Here’s a list of jQuery plugins that I frequently use.

jQuery Form Plugin
jQuery UI
jQuery Validation Plugin

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Vi is a very powerful text editor. It’s also very overwhelming when you’re first learning it! That’s why I like to install Nano in whatever Linux environment I happen to be working in. To do so on CentOS, you’d use the following:

yum install nano

Once installation is complete, you can freely edit your text files using:

nano filename.txt

If you’re new to Linux, this should make text editing much easier.

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Having to resort to mouse movements and clicking can be time consuming and frustrating (not to mention bad for your health). To reduce mouse dependency, I’ve put together this list of common Windows functions that can be performed with key-stroke combinations.

Minimize a Window – +
Maximize a Window – +
Dock Window to the left of screen – +
Dock Window to the right of screen – +
Minimize all Windows – + D or + M
Switch Between Open Windows – + (holding while tapping will scroll) or + + (opposite direction)

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To pull from a predefined remote repository use:
git pull origin

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To Add a remote Git repo via SSH

git remote add origin ssh://@/

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Often overlooked in SEO is the use of the Title attribute. Not to be confused with the Title tag, the title attribute can be used to add descriptive text as to any HTML element, but it’s particularly useful for describing the content of linked-to pages.

This is useful for SEO purposes, because The Bots can get an idea of what the content of the linked-to page is, even when the anchor text is something generic like “Read More”, or “Click Here” generated by a CMS.

An example of an anchor tag using a title attribute:

Golf-Draft.com

Which results in a link like so:
Golf-Draft.com

If you hover your mouse over the link above for about a second, you should see a yellow “tool tip” box pop up with the description “A simple web application for tracking golf drafts”.

Which brings us to some very handy secondary functionality of the title attribute. It can be used as a useful UI element to provide contextual help. For example, if you have a text-input used for requesting a telephone number in a form, you can use the title attribute of the input tag to provide some insight into what format you’d like the phone number entered in ie. “Please format as (204)-555-1234″.

The title attribute of elements is also often used by screen readers to provide information about HTML tags. So it’s also good practice to use the title attribute on anchor tags for accessibility reasons, especially if you’re website is likely to be visited by the visually impaired.

The one downside of properly using the title attribute is that it usually requires manual effort by a human to properly implement. For example, this blog post is titled “SEO Tip – Utilizing the Title attribute”. However, if I were to want to link to it from another page, I’d want the Title attribute to be something like “Nathan explains why websites should be using the title attribute for SEO and other reasons”. This title attribute provides a little more context than simply “SEO Tip – Utilizing the Title attribute”.

And if you really just don’t like the tool tips popping up, but you want the SEO benefits you can always use jQuery (or any other Javascript library) to remove the title attribute on the hover state:

$("a").removeAttr("title");


That would remove the title attribute on all anchor tags in the page. And since The Bots don’t run Javascript when indexing pages, you’ll still get all the benefits of using the Title attribute, without affecting the user experience of your site.

Hopefully I’ve given some valid reasons as to why your website should be using the Title attribute when you’re building links. It should be good for you’re SEO efforts, it can provide helpful contextual information for the user, and it will make your site more accessible. Hopefully, we’ll start to see

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One of the most beautiful things about WordPress is it’s plugin system. It’s incredibly easy to use, even for the newest users. And with thousands of developers making their own plugins available for free, it greatly reduces the time needed to add new features to a WordPress site. Below is a list of the plugins I install in almost every WordPress project I work on.

Exploit Scanner

Search the files and database of your WordPress install for signs that may indicate that it has fallen victim to malicious hackers.

WordPress SEO By Yoast

Yoast’s all in one SEO solution for your WordPress blog: SEO titles, meta descriptions, XML sitemaps, breadcrumbs & much more.

Regenerate Thumbnails

Regenerate Thumbnails allows you to regenerate the thumbnails for your image attachments. This is very handy if you’ve changed any of your thumbnail dimensions (via Settings -> Media) after previously uploading images or have changed to a theme with different featured post image dimensions.

Contact Form 7

Contact Form 7 can manage multiple contact forms, plus you can customize the form and the mail contents flexibly with simple markup. The form supports Ajax-powered submitting, CAPTCHA, Akismet spam filtering and so on.

WP Super Cache

This plugin generates static html files from your dynamic WordPress blog. After a html file is generated your webserver will serve that file instead of processing the comparatively heavier and more expensive WordPress PHP scripts.

WP Minify

This plugin integrates the Minify engine into your WordPress blog. Once enabled, this plugin will combine and compress JS and CSS files to improve page load time.

White Label CMS

The White Label CMS plugin is for developers who want to give their clients a more personalised and less confusing CMS.

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