Bostonian Adam

Blog

  • Testing your web site in different web browsers and mobile devices

    When building your web site, at some point you should test how your site looks in different web browsers and mobile devices. To do this all you need is the Google Chrome web browser. Follow the steps below to test your site. The below steps were written while using Chrome version 33.0.1750.154. Future updates of Chrome may have the icons or tabs in different places.

    1. In Chrome, open the “Developer tools” via the button with the horizontal lines in the top right corner of the Google Chrome web browser
    2. Now with “Developer tools” open, in the bottom right corner click the round gears icon (the word “Settings” appears when you mouseover it)
    3. In the “General” tab, check the “Show ‘Emulation’ view in console drawer” checkbox and close that overlay
    4. With the “Developer tools” still open, in the bottom right corner click the icon with a greater than symbol and three lines (the words “Show drawer” appear when you mouseover it) and a new tab appears below the “Developer tools”
    5. Click the “Emulation” tab and now you can see how your web site looks in different mobile devices (in the “Device” tab), different screen sizes (in the “Screen” tab), and different user agents/web browsers (in the “User Agent” tab)

  • Enhance SEO for your WordPress blog

    WordPress by itself does a good job with SEO (search engine optimization) but you can make improvements to help your site with SEO as there are some nice free WordPress plugins to do this for you. I’ll go over the two plugins I use to help with SEO and getting indexed by search engines.

    The first plugin I use is All In One SEO Pack by Michael Torbert. This plugin helps optimize your site for search engines. The main features this plugin has (as of when this was posted) are:

    • Edit your home page title, description and keywords
    • Change the title format for posts and pages
    • Add webmaster verification codes for Google Webmaster and Bing Webmaster
    • Add Google Analytics ID for tracking
    • Add noindex tags for category pages, archive pages, tag pages, etc
    • Add additional code into the header of posts and pages

    To get and install the All In One SEO Pack plugin on your blog, follow these steps:

    • Go to your “Admin” area of your site
    • Click the “Plugins” link in the left side nav
    • Click the “Add New” link at the top of the page
    • In the search field, type “All In One SEO Pack” and click search
    • The plugin you want should be the first one listed, but find the one named “All In One SEO Pack” by Michael Torbert, and click the “Install Now” link for it and you should be all done

    The latest versions of All In One SEO Pack now includes an XML Sitemaps feature so if you use that feature as well, you won’t need the next plugin I’ve been using, Google XML Sitemaps by Arne Brachhold. The main features this plugin has (as of when this was posted) are:

    • Create an XML sitemap that can be indexed by search engines such as Google and Bing
    • Choose which pages (category pages, tag pages, archive pages, etc) to include from being included in the XML sitemap
    • Choose exactly which category pages to exclude from being included in the XML sitemap
    • Change the frequency of how often your homepage, blog posts, categpry pages, etc are crawled

    To get and install the Google XML Sitemaps plugin on your blog, follow these steps:

    • Go to your “Admin” area of your site
    • Click the “Plugins” link in the left side nav
    • Click the “Add New” link at the top of the page
    • In the search field, type “Google XML Sitemaps” and click search
    • The plugin you want should be the first one listed, but find the one named “Google XML Sitemaps” by Arne Brachhold, and click the “Install Now” link for it and you should be all done

    I hope this helps you improve SEO for your WordPress blog. If you have any questions concerning these plugins check out their official sites or feel free to leave a comment and I can try to answer them.

  • Helpful resources including free icons, Google Analytics tips and email stats – December 2013

    I meant to post this sooner but here are links to articles I found interesting and they can most likely help you with your web sites.

  • Display RSS feed contents as HTML using ASP

    In a project I was working on, I needed to show the five latest items in an RSS feed as HTML on an ASP website. I found an ASP script online (sorry I cannot find the URL where I found it at this time) and I modified it for my needs. Here’s the ASP code I used to pull the RSS feed and show it in an HTML list:

  • Select all checkboxes with jQuery

    So you have a form on your web site and you want to add a way for a user to select all checkboxes for one of your questions in the form. Here’s an easy way to do just that using jQuery. Use the Javascript and HTML code below.

    HTML and Javascript code with the function that will make this work:

    Remember that the checkbox’s “class” have to all be the same for those checkboxes that you want to check with the function. In this example the class is “checkboxClass”.

  • Sharing resources: Few free good resources – September 2012

    This is a quick post where I just wanted to make others aware of these cool free tools and resources available.

    • Smashing Magazine blog post about using Opera’s Mobile Emulator to test how web sites look on mobile. The article has a link to where you can download the emulator.
    • Mobilizer, a free Adobe Air tool in beta, where you can test how web sites look on mobile.
    • Onextrapixel.com with a free downloadable e-commerce icon set.
    • DeveloperDrive.com with a post with their list of 10 Best Open Source Tools for Web Developers

    Here are some more good freebies and resources to check out that I didn’t have a chance to post earlier.

  • Hello world!

    Yup, hello everyone! This is the first post on my tech and life blog here at BostonianAdam.com. I have an old blog over at Blogger that I’ve had for years, where I’ve posted about anything I’m interested in, but I haven’t used it in quite some time. With this blog, I’m hoping to use it for posting about web development, tech-related news, interesting resources around the web, tips, questions/thoughts, things I’ve learned, and about life.

    You can also find me on Twitter @BostonianAdam.