Ryan Coughlin | Web and Graphic Designer

Internet Explorer 6 Still the Popular Browser?

Ryan Coughlin — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 16:31:17 +0000

A friend who started Cat on The Couch Productions, tweeted me an article titled “Browser Version Market Share” and I found this extremely interesting, check out this clip that was taken from the website. Most of you are going to have the same feeling as me when you see what the first result is. This article was published along with the data presented in October, 2009. I am sure there might be other data that says otherwise, but I believe this is very creditable, this resource came originally from the CNET website.

Browser Version Market Share

Find Internet Explorer 6 at the top using 23% – was a huge shock to me. Waiting til it dies out and Firefox, Safari, Chrome and others start to take the market share for browsers. Slowly but surely, that number will dwindle as new computers are coming with Internet Explorer 8 preloaded. As for Web Developers, you all know this still means we will be using CSS fixes to fix double float margin and many other issues that we deal with when testing a website on IE6.

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Google Insights – An Aid to a Successful Blog Post

Ryan Coughlin — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 04:37:41 +0000

Last spring I came across Google Insights while I was working at EpikOne as a Web/Graphic Designer for the Spring semester. I used this for one of their projects to research currents trends that were developing among coffee, this was what the company was based around. I was using Google Insights to then gather information on current trends that were developing during a certain period of time and a set geography base for the search. After analyzing the data presented by Google Insights I took notes on the data given then worked that in to a new newsletter that was going to be sent out to a list of subscribers.

Lets cut to the chase, Google Insights can help you create a successful blog post because if you have an idea for a post in mind, send some keywords/phrases to insight. The interface of Google Insights is very simple, the landing page looks as follows:

Here are some basics steps that I take when I want to use Google Insights to writing a successful blog post:

Think of a new blog post idea/thought to work with
Write down some keywords/phrases, that visitors might search for
Enter them in to Google Insights – If you need to add any filters (Area, Timeline, Country, etc)
The results for your keywords/phrases will be graphed out for you and also a map overlay showing popularity, also showing a graph of Interest over Time
See which keywords/phrases are doing the best, then work those around your up and coming blog post.

The simple tips above can help your blog post become more successful by analyzing what the current trends are relating to that one topic. Lets say I wanted to write an article about jQuery and AJAX, lets plug these in to Google Insights and see what it returns, below is an image that shows us Top Searches and Rising Searches.

Give this method a try out for yourself. Ponder up a new post idea, think of some keywords, plug them in to Google Insights, blow away, bring on the followers. This has become a common tool in my arsenal for blogging and designing. Great way to check if your blog post is running in to any current trends, that will lead in readers to your blog. Give this a try and see how it goes.

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Launched Cat On The Couch Productions Site

Ryan Coughlin — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 01:02:48 +0000

Finally..after months and months and still work to do. I was able to launch the Cat on the Couch Productions website. Which has a much cleaner appearance with new branding, that was a must to have.

The old site was terrible and did nothing but turn potential clients away. I loaded up some jQuery on the new website but am removing alot of the components to increase performance.

If you are using qTip, don’t. It is 44KB packed, which is still incredibly large. They have a lighter weight SimpleTip, that I am switching too, that is less than 10KB.

You can check out the website, but there are still numerous changes to be done, but my thoughts were that it was acceptable and working to launch for now. Then go back and tweak performance, gzip, compress, and CSS sprites.

Work and school studies have been picking and I have been slacking on the blog posts and jquery goods, but there will be more.

No related posts.

Reload CSS without a page refresh

Ryan Coughlin — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 16:28:07 +0000

As I was working this afternoon, Rogie King posted a tweet about a Bookmarklet that allows you to reload your CSS on your page without reloading the page.

So far I have been loving this, it is the perfect tool for your workspace. I highly recommend this to others. Thanks to the creator of this, can grab this bookmarklet and start using it.

Drag it to your bookmark toolbar
Open a site your are designing
To view your new CSS changes, just click the bookmark in the toolbar, and wa la

Quick and really easy. Thought i’d share this tool with everyone. Give it a try.

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Minor changes – Syntax Plugin

Ryan Coughlin — Wed, 07 Oct 2009 14:13:40 +0000

I am switching my syntax highlighting from WP-Syntax to Google Syntax Highlighter. It is installed and working, but for some reason it is parsing my PHP, which is not allowing me to post the code for readers can try out the articles.

I have been doing some searching on Google with little results, but hopefully something will come up.

I recently started working at Commerce Generation in Burlington, VT so pardon for the delay in articles. I have several quick posts with some tips to publish in the next couple of days.

In the mean time sorry for the error in the syntax highlighting.

If you’re in the Northeast, try to stay dry!

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NextGEN Gallery not loading CSS/Javascript

Ryan Coughlin — Thu, 01 Oct 2009 20:02:34 +0000

Is your NextGEN Gallery showing images? But not loading the CSS and Javascript? Find the solution below.

I have been working on this project where the client wanted to be able to upload and install image galleries, so I have worked with this one and I love it: mhttp://alexrabe.de/wordpress-plugins/nextgen-gallery/

All was smooth and working until, I removed this one line of code from my header.php in my WordPress theme directory.

Without this function in your header.php the gallery does not know where to insert the CSS/JavaScript files to create a fully functioned gallery. Be sure that it is placed before your closing tag.

To find out more information on the function check out this

All in all, be sure if you are running any type of plugin where they need to insert code upon plugin creation that you have that line within your head element of the page.

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TIP: Use trackpad to control Expose in Mac OS X

Ryan Coughlin — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 00:31:24 +0000

Another Sunday night is here, which means 8AM classes to start the week. After Football all day, I started working on some design projects, and I stumbled upon this small feature on my Mac. If you activate your desktop Expose and use two fingers you can use as you would use the arrow keys to navigate Expose on Mac OS X.

Not too crazy of a tip, but one I found out, that is pretty neat.

No related posts.

WordPress Login Page Blank

Ryan Coughlin — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 15:17:19 +0000

Trying to login to your WordPress blog and after submit you get a blank login page? Also trying to access the wp-admin area with a blank screen and no errors?

This problem has happened to me many times with my personal site as well as client sites. After trying different things and looking at other articles what worked for me was to:

First log out using this url: http://www.yourdomain.com/wp-login.php?loggedout=true
Rename your plugins folder to “_plugins” to back them up and create a new folder called “plugins” – this insures that there is on conflict with any plugins that are being run
Replace your current wp-login.php file with a new one
NOTE: You might get a header php error, and if you do follow this article posted at WordPress

Hopefully those steps can fix this problem for you. If something else works for you, feel free to post the results.

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Display wordpress posts on a page

Ryan Coughlin — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 21:34:11 +0000

I have been searching for various articles and help to use WordPress to display a page full of your blog posts. I finally found out a source and it is going to be creating a custom page template in WordPress. If you want to read more on creating custom page templates, be sure to check it out.

The basic concept, will go as follows:

Create a new file and give it a name such as “allposts.php”
Paste the code below in the “allposts.php”
Upload the file to your theme directory
Create a new page in WordPress
To the right where you see Page Template, select the one you just created
Save and view the page. You should now be viewing your posts

Code that goes in to the “allposts.php” is below, this is an example from my site. The XHTML can be customized to the theme of your website.
The top section of code is where the name of the page template is defined. This will display on the page editor under the Page Template drop down.





			
			


Post by:  on  with  comment(s). located in .

This is a standard way to display your WordPress blog posts on a page using custom page templates, you can alter your query by editing this line:

To read more on the WordPress query_posts(), check out the reading.

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Another jQuery UI Slider Example

Ryan Coughlin — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 18:03:14 +0000

First post in a very long time. Finally the summer is over and I am back at school for my last year. Now finally I have a lot of free time to work on this new layout and getting it solid, and getting back to blog posts to catch up on what I missed.

The jQuery UI Slider is one part of the jQuery UI collection that is really neat and can have many uses. So last year I created this jQuery UI Slider never posted about it and I figured now would be the best time.

I wrote this tutorial on using the slider close to a year ago.

Now I created another version of it, with some different styles, with full code examples as well. This will display the current value of the slider as you move up and down bar. Check out the jQuery UI Slider and start playing around with it.

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