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.

Well, sometimes there are good uses for the iframe. Such as using an iframe for Google Calendar, or if a client uses some other third-party calendar provider and get their content through the use of the html tag iframe.

Remembering what I had to do to extend WordPress to be a more full-featured content management system, I took my cue and created a new page template. You could call it “calendar.php.”

It is in the template where I just chose to place all of my code for that page and pulled the iframe in rather nicely.

I used a PHP include to bring in the actual html, but I’m pretty sure it will work just putting the iframe code directly into the template file (though I have not tested that).

So if you’ve been beating your head against the wall looking for a way to get an iframe into the body of a WordPress page, this is a simple solution. Though one that is more technical than you should have to be for a content management system.

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

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

Implementing SuperFish is pretty simple, so I’ll leave their documentation for that part of this “how to.”

After you get the SuperFish plugin working with wp_list_pages in WordPress, you run into a major problem with sIFR and any of the dropdown solutions for Wordpress. The CSS wp_list_pages creates is applied to the <li> tags, and sIFR will want to replace all of the sub-pages text as well as the text for the top level pages.

To get around this, I installed the plugin List Pages Plus and made a couple modifications.

Once you have the plugin activated, you need to edit the “list-pages-plus.php” file included. Change the following line:

$litem[$k] = "\n\t" . ‘<li class="’.$class1.$ac.’"><a href="’.$href1.’" title="’.$title1.$at.’">’.$pre.$text1.$post.’</a>’. "\n\t <ul> \n\t" .’<li class="’.$class2.$sac.’"><a href="’.$href2.$sah.’" title="’.$title2.$sat.’">’.$spre.$text2.$spost.’</a>’;

to:

$litem[$k] = "\n\t" . ‘<li class="’.$class1.$ac.’">’.$pre.’<a href="’.$href1.’" title="’.$title1.$at.’">’.$text1.’</a>’.$post. "\n\t <ul> \n\t" .’<li class="’.$class2.$sac.’"><a href="’.$href2.$sah.’" title="’.$title2.$sat.’">’.$spre.$text2.$spost.’</a>’;

And then change this line:

$litem[$k] = "\n\t" . ‘<li class="’.$class.$ac.’"><a href="’.$href.’" title="’.$title.$at.’">’.$pre.$text.$post.’</a>’;

endif;

to:

$litem[$k] = "\n\t" . ‘<li class="’.$class.$ac.’">’.$pre.’<a href="’.$href.’" title="’.$title.$at.’">’.$text.’</a>’.$post;

endif;

Now, if you really wanted to be complete, you should also change the position of the input box in the form for the admin, but it is not a necessary step. The hack will work whether it looks right in the admin form or not.

After you have made the above code changes, go into the settings for List Pages Plus and add <div class=navReplace> and </div> to the last two input fields for the parent item.

Now, change wp_list_pages to wp_list_pages_plus in your header file (or wherever you are implementing your dropdown menu with sIFR for the top level).

Your last step is to use the span tag as your selector for your sIFR replacements. Using the class example I gave above, your selector would be “.navReplace”

If you do the above, you can get sIFR working on your top level navigation items with dropdown menus.

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

Using GMail and GA holds many benefits. If you configure it from your domain’s registrar console, your email will work even if your hosting provider is having troubles. It means less downtime for your emails.

Also, emails do not take up space on your server or hosting account. If a user does not download messages off the server, spam will quickly multiply. I’ve seen over a gig of spam in one user account before! Depending on your hosting package, you could be scratching your head wondering why you can’t upload your 200k picture to your website.

The GMail interface for webmail is second to none. Searching emails, organizing emails, sending/receiving, anything you want from a webmail client… GMail powers it better than any other free alternative I’ve used (and I’ve used most, if not all, of the major ones).

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

To the Bad Behavior author’s credit, he did issue a patched upgrade rather quickly. This is quite disturbing, however.

We noticed that this blog did not block us out of the main content or the admin, but it did prohibit MarsEdit from posting or retrieving posts. Very interesting. I’m not sure why the plug-in would only block certain types of access coming from the same IP. Because it was through MarsEdit, we did not see the standard Bad Behavior message. This makes it even more disturbing as we would have had no idea what was causing this failure in our offline blog editor.

WebGeek posts on “Bad Behavior Behaving Badly“:

This was no minor glitch, and something like this could have serious consequences for websites and businesses. If left unattended in this state for a long time, a site could lose valuable search engine rankings, after the spiders of the Big 3 (Google, Yahoo, and MSN) find that they are locked out repeatedly with 403 errors. It’s most likely that these losses would be temporary, but there’s no guarantee, and by that point the damage is done.

And the explanation comes from the Bad Behavior blog:

Update: Some people have asked for more details on what exactly happened. In brief, yesterday I moved all of my sites to a new dedicated server. In the process, I decommissioned an old blacklist I was running which I thought wasn’t being used, not realizing that Bad Behavior was still set to use it. Shortly afterward, I found myself locked out of my own blog, just as you all did. So therefore, this release.

WebGeek has recommended the removal of Bad Behavior from all blogs until stability can be assured. We agree, but suggest if you want to keep the updated version of Bad Behavior going on personal blogs you monitor closely, it will help to see if this plug-in has truly stabilized.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.