Designoplasty Web Design and Development Blog

If you want your WordPress theme to stand out you have to bring it with the artwork. That usually means you need a pretty dramatic header and background, and maybe other elements as well. Transparency is really going to allow you to do a lot more interesting things. Some people use transparency in Photoshop and [...]

When you’re in the web business there are a lot of repetitive tasks, such as making image thumbnails, updating website code, or adding images to a blog post. You will do a better business if you can automate these tasks as much as possible. For me, creating automated methods is also more fun. I quickly [...]

I just uploaded a new theme. Here’s how I work. I have a base theme that gets updated with the current best technical ideas of my themes. All the good structure ideas go into the base theme that I would generally want all themes to have. Then the other themes need to be updated with [...]

For a while now I had been using encrypted disk images, as recommended by Apple to store encrypted files. But the minimum disk image size is 10 megabytes, which is awfully large to store a 4K text file. Also, if I want to look at the file I have to mount the disk image, go [...]

Today I did some experimentation with the dbDelta function in WordPress. I’ll get right to the point, I don’t recommend it. I read about the function in the article Creating Tables with Plugins which talks about adding tables to WordPress from a plugin. This is exactly what I was doing. I want to make it clear [...]

I do command line searches of the contents of files all the time. If you work with WordPress this is half of your documentation. It’s amazing to me how difficult this is, the shortest way I’ve found is this. find . -name '*.php' | xargs grep term-to-find This will find all the files ending in .php in [...]

I have plenty of experience with databases, but I haven’t been hands on for a while. Now I am hands on developing plugins for WordPress. It’s really fun for me. Today I needed to know the MySQL type to use for holding money or currency values: DECIMAL(10,2) There is surprisingly little discussion on this and what discussion exists [...]

I was just deleting my spam comments. I love Akisment, it’s practically perfect. One of the spam comments was something like: Thanks for the tip! I’ll probably be subscribing to your posts. Keep up the good work! What I find hilarious is the use of the word “probably”. Like he’s still not sure, and I’ll have to [...]

When I first started blogging I plastered all my blogs with Google ads, like one does. When it didn’t work out, I removed them all. I’m experimenting in a very small way to see if I can actually make Google ads work. But today I just removed all of my AdSense for feeds ads, and [...]