I came across a great trick to solve a problem I had today.

I have thousands of LinkedIn connections and periodically my inbox gets over-full. However, there doesn’t seem to be an easy way to clear your inbox with LinkedIn.

So I turn to Google!

In this great post How to Delete Multiple LinkedIn Messages [LinkedIn Hack], Peter Abilla explains a great trick using Google Chrome’s Inspect tool to quickly clear your inbox!

I tried it and it worked great.

Here are the steps…

1. Go to your LinkedIn inbox (you must use Google Chrome for this hack)

2. Right-click (or double-tap if you are on a Mac) and select INSPECT

3. Click on the CONSOLE tab in Chrome Inspect

4. Copy and paste the following code into the console’s command line and press return

[code]$('.action.delete-action').each(function(){this.click();var found = "";while(found == ""){var found = $('.yes-btn');found.click();}});[/code]

You may have to do this several times to totally clear your inbox due to the fact that you might have more than one page of messages.

I hope you found this post valuable in taking the pain out of clearing your LinkedIn inbox!

Cheers,
Eric

The post Delete all messages in your LinkedIn inbox appeared first on Eric A. Hicks, MBA.

/* shortcode for the current year */
function year_shortcode() {
	$year = date('Y');
	return $year;
}
add_shortcode('year', 'year_shortcode');

So your copyright date in your theme’s footer might look something like this…

Usage:
Copyright © [year] Company Name, Inc.

Displays:
Copyright © 2014 Company Name, Inc.

The post Custom WordPress shortcode to display current year appeared first on Eric A. Hicks, MBA.

So a typical image in one of my websites might look like this…

<img alt="" src="/wp-content/uploads/responsive-image.jpg" style="width:100%;" />

So today I said to myself “there has to be a better way!”.  I don’t like to take the 30 seconds to strip out and add my own code every single time, so I thought if there isn’t already a plugin to do this, then I was going to write a plugin.  So I did a search for “wordpress plugin responsive images 100%” and WP Fluid Images was at the top of the search results.

This plugin does the trick!  Here’s the code it injects when you add an image to a page or post.

<img src="/wp-content/uploads/responsive-image.jpg" alt="" class="alignnone size-full wp-image-156">

The size-full class effectively adds “max-width: 100%;height: auto;” CSS styling to the image.

I’m not super happy about the image not being properly ended ( “/>” vs just “>”) but what can you do?

Check out this plugin, it’s going to be permanently in my list of plugins that I install into every website!

http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-fluid-images/

The post How to quickly add responsive images to WordPress with width:100% CSS set appeared first on Eric A. Hicks, MBA.

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So I just noticed this as I did my first Google search of the day.

Google Play

It seems that Google has positioned selling content front-and-center now.  When you either click through the top navigation item, or go directly to https://play.google.com/store, you’ll find Google’s offering of Music, Books, Movies, and Android Apps.

If you explore the store a little, you’ll notice the “My” section (My Music, My Books, etc) in the navigation bar.  I’m curious, so I clicked My Music and was forced to agree with a terms of service.

Because I haven’t purchased anything yet, I’m still a little fuzzy on what My Music does yet, but the one thing that caught my eye was the Music Manager.  It says you can add your collection from iTunes and other media players.

Being a Mac user, I don’t think I’ll ever switch to something like this simply because I use iCloud and like the ability to sync my files across all devices, but I can definitely see this being a popular offering from Google for Windows, and definitely Android users.

The post Google Play now live and in your top navigation bar appeared first on Eric A. Hicks, MBA.

Thanks to Dennis and SavvyCard for the opportunity to go to the St. Pete Grand Prix last Sun.

Citgo car being towed to the starting line

Floating dock watching the St. Pete Grand Prix in style

New front spoiler designs

New rear tire protections to help prevent accidents

Walking to the Paddock

Yes, that is THE Mario Andretti

The post 2012 St. Pete Grand Prix #gpstpete appeared first on Eric A. Hicks, MBA.

So besides being a very poor “benefit” of buying Silver Morgan Dollars (do you REALLY buy them because you want to hold a piece of history in your hand? Seriously, couldn’t you think of any better benefits?), they phrased their benefit in the form of a question.

This is bad copy-writing, and I’ll tell you why.

A quick introduction to the subconscious mind in advertising

People have generally become conditioned to view advertising messages with skepticism. Whether you realize you’re doing it or not, your subconscious mind completely absorbs what it reads or is being told. Because we’re skeptical of advertising by nature, our subconscious minds are looking for a reason to disagree with what it’s consuming.

For instance, “Wouldn’t you like to hold a piece of history in your hand?”  Uh, no, not really.

So when you ask a question that elicits a yes or no answer, you stand a very strong chance that the person will simply say “no”, and you’ve lost them for the rest of the ad.

Further, even if they were the type that thinks owning a Morgan Dollar for it’s historical significance is the most important reason, it’s still bad to ask that question. What happens in ones subconscious mind is that it stops to answer the question, and it lingers on that question a little bit… and you lost your influence on their subconscious for several more seconds, even through the rest of the ad.

Your goal in advertising is really to influence a buying decision. So why would you interrupt that influence? Instead, you should stack several influencing statements that are generally agreeable… but that’s for explaining in another blog post.

So are you saying I can never ask questions in my advertising?

Sort of.

I’m not saying it’s NEVER acceptable to ask a question in advertising, but quite frankly, I can’t think of an instance where it’s better to ask a question than make a statement.

Another example

Here’s another good example. I designed a post card for a pest control operation once, and the owner wanted the main text on the card say “Are you paying too much for your Pest Control?”  Uh, no.  Subconscious is now distracted, and doesn’t get influenced by anything else on the card that would lead to a buying decision.

So knowing that this was bad copy-writing, I proposed the main text should read “Find out how much you can save on your pest control service!”

Head vs. Emotions

Here’s some further explanation of how asking questions is a subconscious distraction. Questions put people “in their head”. Marketing is more effective when it stays emotional. Asking a question puts someone in a cognitive state (the mind) instead of an influential emotional one.

The lesson learned here is keep the consumers of your marketing message in their emotions, not in their head.

If you can ask a question, then you can change it to be a statement.

So if you’re tempted to ask a question in your advertising copy, try changing your question into a statement instead.

Are you paying too much on your car insurance? vs.
Find out how much you can save on your car insurance.

Is your house infested with termites? vs.
Have the peace of mind that no termites are infesting your house.

Do you need new windows in your house? vs.
Save money in every heating bill by installing double-paned windows.

So what do you think? Is asking questions in copy-writing a bad idea?

Oops, I just lost you, didn’t I?  🙂

The post Don’t ask questions in your advertising appeared first on Eric A. Hicks, MBA.

Please help me fulfill my dream by referring me to people you run into. If you overhear anyone needing a website developed please send them my SavvyCard!

Thank you!

The post Full-time Freelance Web Developer in Tampa, FL appeared first on Eric A. Hicks, MBA.

So my login controller had something like this in it…
[php]
$this->load->helper(‘cookie’);
$this->data[‘remember_email’] = ”;
if (get_cookie(‘site_remember’) != ”) {
$this->data[‘remember_email’] = get_cookie(‘site_remember’);
}
[/php]
The simple fix was to remove the underscores from the cookie name and it worked great.

The post CodeIgniter, Cookies, and IE9 (oh my!): Underscores in cookie name fails in IE9 appeared first on Eric A. Hicks, MBA.

I have a client who has been getting blasted with form spam for almost 48 hours straight.  Here’s the odd behavior though… there are no links or any other HTML in any of the form fields?!?!?

So why is the person behind this bot doing this??

Other than to annoy me, I can’t think of any other reason.  So I had to think of a new way to foil this form bot and I came up with this…
Form Bots Are Predictable

I believe that most form bots read the name or id attribute in the input tag as a clue for what info to insert into that form field. So, if you name your input field “email” then the bot knows to insert an email address into that field.

So I’m going to use the bot’s predictability against it by naming my email field something completely different, then validating the field to require a properly formed email address (i.e. name@example.com).

So the bot will likely populate this field with random characters instead of a properly formed email address.  My validation will throw an error when the field doesn’t get an email address, the form bot is STOPPED!

I have a few more tricks up my sleeve, but I’ll save that for part III.

The post How to out-smart form bot spam without using a CAPTCHA – Part II appeared first on Eric A. Hicks, MBA.