new CSS toys for WordPress Theme Development

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This weekend I was lucky enough to give a talk at WordCamp Ottawa 2017. It was a lot of fun, and I thought I’d share my slides with everyone who couldn’t be there. Below is my talk description.

Check out all newest things that CSS can bring to WordPress theme development: CSS Filters, Feature Queries, Native Mixins, Grid Layout, Native Variables, and more. The W3C’s CSS Working Group is introducing a ton of new CSS modules in 2017. Learn how they work and when to use them. We’ll look at real examples that you can start using right now.

CSS has seemed quite stable for some time, so I was excited to see all the new CSS modules that have just come out. They’ve made CSS fun again. There is just so much to play with.

With so much material, it was hard to choose what to present. I feel like grid could have been a full-day workshop on its own! But for this talk, I only had 30 minutes, plus time for questions. So I chose a small sampler of new CSS that you can start using quickly.

My talk is intended for people who already have a basic grasp of CSS. But, to keep the talk as accessible as possible, I’ve included links on many of my slides where you can find much more detailed information, including tutorials, demos, and online tools.

Getting started with .htaccess for WordPress

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This weekend I gave a talk on using .htaccess files with WordPress at WordCamp Montreal 2014…

An introduction on how to configure your .htaccess file to do more than what WordPress provides by default. The talk will cover basics like setting up a preferred URL, and redirecting old page URLs for better SEO. How to optimize your site’s files using gzip will also be covered, as well as preventing image hot linking, and more. A sample .htaccess file will be provided to all attendees. A useful introduction to a very important file for any shared hosting environment.

These are the slides.

And if you’d like a copy of the starter .htaccess file I discussed, you can download it here. You’ll need to rename it to .htaccess to use it. Please note that the file is released under the GPL licence without any warranty whatsoever. Use it at your own risk. 🙂

Microsocial for WordPress

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Seen and unseen, tiny bits of data are hard at work on every website. Search engines and social networks are using this information. But are you making them work for you? Microformats, microdata, metadata : what are they, what do they do, and how can you use them to attract visitors and improve SEO on your WordPress site.

If you liked the presentation on structured data that I gave at the Social Capital Conference, this is part II – micro social applied to WordPress. The last presentation was for a general audience, and this one is meant for intermediate bloggers and for developers. I gave this talk last weekend at WordCamp Montreal 2013.

Check out my slides from WordCamp Montreal.

If you are looking for a checklist for general users, check out my previous post.

Microsocial: How tiny bits of data can make or break your website

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Seen and unseen, tiny bits of data are hard at work. Microformats, microdata, metadata : search engines and social networks are using this information. But are you making them work for you?

Today I was one of the speakers at the Social Capital Conference, a conference in Ottawa that focusses on Social Media. My talk focussed on some small but important things that are happening on the Web that can get you more traffic, better search engine results and more social media attention.

Check out my slides from the Social Capital Conference 2013.

Get the Microsocial Checklist

Download our easy microsocial checklist to help get your website ready for the microsocial web.

How to Get Structured Data Onto Your Website

I was also asked for some links to tools that will allow you to create structured data easily. Here are a few.

Add Microformats to Your Contact Page
Microformats.org has a tool which will allow you to mark up your contact information in Microformats.

Add Microformats to an Event
Microformats.org has another cool tool that lets you add microformats to events.

Add Open Graph and Twitter Cards to WordPress
If you happen to own a self-hosted WordPress site, you can use the Yoast SEO plugin to add meta tags for Facebook and Twitter.

The future is mobile: Part II

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This is the second part of a two-part series on designing for mobile.

Today, I’m going to cover SEO, server-side tweaks, and conditional tags. I’ll also look at how to deal with javascript and multimedia. I’ll be posting a short follow-up on accessibility soon. Check back for more.
Continue reading →

The future is mobile – Part I

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Last weekend I gave a presentation at WordCamp Montreal 2011 on developing for the mobile Web. The talk covered some easy online tools, and WordPress-specific themes and plugins that require no coding. Then I offered my own solution.

Designing for mobile can be tough because you are designing for so many different devices, screen sizes, screen resolutions, operating devices, and functionality sets. Your design needs to be really flexible in order to work on the majority of mobile devices.

And it needs to be attractive. Most of the mobile web is not especially functional, and what is functional is a bit plain vanilla. It’s quite easy at this point to build a standout site, if you put in the effort. Continue reading →