Are you mobile responsive? Er, mobile friendly? Mobile ready, even? Google wants to make sure you know. Check out this mobile web site analyzer. Enter your domain name; view the verdict. Mobile-responsive web design has been with us for a while. No mere trend. I started building sites with the flexible-width scheme in the early summer of 2013. That code & design sea change coincided with the shift to HTML5. Mobile-responsive sites simply react to the screen size of the device being used … [Read more...]
‘Benny’ swings on WordPress 4.0
September 4, 2014 by
My son and I were headed into Ralph's the other day, and the sat radio had Benny Goodman doing an Afro-beat number featuring a long mad solo by Gene Krupa. We sat there in the parking lot, jaws dropped, until it was over. Hoping for a similar gobsmacking from the latest WordPress iteration, 4.0, named Benny in honor of that same bandleader. Enhancements in the text entry process (long needed), the presentation of images in the media library, preview of embeds and plugins, etc. I'm testing … [Read more...]
Taking a hit over web traffic
October 5, 2013 by
Having been a musket-carrying pioneer in the bad old days of the Internet, I got a kick out of a brouhaha that arose the other day over traffic to the Obamacare site in California. Peter Lee, the man who runs Covered California, told a celebratory gathering of Oct. 1 that his web site "had literally over 5 million hits on our web site today," a number that the media cluelessly ran with. The interpretation, it seems, was 5 million was the number of visitors to the Covered California site on … [Read more...]
Welcome WordPress 3.6 — and HTML5
August 2, 2013 by
The up-to-the-second version of WordPress hit the Internet today. It's Christmas and Bastille Day all in one. Put on the party hats ... and start brewing coffee. The count brings us to WordPress 3.6, and true to WP upgrades it's named after a jazz master. This time, it's Oscar Peterson, the great Canadian pianist and "maharaja of the keyboard." (Yes, they've already used Monk. Geesh.) New elements include a built-in HTML5 media player accommodating native audio and video embeds. This is … [Read more...]
Entropy, links & redirects
July 11, 2013 by
"Entropy requires no maintenance," said the noted agnostic mystic Robert Anton Wilson. But your links do. People throw around the term entropy, to physicists' horror. It's hard to discuss accurately without getting into thermodynamics -- fun! -- but the pop-science bottom line is clear enough: Entropy increases. Things fall apart. Anyone who's owned a web site for a while knows that perfectly good links often go bad. 404 bad. Weird redirects bad. Strange spammy landing pages bad. We've … [Read more...]
