It is very helpful to be able to compare different code files to see their changes, specially when working in a team. Adobe Dreamweaver is my main choice when developing since I like the color highlighting theme, it has an FTP client included and a simple check-in/check-out functionality that doesn’t need to be set up like SVN and works in cheap shared hostings that don’t support any version control.

To compare files in Macintosh there are several applications and the best, lighter and faster to load is DiffMerge (works great in my old white Macbook), it is also free and open source so more than welcome. This is how you set it up in Dreamweaver so that you can compare files easily by right-clicking the file and selecting Compare with Remote Server:

Also when uploading a file Dreamweaver may warn you that the file in the server has been modified and you may overwrite someone else’s changes:

And also in the Synchronize files list:

It becomes really useful to see what has changed, once you click the Compare button this is how DiffMerge looks like:

Looks good, huh? Let’s get to work then!

Setting up DiffMerge with Dreamweaver

First thing to do is to download DiffMerge from the official site and install it, no need to open it.

Dreamweaver needs a shell command to open DiffMerge with both files. We will install a small script (10 lines of code) into the /usr/bin folder. To do this you first need to be able to view all hidden files:

defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles YES
killall Finder

Open Finder, go to Utilities and open Terminal. Paste the code above. Finder will restart and all your Finder open windows will close. If the code above doesn’t work then change YES to TRUE and try again.

Now go to Macintosh HD or your main drive and go to usr/bin:

Download this file and rename it as diffmerge.sh

Move diffmerge.sh to the /usr/bin folder, you will probably need to enter your Administrator password since that is a system folder.

Now go to Dreamweaver, open Preferences and go to the File Compare section. In there, paste this text:

Macintosh HD:usr:bin:diffmerge.sh

Yes, it’s got : instead of / but it’s how it works.

Save the settings by clicking OK at the bottom.

You are done! Now you can compare files and see what has changed, great to keep track of your peer changes and even some changes you made months ago and can’t remember.

You can hide the hidden files again by going to Terminal and typing:

defaults write com.apple.Finder AppleShowAllFiles NO
killall Finder

Nice! You made it until the end of the post. Here’s an extra gift for you, a very useful tool to disable or customize the annoying startup sound in all Mac OSX, it is called Startup Sound and it installs in the System Preferences so it gets completely integrated with your system. It’s free too, download here.

Kohana’s official documentation is pretty complete and useful as well as well written. I have been studying it for a few days but wanted to read the tutorials also whenever I had no Internet connectivity. Searching on the Internet for PDFs or ePubs on Kohana didn’t really show much so I developed a little tool that extracts the official documentation and outputs it in one single file so you can read the official Kohana guide anywhere anytime.

You can download the documentation both in ePub, PDF and HTML formats. The ePub format does not have the images in it (I used an online tool and it removed them, there aren’t a lot anyway) but works great in the iPad, Kindle and Android tablets.

Kohana 3.2 Documentation in PDF format (mirror) (3.3MB)

Kohana 3.2 Documentation in ePub format (mirror) (240KB)

Kohana 3.2 Documentation in HTML format (mirror) (310KB)

I have done my best with the crawling tool but it hasn’t been 100% tested so some sections may have been skipped, please let me know in the comments if that’s the case.

Thanks to all the contributors to the Kohana Documentation, as I am still learning Kohana accept this as my little contribution to the framework :)

Si nos falta el tiempo y el dinero para poder ejecutar un estudio de usabilidad de nuestra página web siempre podemos recurrir a sistemas caseros que son rápidos y económicos.

Escoger la lista de perfiles

Muchos usuarios visitarán nuestra web en el futuro. Entre éstos tenemos que identificar los diferentes perfiles de usuario (llamados “personas” en inglés) y de estos perfiles escoger los dos o tres principales, si hay algo que está claro es que la página web nunca será del agrado de todos nuestros usuarios ya que es imposible que agrade a todo el mundo aunque sí que podemos adaptarla a la mayoría que nos interese. Un perfil de usuario sería algo así:

Persona de entre 25 y 35 años con poder adquisitivo medio-alto, educación universitaria, que vive en una ciudad, no tiene hijos, con conocimientos medios de informática, que navega entre 30 minutos y 2 horas al día por Internet vía un ordenador portátil o de escritorio. Realiza actividades de ocio entre 4 y 8 veces al mes.

Una vez tengamos los perfiles principales deberemos encontrar gente que se adapte a ellos. Si nuestro presupuesto es bajo podemos recurrir a favores de amigos, familiares y conocidos. Lo importante es que puedan estar presencialmente con nosotros.

Test de usabilidad

Una vez tengamos una lista de los diferentes perfiles de usuario, situaremos al primero delante del ordenador y dejaremos unos minutos para que el usuario se acomode y familiarice con él, encuentre el icono del navegador web y lo abra. Si puedes realizar el test desde el ordenador del usuario muchísimo mejor.

Misión

El siguiente paso es el más importante y es que sólo le encomendamos una misión no más larga que una oración y cuya tarea debe durar menos de 15-30 minutos (podemos encomendarle varias misiones, una a una, pero una sola a la vez). Por ejemplo:

Visita la página xaviesteve.com y compra el aparato de música de entre 100 y 200 euros que más te guste.

En esa frase queda implícito que el usuario deberá: buscar el producto, registrarse para poder comprar, confirmar un enlace de activación de la cuenta en su correo, hacer click en Comprar, introducir sus datos de la tarjeta de crédito (una vez saque su tarjeta de crédito le proporcionaremos una nuestra de prueba) y finalmente confirmar. Otro ejemplo sería:

Mañana quieres ir a cenar a un restaurante japonés, haz una reserva para 2 en la web helloplan.com y encuentra donde está ubicado.

Nuestro papel

Lo importante es que el usuario lo deduzca todo por él mismo sin que tengamos que explicarle nada. Si nos hace preguntas le diremos que no se preocupe, que intente descubrirlo él mismo. Si vemos que duda demasiado o empieza a frustrarse le ayudaremos.

Pensando en voz alta

Al usuario le pediremos que piense en voz alta durante el proceso, es decir, que vaya contando todo lo que piensa, hace y por qué, por ejemplo:

Espero a que la página se cargue, a ver… ¡Ahá! Aquí pone Electrónica, los aparatos de música estarán dentro, ah no, hay otro que se llama Música, debe ser este mejor, hago clic… Ok este es, bien, a ver, aquí centrado hay las mejore ofertas… aquí a la izquierda me sale una lista con subcategorías… voy a clicar aquí…

Analizar con detalle

Si disponemos de una cámara de vídeo o programa de screencasts, nos ayudará muchísimo para poder analizar mas tarde cualquier duda que el usuario haya podido tener y descurir las dudas y micro-gestos que ha tenido y que ocurren en milisegundos (estas son las que cuestan más de detectar y las que tenemos que solucionar) o aquellas donde el usuario duda de entre varias opciones.

Objetivo del test

Nuestro objetivo final del test de usabilidad es detectar qué podemos cambiar o mejorar para que nuestros usuarios reales tengan que pensar o dudar lo mínimo. Cuanto menos hagamos pensar a nuestro usuario menor será su nivel de frustración y mayor el de autorealización. Una web usable es aquella donde el usuario cumple su objetivo por intuición sin tener que pensar demasiado. Para acabar, una cita de uno de los genios en usabilidad web, os recomiendo su libro.

Una web poco usable no es aquella web que no se usará pero sí aquella que se usará menos.
–Steve Krug en ‘Don’t make me Think’

I’m currently developing a WordPress plugin that needs to show a virtual page generated by my plugin (such as a form or a message) and I wanted to avoid adding a new Page and modifying the current WordPress installation, so every plugin form, message or page had to be generated on the fly without touching the database.

Some WordPress plugins or themes create new pages in the website’s installation to add advanced functionalities. As an example, WooCommerce adds new pages to the wp_posts database that help set up the website to work with it. In my opinion this is a mess, if you already have a WordPress website running, installing this theme/plugin will mess with your current page structures and whenever you want to uninstall it or deactivate it you will need to manually remove those pages created previously by the plugin. I once wanted to test an advanced WordPress theme that deleted all the current pages I had… that was the most annoying thing ever, since I already had written the content for the website and lost it (yes, I should have backed up but, who would expect a theme to delete and install pages without even a warning?).

A few weeks ago I posted a question in WordPress StackExchange but couldn’t really get the answer I was looking for, there was this solution to create fake posts but I wanted generate unlimited pages with simple code as possible and using friendly URLs like: http://example.com/?plugin_page=myfakepage (I could then easily use mod_rewrite to make them look even better). Today I kept investigating and finally came with the solution.

Step by step guide

We will load the page at http://example.com/ but modify its title, content and select a blank theme template so it looks like a complete new page.

Custom page content

First of all we create a function that will overwrite the content:

function plugin_myown_content() {
  $return = '
<p>Fill in this form:</p>
<form action="?" method="post">
  <input type="text" name="foo" value="bar" />
  <input type="submit" value="Connect" />
</form>
';
  return $return;
}

Custom page title

Now we overwrite the title of the page with this function:

function plugin_myown_title() {
  return "On the fly foobar form";
}

Default page template

With this function we force WordPress to load the default page template of the current active theme:

function plugin_myown_template() {
  include(TEMPLATEPATH."/page.php");
  exit;
}

Hook actions and filters

Finally, we add a simple ifto check if the user is requesting the plugin’s fake page and run WordPress hooks to load the 3 functions mentioned before and force WordPress into displaying the virtual page we have just generated.

if ($_GET['plugin_page'] == "myfakepage") {
  add_filter('the_title','plugin_myown_title');
  add_filter('the_content','plugin_myown_content');
  add_action('template_redirect', 'plugin_myown_template');
}

The code is pretty basic, from here you can add your desired PHP code to make it do whatever you want. You can also add more hooks to customize the page even further. I hope you get the idea. This code has been tested with the latest version of WordPress (3.3.1).

After several Monopoly games with my flatmates I wondered about the “mathematical luck” that was involved in the game so I created a Monopoly simulator and emulated up to 1,000,000 turns in a 4 players game which shows that the game has a big luck factor for every player although there are very interesting facts that can help you in having a higher chance of winning the game. I am assuming that you already know the rules and have a solid strategy playing the game.

Street names are based in the London (United Kingdom, with Mayfair) board edition although the colours and positions of the lands are the same for all Monopoly versions so you should have no problem reading the report. Here’s how it looks for your reference:

General Tips and Facts

Trading

- Trading is a human to human interaction and a good people strategy is highly flexible. Do not criticise anyone and keep quiet during the game, you do not want to appear as an asshole or be hated. Focus on your partner’s benefits when selling and be positive and polite.

- When trading, consider a mortgaged property to be MortgageValue+(TotalValue/1.5).

- Make low trading offers to players (bad for them), they will usually decline. Then wait until they need the money and tell them again, they will not see it as bad as before.

- Never trade if you benefit a potential opponent the same or more, he is nothing more than your enemy in the game and will eventually try to destroy you with it.

Money

- Save money to pay for the highest rent you may need to pay in the next 3 moves.

- Spend money the latest you possibly can to avoid surprises and nasty debts.

- Mortgage (only 10% economical loss) before selling any properties (100% economical loss) or lands (highly unrecoverable).- It is better to spend your money in upgrading unmortgaged lands (building houses and hotels) than unmortgaging other lands.

Lands

- It is wise to mortgage at the beginning of the game (for buying more land, houses or paying debts) but keeping at least 20% of them unmortgaged (for houses and emergencies).

- Stations and Utilities are a great asset at the beginning of the game until people start building 3 houses.

Houses and hotels

- Get to 3 houses as soon as possible, rent increases substantially from 2 to 3.

- It is better to separate your buildings and higher rents along the board as much as possible instead of focusing on a “death passage”.

Random facts

- It takes from 6 to 10 rounds for a player to go through the board and get through GO.

- The rents go higher as you go to the end of the board (scroll down for charts).

Game rules

- Our brain is limited so the less you need to guess, the more accurate and precise your moves will be.

- Agree to play the official rules every time you can, the more you play to the same exact game, the better your brain is at predicting the best strategy and predicting old mistakes.

- Learn and set all the house rules before playing, this will not only avoid future confusion but help you in decide your strategy better.

- The official rules do not require you to pay rent if the owner doesn’t claim it.

- The official rules say you can buy and sell buildings before and after each turn, not only yours. Wait until people are close to your lands (see The dice probabilities below) to invest in buildings.

The dices

Since we are playing with two dices the probability is not even at all. The following graph shows the results obtained after throwing 2 dices 1,000,000 times:

Not a lot can be done with the dices but it is interesting to know that 6, 7 and 8 are the most probable results when throwing two dices, good for estimating future strategies and focusing your brain power in the most probable situations.

Best places to build

This chart shows you the chances of players landing in each land/position in the board (4 players played 100,000 rounds each). Turns skipped when in Jail have been calculated (including the chance of getting out too):

As you can see, lands after Jail are visited more frequently so you should really focus to acquire these lands.

Buildings profitability

When buying land and building, this is the profitability of the rent (ignoring utilities and stations).

Built 0 houses and 1 player paid rent

Built 1 hotel and 5 players paid rent

Profitability VS Probability

These charts compare the profitability of earning rent based on the times players land on them (100 rounds):

4 players, all lands with 0 houses (1,000 rounds)

4 players, all lands with hotels (1,000 rounds)

Further observations

I keep adding interesting charts and tips to this report every now and then so you may want to bookmark it or share it for future reference. Feel free to comment or add your own tips in the comments.

Script code available to download for free

The full code for the Monopoly algorithm is available at GitHub as a PHP script, if you know PHP programming feel free to extend the investigation with your own calculations so we can discover the most advanced tricks in this game and post them in the comments or send me an email to add your contribution and credits to this page.

Original post image by compujeramey.

This is a little compilation I’ve made of my most used code snippets every time I build a prototype, website or theme. By following these steps you can save 80% of coding time for any HTML/CSS website or WordPress theme. For some of my projects I use the Zen Coding plugin to develop the HTML. Most of the CSS itself is optimized already using short names and what some people call OOCSS (Object Oriented CSS).

1. CSS Reset and Minimal Grid

Yahoo CSS Reset

/* Copyright (c) 2011, Yahoo! Inc. All rights reserved.
Code licensed under the BSD License:

http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/license.html

version: 2.9.0 */
html{color:#000;background:#FFF}body,div,dl,dt,dd,ul,ol,li,h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,pre,code,form,fieldset,legend,input,button,textarea,select,p,blockquote,th,td{margin:0;padding:0}table{border-collapse:collapse;border-spacing:0}fieldset,img{border:0}address,button,caption,cite,code,dfn,em,input,optgroup,option,select,strong,textarea,th,var{font:inherit}del,ins{text-decoration:none}li{list-style:none}caption,th{text-align:left}h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6{font-size:100%;font-weight:normal}q:before,q:after{content:''}abbr,acronym{border:0;font-variant:normal}sup{vertical-align:baseline}sub{vertical-align:baseline}legend{color:#000}

960px Grid (12 cols, 60px width, 20px gutter)

/* Minimal Grid */
.g1{width:60px;}.g2{width:140px;}.g3{width:220px;}.g4{width:300px;}.g5{width:380px;}.g6{width:460px;}.g7{width:540px;}.g8{width:620px;}.g9{width:700px;}.g10{width:780px;}.g11{width:860px;}.g12{width:940px;}.g1,.g2,.g3,.g4,.g5,.g6,.g7,.g8,.g9,.g10,.g11,.g12{overflow:hidden;float:left;display:inline;margin:0 10px;}.r{width:960px;overflow:hidden;margin:0 auto;}.r .r{width:auto;display:inline-block;margin:0 -10px;}

CSS 100% box model

Padding, borders, margins and width equals 100%:

* {-webkit-box-sizing:border-box;-moz-box-sizing:border-box;box-sizing: border-box;}

Common CSS

/* Common CSS */
html {}body {font-family:Arial,sans-serif;font-size:14px;}
a{color:#0085d5;text-decoration:none}a:hover{}
li{display:inline}
h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6 {}
strong,.strong {font-weight:900}em,.em {font-style:italic}
.right{text-align:right}.center {text-align:center}
.fright{float:right}.fleft{float:left}
.hide{display:none}

Sprite map

/* Sprite */
#logo,.button,
.sprite{background:transparent url('images/sprite.jpg') no-repeat;}
.ico {display:inline-block;height:16px;width:16px}
.ico.aa {background-position:-px -px}

Forms and buttons

.button{background:#eee;border:1px solid #ccc;cursor:pointer;font-weight:900;padding:5px 10px;text-decoration:none}

CSS for the coming HTML template

/* Main structure */
#wrap {}
#header {}
 #logo {}
  #logo span {display:none}
 #s {}
#topnav {}
 #nav {}
  #nav li {display:inline}
#container {}
 #container a {text-decoration:underline}
 #container li {display:list-item}
 .main {}
 .main h1 {}
 .main h2 {}
 .main p {}

 .side {}
  .side h4 {}
  .side h5 {}
  .side p {}

#footer {}
 #footer p {}
 #footer p a {}

Overlap design watermark for pixel perfect CSS

    <style>
        #watermark {position:fixed;top:0;left:0;width:100%;background:url(images/watermark.jpg) top center;height:5px;opacity:0.2}
        #watermark:hover {height:1000px;opacity:0.5}
    </style>
    <div id="watermark"></div>

2. HTML Zen Coding shortcuts

Typical HTML website structure

With the power of Zen Coding, I can code a full HTML website in one line of code, then press the shortcut (Ctrl+, in Dreamweaver) and voila, there you have all the HTML ready:

html:xt>(div#wrap>(div#header.r>(div.g6>p#logo>span)+(div.g6>form#search>input[type=text]#s+input[type=submit].hide))+(div#topnav.r>div.g12>ul.nav>li*5>a)+(div#container.r>(div.main.g8>div.post>h1+p+img[src=http://dummyimage.com/150x150])+(div.side.g4>h4+p>ul>li*5>a))+(div#footer.r>(div.g6>p>a*1)+(div.g6>p>a*4)))

Here’s the fragmented HTML:

html:xt
div#wrap
div#header.r>div.g6*2
div#header.r>(div.g6>p#logo>span)+(div.g6>form#search>input[type=text]#s+input[type=submit].hide)
div#topnav.r>div.g12>ul.nav>li*5>a
div#container.r>(div.main.g8>div.post>h1+p+img[src=http://dummyimage.com/150x150])+(div.side.g4>h4+p>ul>li*5>a)
div#footer.r>(div.g6>p>a*1)+(div.g6>p>a*4)

Forms and tables

form>label+input:text+input:submit
select#items>option[value=item-$]*3
table>(tr>th*2)+(tr>td*2)

Listings

div.list-vert>(img[src=http://dummyimage.com/100x100]+h3+p.brand+span.rating-5+p.price+(p>a.button-m))

3. WordPress theme

1. Download the Starter Theme
2. Add TimThumb
3. Then grab snippets from WP Snippets
4. Start coding and customizing

4. WordPress customization

In the functions.php

date_default_timezone_set('Europe/Madrid');
date_default_timezone_set('Europe/London');

TimThumb shortcut

function timthumb($src, $w, $h, $q=90, $zc=1) {
    return get_bloginfo('template_url').'/thumb.php?src='.$src.'&w='.$w.'&h='.$h.'&q='.$q.'&zc='.$zc;
}

Custom field shortcut

function customfield($name, $id="") {
    $value = get_post_custom_values($name, $id);
    return $value[0];
}

Extract images of a post

function catch_that_image() {
    global $post, $posts;
    $first_img = '';
    ob_start();
    ob_end_clean();
    $output = preg_match_all('/<img.+src=[\'"]([^\'"]+)[\'"].*>/i', $post->post_content, $matches);
    $first_img = $matches [1] [0];

    if(empty($first_img)){ $first_img = "/images/default.jpg"; }
    return $first_img;
}

Nice excerpts

/* This function will trim text without
cutting it in the middle of the word and
adding … if longer
*/
function trimtext($text, $length) {
    $words = explode(" ", strip_tags($text));
    $newtext = "";
    $addhellip = "";
    foreach ($words as $word) {
        if (strlen($newtext." ".$word) < $length) {
            $newtext .= " ".$word;
        }else{
            $addhellip = 1;
            break;
        }
    }
    if ($addhellip) {$newtext .= "…";}
    return $newtext;
}

Get exact current page URL

function curPageURL() {
 $pageURL = 'http';
 if ($_SERVER["HTTPS"] == "on") {$pageURL .= "s";}
 $pageURL .= "://";
 if ($_SERVER["SERVER_PORT"] != "80") {
  $pageURL .= $_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"].":".$_SERVER["SERVER_PORT"].$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"];
 } else {
  $pageURL .= $_SERVER["SERVER_NAME"].$_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"];
 }
 return $pageURL;
}

Optimize WYSIWYG editor for SEO

if (isset($wp_version)) {
    add_filter("mce_buttons", "extended_editor_mce_buttons", 0);
    add_filter("mce_buttons_2", "extended_editor_mce_buttons_2", 0);
    add_filter('tiny_mce_before_init', 'extended_editor_change_mce_buttons', 0);
}

function extended_editor_mce_buttons($buttons) {
    return array(
        "formatselect", "separator",
        "bold", "italic", "separator",
        "bullist", "numlist", "blockquote", "separator",
        "link", "unlink", "separator",
        "charmap", "separator",
        "pasteword", "separator",
        "fullscreen", "separator",
    );
}

function extended_editor_mce_buttons_2($buttons) {
// the second toolbar line
return array();
}

function extended_editor_change_mce_buttons( $initArray ) {
    $initArray['theme_advanced_blockformats'] = 'p,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6,pre';
    return $initArray;
}

In the wp-config.php

Disable/limit revisions

# Maximum 5 revisions
define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', 5);
# Disable revisions
define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false);

 5. WordPress must-have plugins

• Admin Helper
• All-in-one SEO
• Google XML Sitemap
• HTML Sitemap

Related posts

• WordPress code snippets, tricks and cheat sheet
• WordPress Performance

Photo by CoffeGeek

If you have set up a new website or a company and want to send and receive emails with your company’s email address but don’t want to have multiple inboxes (specially when you manage more than 5 different email accounts) the best way to do it is to redirect all your emails to the same email account. And thanks to the power of Google Mail or Gmail you can manage unlimited accounts effortlessly and send and receive emails from different accounts easily into one inbox. Follow these two step-by-step guides to set up receiving and sending:

Receiving emails from your website to your email

Go to your website’s cPanel (if you don’t know what cPanel is then send this website to your web developer to do this for you) and click on Forwarding:

Then click on Add Forwarder:

Now fill in your email account name (what goes before the @ symbol) and select the domain you want to use, then forward it to your Gmail account like in the image:

Click on Add Forwarder and a success message will appear. You can now close cPanel. You must wait for a few minutes or even a few hours for the mail server to update and spread your new email account before it forwards emails correctly and you start receiving them.

Sending emails from your company’s email address

First of all make sure that emails sent to your company’s email address are successfully forwarded to your Gmail account, try sending a test email now and look in your Gmail account for the message to arrive. Once you open the message you should see your company’s email address in the To: field as in this screenshot:

If you are not receiving them then wait a few hours and try again later or check the Spam folder in case it went there.

Once you are receiving the emails you can set Gmail up to start sending emails with your company’s email address:

Go to the top right corner of Gmail and click Options > Mail settings:

The Settings page will open, click on Accounts and Import:

Now keep scrolling down until you see a Send email as section and a link to Add another email address you own, click that:

A popup window will open, on this step you need to fill in the name that will show when people receive an email from your company’s address and your company’s email address, then click on Next Step:

The easy and quick way now is to select Send through Gmail and click Next Step. If you want to send it through the SMTP servers of your company you will need to find them out asking your web developer or IT company. For HostGator accounts have a look at the Email client settings.

The next steps are pretty straight forward, a confirmation email will be sent to the company email address (which will be forwarded to your Gmail account), open it and click on the activation link to authorize Gmail to send emails as the company’s address.

Now, when writing a new email or replying to one, there will be a From: dropdown from which you will be able to choose the account to use:

Organizing your inbox

Once you start using multiple email accounts in the same inbox things may start to get unorganised. To solve this you can create tags. Go to your Gmail and go to Mail settings again (at the top right), then select the Filters tab and click Create a new filter and type in your company’s email address there and click Create filter with this search:

In this step select Apply label and create a new label:

You are done! Now, every time you receive an email to the company’s email address a label will appear next to the subject, you can customize the colour of the label and rename it to whatever you want.

In your inbox sidebar you will be able to filter messages sent only to that email address. Find below my own inbox, I have more than 10 email accounts configured and all of them have a different Label so that I keep everything organised:

If you have any questions or anything is unclear let me know in the comments section below and I will do my best to help you.

About a year ago I created a one-page document for content writers in my team to write better online articles. I am now releasing it so you can print it and have it close to you while writing. These are the most basic and important SEO tips you need to know if you want your posts to succeed. You will find a link to download the one-page PDF at the bottom of the article.

1. The most important tip is to create quality content

Posts that are bookmarked, shared, linked, commented or thanked. That should be the purpose of every post and should either be:

1. Useful (people reference to them)
2. Interesting (people bookmark them)
3. Funny or entertaining (people share them)

Here’s a good article extending this concept on writing with a purpose.

2. User goes always first

Keep the post readable and attractive to humans. Google is secondary. Ensuring you write for your users will have long-term SEO benefits.

3. Use Headings to split the content

Heading 1 is always the page title and it is the most important title. Headings to use in the content must start from Heading 2 to a max depth of H6. Use headings instead of bolding or formatting the text yourself.

4. Use eye-catching titles but keep them short

Don’t be just informative, get the user’s attention.

1. Windows tricks -> Top 10 coolest tricks for Windows!
2. London party places -> Best secret places to party in London

5. First paragraphs are the most important ones

Search Engines give more importance to the first part of the posts. In fact, really large posts are usually not indexed completely.

6. Be descriptive by adding keywords whenever possible

All headings should have keywords in them:

1. What I like -> What I like about the HP Pavilion laptop
2. My trip -> My awesome trip to Barcelona this summer

7. Use synonyms

Don’t repeat keywords you are not targeting for, use a lot of synonyms instead.

1. What I like about Acer -> Review about Acer computers / My opinion on Acer laptops

This way, users searching for “acer review”, “acer opinion” or “acer laptop” will find our page.

8. Rich formatting increases SEO

Eases Search Engines to identify the content.

• Using lists (and differentiating between ordered and unordered lists),
• bold and italic words or sentences,
• blockquote paragraphs when quoting or pasting literal text

9. Add both inbound and outbound links

Links to authority webs like Flickr, Wikipedia or YouTube can be frequent (you don’t lose any PageRank juice). But don’t link too much to other websites (one or two per paragraph). Always describe the links:

1. Download the Flash player by clicking here. -> Download the Flash player.

10. Format posts inside WordPress

Text editors like Microsoft Word may add irrelevant or invalid code into posts. If the text is in Word, paste it in Notepad so it looses all formatting, then copy and paste into WordPress and format it there using Headings, lists, bold, italic, etc.

Download the 10 SEO tips for WordPress PDF file

10 SEO tips for WordPress PDF file
If you have any doubts feel free to ask them in the comments. Also, share this article with your team, friends and colleagues for increased results and better blogging.

So you don’t want to waste any money in iPhone stands nor care about looks. You are looking for a stand where you can have your iPhone in portrait mode to read, listen to music and use most apps and also in landscape mode to watch movies too. You are lucky because thanks to one of the best inventions in the world… Yes! you got it right, the toilet paper roll! With just a single roll we can create a highly customized iPhone stand without too much effort or complex professional tools. It will just take you 60 seconds to create (without counting step 1). Keep reading for step-by-step instructions.

Instructions

1. First of all, finish a toilet paper roll as you would normally do (no image will be provided for this step).

2. Now get the roll and some scissors and cut it along the dashed line like in the following image:

3. You are done!

If you would like your cheapest iPhone stand to also be able to charge the iPhone… What?! Srsly? Yea! the cheapest iPhone stand can also charge your iPhone while it’s on it. Just cut an extra whole in the back like in the following image and put your cable in:

So that’s how you get a free iPhone stand. In fact, this stand will work for any phone so Androids are also welcome. Furthermore, I guess you could use a kitchen paper roll to create the cheapest iPad stand too.

Did you like this DIY tutorial? Share and tweet it to your friends and Apple fans!

This is a list of actions and tips to take in order to make your WordPress website faster and improve its performance. You should follow these steps at least once every 3-6 months depending on your website’s activity in order to keep it clean and to increase its performance to a top level. If you have been using WordPress for a while and have never cleaned it you may be surprised at how much database space you can save up, the last cleaning I did to a client saved 82% of space going from 132MB to 23MB.

Before running any queries in the database take backups of everything and make sure no one is editing any post or page while cleaning WordPress.

The database

1. Delete post revisions

Create a backup of the revisions first by selecting and exporting them:

SELECT * FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = 'revision'

Then delete them and be amazed at the big space savings:

DELETE FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = 'revision'

2. Limit post revision

By default, WordPress saves every revision of a post. This can make your wp_posts table 2 to 10 times bigger than necessary. In your wp-config.php file, add this:

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', no_of_revisions);

Leaving number of revisions to 10 is more than enough, if your blog is used by 1 or 2 people then 5 may be even better.

3. Disabling post revision

You can disable post revision completely (although I would personally leave it just in case). To do that:

define('WP_POST_REVISIONS', false);

4. Deleting spam comments

If you don’t use Akismet or any other effective spam control service, spam messages can bloat your database waiting to be approved or deleted. You can either go to the WordPress Administration Panel > Comments and delete them or just head to MySQL and execute this:

DELETE FROM `wp_comments` WHERE `comment_approved` NOT LIKE '1'

This query will delete both spam, pending and trashed comments.

5. Disable comments in all your WordPress blog posts

Some WordPress sites get loads of real comments every day but some don’t. If your website just receives spammy comments and you guess one in a million will be real, I may suggest you to consider disabling them, not only will this save you time and loads of database space but will also increase the performance and loading speed of your pages. You can install Disqus which allows people to post comments through several ways (Twitter, Facebook, manually, etc.) and has very effective spam protection. If you don’t get many comments and performance/SEO is a must then add a link to a Contact Us page next to the post and encourage people to contact you that way.
To disable comments go to Settings > Discussion and disable these two checkboxes:

• Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks.)
• Allow people to post comments on new articles

This will disable comments only in the new posts you create from now on. To disable comments (and pings) in your existing blog posts execute this query in your MySQL:

UPDATE `wp_posts` SET `comment_status` = 'closed', `ping_status` = 'closed';

6. Delete plugin log tables

Some plugins store log files in your database but these can sometimes get way too big if the plugin developer hasn’t set a limit. Check your database tables and look for big tables or tables containing log in their name.

7. Delete old plugin tables

Some WordPress plugins create tables in your database and when you delete them, the tables are still there to keep your configuration if you ever install the plugin again. If you do not intend to install them anymore, have a quick look at your database tables and see if you find any remains of those plugins.

8. Delete old plugin option parameters

Some WordPress plugins also store information in the wp_options table.

9. Optimize, analyze, check and repair your tables

After deleting so many records, it is good to optimize your tables again to remove any over-heading data.

10. Check your WordPress table’s Primary and Index Keys

It’s not just about size what makes a database run slower but the way it is indexed. Once you have cleaned your database, it is time to check that MySQL is indexing everything properly. phpMyAdmin is a very powerful tool and may also warn you about it or suggest better ways. I suggest you read more about MySQL and how it works to understand how queries are made, how to index properly and how a database works on the background.

The server

11. Remove old plugins completely

Connect with your FTP and remove any old plugins you are not using anymore. Don’t bother to remove Hello Dolly as it will get installed again in the next update.

12. Search for the upgrade folder

Sometimes (usually on failed WordPress automatic upgrades) an upgrade folder is created which contains some temporary files that you can remove.

13. Search for old backups

Delete old backups from the web server and store them locally, also search inside your plugins in case any of them stores backups there.

14. Search for cache files

If you use TimThumb or any other file caching system it is a good idea to, once in a while, clean the complete cache folder to remove items not used in a long time.

WordPress settings

You’ve now cleaned the database and the server files and probably made the server much quicker. You can now tweak your WordPress installation to make it work even faster.

15. Upgrade to the latest version

Seems quite obvious but it really makes a difference and protects you from any bugs.

16. Empty the posts/pages trash

The trash is emptied every 30 days by default. You can change that time by adding this function to your functions.php file:

//empty WordPress trash once a week
define('EMPTY_TRASH_DAYS', 7);

Or change the number to 0 to disable automatically emptying the trash at all.

17. WordPress permalinks

One of the biggest neglected performance hits by advanced users is the way you set up your permalinks. There has been much discussion and it has been demonstrated that you should not just use /%postname%/ as your Permalink structure. I personally use /%post_id%/%postname%/ as it’s the fastest query (the Post ID is a primary key in MySQL).

18. Remove non-changing dynamic code

PHP functions such as <?php bloginfo('title'); ?> or <?php if ( function_exists('my_plugin') ) ?> nearly always output the same value so it doesn’t make sense to request it all the time increasing server load. Replacing those with its static content will decrease avoidable queries. To see how many queries a page load does you can use this code: <?php echo get_num_queries();?> .

19. Enable the default WordPress Object Cache

If you are using a cache plugin such as WP Super Cache, W3 Total Cache or WP-Cache you should ignore this step.

Since WordPress 2.0 there is a feature called Object Cache which is not enabled by default. To enable it follow these steps:

• Open wp-config.php in your WordPress root folder
• Add the following code:

  define('ENABLE_CACHE', TRUE);

• Create a new folder called cache to store all the cached files in wp-content
• Change the cache folder permission to 755 or 777

You can set an expiration time to keep it clean, to do this add this line too (time is in seconds):

define('CACHE_EXPIRATION_TIME', 3600); // 1 hour

20. Move your WordPress installation to a subdirectory

It will help keep the web server root folder cleaner. To do this you will need to do some tweaks in your website’s administration panel or in Apache so that the destination of your domain points to the /wordpress/ folder.

21. Fix PHP notices and warnings

The plugins and theme you are using work fine, if not you would disable them. But occasionally some of them are not coded a 100% correctly. One of the most common issues is not defining variables in PHP, this is not just a bad coding practice but it also makes the PHP engine go a bit crazy and take extra time to process the code. It is very easy to fix and any beginner programmer should be able to manage this. Once you are done, notify the plugin/theme authors of these so they fix the warnings and notices on the next release. Enable WP_DEBUG in your wp-config.php file and read this article on PHP error suppression performance.

Further tips

22. Change your hosting provider

One of the main reasons why websites load slowly and sluggish is because of the hosting provider. Some hostings such as GoDaddy have really bad reputation and you should move to somewhere else like HostGator, you may spend £2-10 more per month but both your users and Google will compensate you.

Final notes

Here we’ve just covered optimizing a WordPress installation although you can keep optimizing the PHP code, MySQL queries, use less HTML, optimize the CSS selectors and use a sprite map, tailor Apache to your needs, enable Gzip compression to your files or use a Content Delivery Network amongst many others.