Taking screenshots of DVD, MPEG, AVI, and other video on Windows machines requires a couple of extra steps. A normal screenshot is easy enough to capture by pressing the “Print Screen” button on your keyboard. To capture a screenshot of video display, however, you need to disable hardware acceleration to make it work. To do this on Windows machines, go to your Desktop properties and click on the Settings tab. Click on the Advanced button and then on the Troubleshooting tab. Slide the Hardware Acceleration to “None” and then capture and process your screenshot as normal. Once you are finished taking your screenshot, don’t forget to switch your Hardware acceleration back to its original settings (e.g., “Full”).
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When designing sites, it is often useful to identify different pages by adding an ID attribute to the <body> element. Commonly, the name of the page is used as the attribute value, for example:
<body id="about">
In this case, “about” would be the body ID for the “About” page, which would be named something like “about.php”. Likewise, other pages would have unique IDs as well, for example:
<body id="archive">
<body id="contact">
<body id="subscribe">
<body id="portfolio">
..again, with each ID associated with the name of the page. This identification strategy is useful for a variety of reasons, including the following:
- Page-specific control over CSS via descendant selectors
- Page-specific DOM manipulation via JavaScript
- Page-specific control over the navigational interface, current-page highlighting et al
- Page-specific content-inclusion via conditional PHP
if() statements
For page-specific control over your design, using the current page name as the body ID will certainly do the trick. The question is, what is the best way to go about defining the different attributes? For static sites or for sites with only a few pages, it might be easiest to just add the IDs manually. For larger, dynamic sites, however, you can automate the process with the magical powers of PHP.
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A great way to improve the performance of your site is to optimize the size of your images. Smaller image sizes require less bandwidth, disk space and load time, and ultimately improve visitor experience. In this article, I share my effective 5-minute technique for optimizing PNG images. This is a two-step, lossless optimization process that removes as much extraneous data as possible without sacrificing any image quality whatsoever. It’s fast, free, and highly effective.
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Just like last year, this Spring I have been taking some time to do some general maintenance here at Perishable Press. This includes everything from fixing broken links and resolving errors to optimizing scripts and eliminating unnecessary plugins. I’ll admit, this type of work is often quite dull, however I always enjoy the process of cleaning up my HTAccess files. In this post, I share some of the changes made to my HTAccess files and explain the reasoning behind each modification. Some of the changes may surprise you! ;)
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One way to prevent Google from crawling certain pages is to use <meta> elements in the <head> section of your web documents. For example, if I want to prevent Google from indexing and archiving a certain page, I would add the following code to the head of my document:
<meta name="googlebot" content="noindex,noarchive" />
I’m no SEO guru, but it is my general understanding that it is possible to manipulate the flow of page rank throughout a site through strategic implementation of <meta> directives.
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The other day, my server crashed and Perishable Press was unable to connect to the MySQL database. Normally, when WordPress encounters a database error, it delivers a specific error message similar to the following:
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Given my propensity to discuss matters involving error log data (e.g., monitoring malicious behavior, setting up error logs, and creating extensive blacklists), I am often asked about the best way to go about monitoring 404 and other types of server errors. While I consider myself to be a novice in this arena (there are far brighter people with much greater experience), I do spend a lot of time digging through log entries and analyzing data. So, when asked recently about my error monitoring practices, I decided to share my response here at Perishable Press, and hopefully get some good feedback concerning best practices for error monitoring. Here is my email response to the question:
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