SoCal Websites

With WordPress’s custom page templates, you can now get iframes to work in the body of your pages.

After searching the internet far and wide for an iframe solution for WordPress, I mostly found uppity comments about how it was not secure, and you just should not use them.

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After much searching across the webosphere, I decided very few people have shared how to integrate sIFR with dropdown menus.

I found one example, but his solution did not work for me.

Taking his cue, however, I did implement SuperFish as a starting point.

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Process Resource Monitor

When running a shared server environment, you must be extremely aware of activity which can take down your server. One rogue hosting account can ruin things for everyone. Continue Reading »

If you haven’t explored Google Apps for Your Domain or just plain old GMail, now is the time.

GMail and Google Apps for Your Domain capacity is now 6 GB. That’s per user. Continue Reading »

Possibly thousands of bloggers were thrown into a panic by being locked out of their own blogs the last couple of days. The popular “Bad Behavior” plug-in started banning nearly all IP’s and in many cases locking individual users out of their own blogs.

A friend could not even access his wp-admin page, because of the glitch in the plug-in!

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For the most part, I love Google Apps for Your Domain. Lately, I’ve had some issues which for me are pretty serious.

Most importantly, I am continually getting no love when I try to send email via Apple Mail. What happens at first, is that it looks like it is trying to send then several minutes later I’ll get an error message saying it couldn’t be sent and asking if I want to try another outgoing server.

Usually after this message, if I try again, the email will just send right away using the exact same settings. A friend of mine has reported the same issues with his Google Apps for Your Domain accounts.

And this problem does not seem to be limited to Google Apps. My GMail accounts are also suffering the same fate.

If you are having this problem, a temporary solution allowing you to send more quickly is to close Apple Mail and reopen it. Upon reopen, it always seems to send right away. Otherwise, you have to wait several minutes to get the error message before you can send again.

Another issue I’ve had is that my redirect for my webmail does not always work. All of my other subdomains pointing elsewhere work fine, but the Google Apps configuration has been frequently failing on me. If both of these issues persist, I may, sadly, have to leave Google Apps for Your Domain.

You Don’t Need Web Analytics: “

How many saw that headline and heaved a sigh of relief? ‘Oh good,’ you thought, ‘one less thing on my to do list.’

Web Analytics World has 21 reasons that you do not need web analytics. Any of these sound like you or your clients?

• You don’t want to know where your visitors are coming from.
• You don’t care how much time visitors spend on your website.
• Most popular products? Who cares, you already know what your customers want.
• Dead Content? There can’t be any dead content on your site.
• Site overlay is overrated because you can pretty much guess which links visitors find appealing.
• Bounce rate sounds like a make believe metric.

(Via Andy Beal’s Marketing Pilgrim – Internet Marketing Blog & Consultant.)

With Google Analytics being such a great price… free, there’s little excuse for not having top-notch analytics available for your site. Whether someone actually analyzes the data or not, at least it will be there when someone realizes the need.

Of course, there’s arguments to be made for having your analytics from the server rather than a javascript in the code. If you have cPanel, like on our servers, you have analytics built into your administrator. We still often use Google Analytics for our clients, but the server-side stats also provide the 404 not found errors and occasionally checking Google Analytics against the server stats can show if the tracking code has been installed properly on all the pages it is supposed to be on.

If you are experiencing problems with Google Analytics (Problems started Tuesday around noon and have persisted to the time of this post, 2:22 PST May 23), you can access your data by using the old interface.

Evidently there’s a problem right now with getting the stats into the new Dashboard. This should be resolved with no loss of data since the data is obviously being collected (as it would not appear in the old interface if it were lost altogether).

I will comment when I see Dashboard working again.

Google Analytics provided a much needed improvement to their system this week.

As a user since the beginning of Google Analytics, I can tell you that these new improvements are intuitive and provide easier ways to get the information you need.

Among my favorite improvements are the “Dashboard,” a customizable overview of your site statistics, the extensive scheduled reports via email, and a more intuitive organization to the navigation in the left column of the Analytics page.

Check it out.

JavaScript Fix for ActiveX

IE 7 changed the way it dealt with ActiveX, and if you have straight coded your object and embed tags in HTML, you need to change it to using JavaScript to call it.

Apple has provided a couple of different methods, I used Solution Two on a site very recently.

This fix works, and it is very simple to implement.