Aldebaran Web Design's Blog

A client sent me a link to this article on Slate.com that gave a fairly scathing review of one of the common open source content management applications called Drupal. While I’ve never used Drupal, after reading this article, I don’t think I ever will.

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Update: DreamHost, for no announced reason, cancelled live chat. Apparently they could not keep up with the number of complaints (that’s what a support person said). Then they recently (08/2012) reinstated it for VPS clients.

I no longer recommend DreamHost to my clients, I recommend BlueHost, who has always had 24/7 chat AND PHONE support (which DreamHost does not.)

For the past month or so, I’ve been able to use live chat to communicate with the folks at DreamHost.com, my web hosting company. While their support ticket system has been excellent, they’ve now improved their support system by adding a live chat feature for some of their customers. I’ve used it several times, and didn’t want to write about it until they officially announced it - and today, they did!

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One of my clients asked me how she could embed a PDF document into her WordPress blog today. After some searching, I found the answer and wanted to document it here so that my other clients and blog readers can learn how to do this.

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I ran across a really impressive article today while I was working on a client’s WordPress blog. She had hired a company to perform SEO (Search Engine Optimization) on her blog and was unhappy and looking for guidance. While I knew some of the basics, I went in search of some expert advice. I wanted to post a link to this comprehensive article called “WordPress SEO: The Definitive Guide To Higher Rankings For Your Blog” written by Yoast that I found, because although it’s quite lengthy and time consuming, it’s a wonderful checklist for those of you who have time and patience and want to increase the rankings of your blog.

He starts out with the most important things to focus on:

• Permalinks (I always do this)
• Titles (yup, this too)
• Descriptions (um, don’t really do this at all for my posts)
• More text (who new you could change this!)
• Image Optimization (those pesky alt tags!)

Enjoy!

Usually Akismet protects my blog from spammers. It’s captured and prevented nearly 50,000 (yes, fifty thousand) spam comments from annoying me. But today, all of a sudden, I got a dozen spam comments one right after the other. I looked at the IP addresses, and they were from all over, Israel to the Netherlands. So I looked inside the Akismet Configuration and saw this scary message: “Unable to reach any Akismet servers.”

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An iframe, is an HTML element that gives you a window through which you can view another website. But sometimes, you want to show just a particular piece of that other website. I thought this was impossible to do, until today, when I found an article that told me how to do it.

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I frequently set up GeoTrust SSLs on my client’s ecommerce websites who are hosted with DreamHost. For those of you who wanted to give this a try yourselves, here are the steps I follow to set up a GeoTrust SSL at DreamHost.

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I have an iPhone and I love it. But recently I was diagnosed with Celiac Disease which means I need to avoid any foods that have gluten (wheat, rye, barley). It’s tricky and very time consuming to navigate a grocery store now, with all of the hidden sources of gluten in processed foods. Did you know that “brown rice syrup” can contain wheat? But a company called MidLifeCrisisApps.com has come out with an iPhone app that makes my life much easier: Is That Gluten Free?

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As part of the process of giving folks a cost range for their website projects, they often mention that they want a newsletter. I wanted to review the different approaches that can be taken when trying to integrate a newsletter into a small business website.

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On all the websites I develop, I strongly recommend that clients add an online contact “form” to make it easier for prospective customers to contact them. My own experience seemed to indicate that folks are more likely to fill out a contact form that’s embedded in a website page, rather than clicking on an email address link that opens their mail application. I decided to actually gather some real data, and post the results to my blog - so here it is.

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