Posted on December 12, 2011 in Web Design by Jeff Starr
Things have been busy! I’m working on a new book and site and having a blast. I’ll share more on that later, but for now I just want to get back into posting at Perishable Press. To kick it into gear, here is one of the jQuery snippets I’m using at the new book site.
Posted on October 10, 2011 in Web Design by Jeff Starr
My current ISP likes to keeps things spicy by changing my IP address every few months or so. There are a million ways to get this changing IP information, but as an obsessive web developer, I like to roll my own whenever possible. That means using my own resources instead of spending time and energy elsewhere.
So the goal for this project is to create a web page that does one thing very well: display the visitor’s current IP information. In this tutorial, we use PHP, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to roll our own sleek & stylish “What’s my IP” page in 3 easy steps.
Posted on September 5, 2011 in Web Design by Jeff Starr
Please excuse this self-serving, miscellaneous post, but I’ve just got to purge all of these code snippets and scraps collected over the years. Whenever I update this site, I place any removed/unused code snippets into a giant note file for future reference, just in case. There’s all sorts of different types of code and snippets that just keep growing and growing and.. and finally it gets to a point where I just need to dump everything and start fresh. That is the purpose of this post.
Posted on June 18, 2011 in Web Design by Jeff Starr
I recently spent some time wrestling with various e-commerce/shopping-cart/membership plugins. One of them was of course the popular WP e-Commerce plugin, which uses a directory named “downloadables” to store your precious goods. I had some large files that needed to go into this folder, but the server’s upload limit stopped me from using the plugin’s built-in file uploader to do so.
Posted on May 3, 2011 in Web Design by Jeff Starr
One thing I love about Twitter is the instant feedback. For the past few weeks I’ve been seeing lots of 404 requests like this:
http://perishablepress.com/humans.txt
http://perishablepress.com/humans.txt
http://perishablepress.com/humans.txtAt first I thought it was some skript kiddie getting creative, you know as a play on the robots.txt file, which is also located in the root of many websites. So it seemed interesting enough to tweet about:
Posted on March 17, 2011 in Web Design by Jeff Starr
After implementing Chris Coyier’s More Sidebar technique here at Perishable Press, I needed a good source of “filler” content for the “more” blocks. After experimenting with multiple loops and template tags, the idea of sliding in RSS feeds seemed like a better solution. Replacing some empty space with great content is a win-win for everyone. For example, I display a few of my recent tweets in the sidebar to help fill a lil’ space. It’s a great way to share stuff, and it’s pretty easy to do.
Posted on March 4, 2011 in Web Design by Jeff Starr
I recently redesigned my business site, Monzilla Media. The new design features a clean and simple single-page, fixed-sidebar layout. Visitors use the various links in the fixed sidebar to quickly and automatically scroll through to any section. In the Portfolio section, each item contains a “Details” link that loads more content into the fixed sidebar. As the site is mostly static, I wanted this bit of functionality to really shine, and after much testing and tweaking, ended up with a cross-browser slide & fade technique for loading content via Ajax and jQuery.
Posted on February 23, 2011 in Web Design by Jeff Starr
![[ Twitter Bird ]](http://perishablepress.com/perish/images/2011/twitter-bird.png)
My previous theme displays my latest tweet at the top of every page. It turned out to be an excellent technique for getting more followers – visitors see the tweet, click the link, and possibly follow me on Twitter. There is even a cookie-powered “Hide” link for uninterested visitors to hide the tweet for awhile. I received quite a few requests for a tutorial on the technique, so here is how to display your latest tweet with show/hide cookies. For this tutorial, we’ll be using HTML, CSS, jQuery and WordPress. Here is a Demo of the finished product.