Turns out these podcasts are all hosted by a service called libsyn.com, and after a bit of sleuthing I found the RSS feed url that is set as the default url in their system.

Here’s how to find it:

Mousing over the “Play in new window” link to see what it’s linking to. For the podcast above, it links to: http://traffic.libsyn.com/mebeingcrafty/epi016_Lee_Monroe.mp3

The “mebeingcrafty” part of this url is the name of this podcast. Take that name and put it in this format:

http://mebeingcrafty.libsyn.com/rss

And you get an RSS feed of the podcast!

This should work for most, if not all, podcasts hosted on libyn.com

Him: this is blah blah from Jobspring, how are you?
Me: I don’t know you
Him: I’m a recruiter from Jobspring
Me: Oh then please take me off your list
Him: I don’t have you in a list
Me: Then how did you get my number?
Him: I have you resume from when you came in
Me: :: pause :: oh you mean from 5 years ago?
Him: Yes and I wanted to let you know that the market for devs is much better now
Me: I know that. And I have a job I like and I’m not looking. Please take me out of your system.
Him: Yes but you should look at these opportunities because —
Me: No, take me out of your system
Him: Yes but I want to update your information —
Me: No, take me out of your system
Him: Ok so you’re not looking for another job
Me: No I’m not, take me out of your system
Him: Ok so do you have any friends who you could refer me to?
Me: :: hangs up ::

5 minutes later:
Email from Frank in my inbox, saying “It was a pleasure speaking with you today and I appreciate you taking a couple of minutes.” blah blah blah

8 minutes later:
I reply back to him writing “You are ridiculous. I will be circulating your name among my friends to be sure none of them works with you.”

10 minutes later:
He replied back AGAIN telling me that I’m being harsh and “he’s just trying to build his network”

12 minutes later:
He adds me on LinkedIn.

*facepalm*

Bottom line

I do have friends I could refer to him. Do not work with Frank Castellucci from Jobspring.

For example, I always put WP in its own directory and never create a user with the username “admin.” While in development, I like to lock the staging environment with basic HTTP authentication.

To make my workflow easier, I have these basic changes in a git repo, and simply check it out when I go to install WordPress.

I’ve now put that repo up on Github as a public repo called hardened-wp. Please feel free to use it on your own projects! I hope it’ll save you time and aggravation in the future.

My client (and friend) Victoria Findlay Wolfe is a well-known quilter and one of the leaders of the Modern Quilt movement. One of the many, many projects she works on is a charity that collects and distrubtes handmade quilts for various organizations/disasters. The charity is called Bumble Beans BASICS and it’s helped with lots of projects already, including recently sending thousands of quilts to those displaced by Sandy.

Can you tell I really like this project’s mission yet? Well I do. And I quite like the website we ended up with too!

This is custom WordPress build that involves two different custom post types for managing content on the back end. I built it as a child theme of the WooThemes Mystile Theme, which has become my new go-to base theme to build on top of, whether or not the site uses WooCommerce.

As is my preference, I did all the customization and custom features in the child theme, not by using plugins. In fact the only two plugins the site uses are:

1. Woo’s excellent WooSlider for image carousels (which I loathe building from scratch)
2. The most thorough forms plugin ever, Gravity Forms, for handling a complicated quilt submission form for internal reporting purposes.

I’m very pleased with how much “extra” this site does with only those two plugins to deal with!

My clients, the owners of The Poffertjesman, needed to upgrade from an extremely outdated site to something new and modern that would more closely convey their brand. Their only requirement was the use of the Depot font, as that’s the font they’d done all their print work in. They also provided me with many stunning photos of their adorable mini pancakes and their booth.

Inspired by the photography, I immediately knew that I wanted to create a minimal site where the photography was the star. I built on top of the Reverie framework to make the site responsive (an absolute must for a client like this, whose visitors are likely to be on mobile devices while searching them out), and used the robust EasyRotator plugin to ensure the clients would be able to work with the home page slider easily.

You know when you get to the section of a checkout form where you can enter a promo code, but you don’t have one?

The next thing you do if you’re me is open a new browser tab and google “website URL promo code” to see if you can grab one and save yourself some cash.

Well, just now, I was signing up for liveplan.com to try out their business plan software and did the above. The result on Google was pretty interesting, and not at all what I expected:

See that first, paid, result? That’s from the company itself! And the second non-paid result? Also from them!

Of course that’s unusual (usually when you google for codes, you find them on sites like retailmenot, not on the actual company’s website!) so it made me click the link immediately.

Check out where it takes you:

A page telling you that if you like them on Facebook, you’ll get 50% off your purchase.

GENIUS.

Their FB page has ~14K likes right now and I absolutely guarantee you that most of them are because of this marketing idea. Whoever came up with this one did a great job!

If you sell a digital subscription product like this one, copy this idea. Now.

So what’s the #1 most important thing about your new website?

Drumroll please . . .

The Purpose.

Yes, capitalized. And in red. It’s that important, but it is usually completely ignored.

You may be thinking that this is really really obvious, but do you actually have a specific, short answer to the question “What do you want visitors to DO?”

I bet you don’t! But don’t feel bad, because MOST PEOPLE don’t.

In this article, I’m going to help you figure out the answer, and therefore The Purpose.

Typical (bad) answers I get when I ask “What’s the purpose of your new site?”

1. Blank stare
2. “Well, you know, to have a website”
3. “Everyone else has a website so my business needs one too”
4. “So people can find me”

It probably won’t surprise you to learn that #1 is the most common by far. People think the answer is so obvious that the question must be rhetorical. Well it isn’t!

You need to have a short, concrete answer to the question. Even though it may seem seem silly and obvious, The Purpose will shape everything you do for the site. So if you don’t know what it is, you’re shooting in the dark, and your results will show it.

Until you’ve thought through this seemingly-obvious but not easily pinned down aspect, do not invest more than an hour on anything else about your site. And definitely don’t start worrying about what it will look like or what colors it will be!

People tend to skip right over The Purpose and go right to the design when they’re starting, and usually if you go in that order you’ll have to redo everything once you figure out that what you’ve done doesn’t work directly for The Purpose.

What are some good goals?

• Sell something online
• Sell something in your brick-and-mortar store (yes, those two are DIFFERENT GOALS)
• Click on the ads
• Simply know about or find me (ie a resume site)
• Sign up for your mailing list
• Sign up for your RSS feed (a good goal if your website is a a blog without a mailing list)
• Tell friends about your site (not a good goal unless your site is a one-off project meant to go viral in the short-term and then die)

Implementing The Purpose

So let’s say you look at the list above and you pinpoint “sell something online” as the primary point of your website. What does that mean?

It means that the most important thing on your site should be shopping.

And what do I mean by that?

I mean that when someone lands on your homepage, they should be able to buy something from you. If it takes 3 clicks to get to the “shop” section of your site, you’re doing it wrong.

If the first thing they see a whole bunch of social media stuff and personal blog posts? You’re doing it wrong.

Let’s try another Purpose. If you’ve decided that what you really want people to do is “sign up for your mailing list,” then guess what?

The most important thing on your site should be a signup form. Meaning it should be big and on your homepage. It should not be in the footer!

In doubt about what to do?

The easiest way to get this right is to identify someone else who does your Purpose well and copy them.

If you’re selling online, there’s no one better to copy than Amazon. The amount of money, time, and effort they spend getting their site to make visitors buy stuff is literally unachievable for the rest of us.

If your goal is to have users click ads, look into niche websites. “Niche sites” are websites whose entire purpose is to get traffic and convert those visitors into ad clicks. Niche Pursuits is a good blog that talks about the business model, where on a page ads convert best, etc etc.

If your Purpose is to sign people up for your mailing list, check out sites that talk about mailing list conversions. Social Triggers is a great example of a site that is getting lots of signups and has done tons of research and optimization on what forms convert the best. Check out what he’s done and do it yourself, and you’ll be well on your way.

But beware of distractions

If you’re thinking that the above is pretty simple to implement, you’re right.

The problems start when you get distracted by bells and whistles and silly web things. Before you know it, you’ve added a Facebook like box and your Twitter stream and who knows what else, and those things start to steal attention from The Purpose.

There is no good reason why Facebook should get equal real estate with your mailing list signup form, for example. Or why you should prominently feature your blog posts about your cat if your website is trying to sell hats (that aren’t related to your cat).

It’s a good idea to sort of “take inventory” of your site every so often to make sure that what you’ve got is still working directly to meet The Purpose. If you find that you’ve strayed from the path, just throw out all the random crap that’s accumulated (or move it all into an “about me” or similar page and off your homepage) and go back to prominently asking people to do what you want them to do.

—

Questions? Opinions? Want me to check out your site and give you feedback? Leave a comment and tell me!

The reason this happens is because FB caches everything, or maybe more accurately, SUPER CACHES EVERYTHING. It’s impressive from a technical standpoint and makes sense for performance and all that, but it definitely sucks if you’re a user trying to market something you recently changed.

So what’s the solution?

Use Facebook’s own tool to clear their cache!

One of the best Facebook dev tools is the Debugger (also called the “linter”), which is intended to help you see how your Facebook-specific meta tags are going to look when the page is shared on FB.

If you go to the debugger and drop in the URL you’re having trouble with, Facebook will actually reach out to your URL right then and grab the current content to display the debugger results.

Doing this also clears Facebook’s cache of your page instantly. Seriously!

After you lint your URL, you can immediately go back and type your update in again, and the good stuff will show up. It’s that easy!

For the update above, this is what the debugger showed:

click for bigger

Which is, of course, the content I was trying to share.

Immediately going back to my Facebook page and trying the update again (you should refresh the page before you start just to make sure it will actually grab the URL) yielded this:

That’s more like it!

It’s really that easy, and I’m so glad I thought to try this. Hope it helps some of you out there too!

Oh and bonus:

If you’re in QA and want to test what will happen when you share content on FB but can’t actually POST the content to FB because it’s still in development, the debugger is the way to go for that too.

And one last thing:

If you’re a knitter reading this and want to actually go to the content in the screenshots above, check out the Koigu KPPPM yarn for sale in my knitting online store!

I’m working on my first-ever WordPress theme to sell (actually, I’m working on two of them at the same time, cuz I’m a glutton for NOT focusing) and as I work, I’m finding that I’m Googling a lot. I have yet to find a comprehensive resource geared towards people who want to sell themes and I’m holding myself back from starting yet another website (ha!) so instead I decided to start documenting what I’m using and thinking here.

First up: Responsive Themes.

It’s 2012 and yet somehow, not every (big) site on the web is responsive yet. This confuses me. If you have the budget to make a mobile app, surely you have the budget to make your site easy to read on any device?? Somehow lots of major sites are still catching up with this. I just checked my former employer’s newly-redesigned site (thrillist.com) and it looks HOT, but it’s not responsive. All I could think is “really? REALLY?”

In my opinion, if you’re releasing ANYTHING new in 2012 it needs to be responsive.

And if you’re charging for a premium WordPress theme? It absolutely needs to be responsive.

How to design a responsive WordPress theme

Like pretty much anything else in web dev these days, the arguably “best” and certainly fastest way is to use a framework. For WordPress responsive themes, there are a few options available. I found this post with a list of 5 options, of which I’ve tried three and settled on Whiteboard.

Whiteboard is based on the Less CSS Framework, which even if you don’t formally use is a great, simple visual on what to target when going responsive. Here are the four layouts Less uses (image shamelessly screenshot off their site):

Everyone knows a visual is worth a thousand words, but in this case I think it’s more like a million. Four layouts, four screen widths, and a simple blue-and-yellow visual of content layout. If you’re like me and a visual learner (and I think most tech people are), I’m wiling to bet that after looking at this graphic most of your responsive design questions have been answered.

But what about the coding?

When you use Whiteboard for your responsive WordPress theme, you start out with a simple, bare-bones responsive theme to tweak and build on top of. When you dig into the CSS you’ll see that it’s broken up into sections based on the width of the screen. Here’s an excerpt:

In each of the sections is the code specific to that screen resolution. You’ll see that everything from font size to content width to alignment can be changed based on the “view” you’re working with.

If your immediate response to that last sentence was “that’s a lot of work” I don’t have a nice answer for you. Yes, it is definitely more work since you have to not only design but also code and debug four versions of your site instead of one . . . but you should do it anyway.

How often do you yourself look at a website on your phone and curse the fact that it’s unusable? That should be reason enough for you.

It sure is for me.

Every so often, things break.

Today was one of those “every so often” times, and instead of the “What’s new in this version” admin screen I expected, I was greeted with a horrifying white screen, completely empty of content. I immediately checked the user-facing part of the site, and that looked fine, so I was confused. I’ve never seen a blank page instead of an admin panel, which is wacky enough, but having that while the user-facing section of the site is functional? Inconceivable! (Princess Bride anyone?)

Trying anything I can think of

A quick Google led me to try something that didn’t make any difference.

My next step was to turn on WP_DEBUG to see what errors came up, and the first one said “load_plugin_textdomain was called with an argument that is deprecated since version 2.7 with no alternative available” — so clearly something else installed on WP was no longer compatible with the new version. Now I at least knew what I was dealing with, it must be a bad plugin.

And no, of course I hadn’t turned off all plugins in order to upgrade, who actually does that? Admit it, you don’t either. And I’m sure you don’t back up your DB before-hand, either (neither do I).

So, the next step was obvious: Turn everything “extra” off and, assuming that brought my admin panel back from death, then start turning them back on one at a time to figure out what was breaking the site.

Turning off all plugins without an Admin panel

To get rid of all plugins, I went into my FTP client and dragged all plugin folders into the wp-content folder. This makes their files inaccessible to WordPress and essentially uninstalls them. Depending on what plugins you had, you may get additional errors after doing this step, and you’ll need to deal with those (for example, cachine plugins often add additional PHP files to wp-content, and those will need to be deleted through the FTP client).

When I refreshed wp-admin, the admin panel popped up! Score!

Time to turn the plugins back on one at a time, until the site breaks again, in order to find . . .

The Culprit

The cuplrit? Popup Domination.The plugin we all love yet hate. With the website that makes GoDaddy seem friendly and streamlined . . . figures.

I found this post in their support section saying that an updated version of the plugin is available that IS compatible with 331, so I’ve emailed them to get a copy.

Sure woulda been nice for them to proactively mail their customers letting them know . . . hint hint Popup Domination. Free services give better customer service.