Archive for the ‘blog’ Category

Flow FTP from Extendmac free giveaway

Thursday, March 11th, 2010

If you use a Mac and use FTP for any reason then you should be using Flow from Extendmac.

Flow is an FTP program that is simple to use and has excellent features.
I am a little bias as I use it all the time, however I have used many other FTP programs and Flow just seems to work.

The interface is what you would expect from Mac software, it is clean, sleek and a little bit whizzy. Add a new bookmark and you will see what I mean by whizzy, the panel slides in and lets you add the necessary details for your website FTP, SFTP, Amazon S3 or MobileMe iDisk servers. Transfer a file and the transfer panel slides in showing the progress and when finished it slides back.

Want to edit some files on your site directly?

I use this feature all the time, not only can you use the inbuilt text editor to edit html, php or any other text based files you can also set it to open files in your favourite editor. I edit my php files using Dreamweaver (don’t worry I use it as a glorified text editor) directly from the server and each time I save the file it shows a quick Growl notification to let me know it was saved. I can then view the site and the change has happened.

Need to see what image is what on the server?

You can with ease by simply clicking on the QuickLook button, it pops up a preview and you can view the image.

My favourite part of Flow is using Droplets. Droplets allow you to use a bookmark as a icon that is stored on your Mac. As an example I put a droplet into my working folder for a website. Then instead of having to launch Flow each time I want to upload a file I can drag the file onto the Droplet and it uploads the file for me.  A progress bar pops up to let me know it has worked even for multiple files.

I have only mentioned a few features that I particularly like but there are so many neat features that you need to try it yourself.

For one lucky reader I am fortunate enough to have a spare copy of Flow that Brian from Extendmac is allowing me to giveaway.

The Competition

To win a copy of Flow simply Tweet this article making sure you have @thefunkhouse in your tweet so I know you have done it.

Here is an example tweet you could use:

RT @thefunkhouse Flow FTP for Mac from @extendmac Free Giveaway:
 http://is.gd/adNLp A funky FTP program for mac that is so useful

If for any reason you do not use Twitter please leave a comment below stating how useful Flow would be for you. Please do not leave short comments that mean nothing, they will not be entered into the competition.

The winner will then be randomly chosen from all of those who participate.

The closing date is 18th March 2010 at 1pm GMT (Greenwich Mean Time)

HAS NOW ENDED

The winner will be notified on Twitter and I will also leave a comment below. The winner will then need to email me using the contact form leaving their Full name and email address so the license can be issued from Brian at Extendmac.

Good luck!

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WordPress plugin for registration page

Thursday, February 25th, 2010

First name Last name WordPress plugin

I made this a while ago, it simply adds the First name and Last name fields to the registration page.

It will need some styling if you are using the default WordPress screens.

It is a very simply plugin but it may be useful to someone.

Let me know if it useful :)

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Merry Christmas from The Funk House

Friday, December 25th, 2009

Wishing all a Merry Christmas and a Happy new year!

2009 has been an incredible year, thanks to all that used the services of The Funk House.

Let us hope 2010 is better than ever.

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SEO and your website

Sunday, September 27th, 2009

A question I get asked regularly is “How do I get to the top of the search engines?” sometimes this is when their website has only just gone live.

If a website has only just gone live then it can take up to 3 months for a website to be picked up by the search engines properly. Once this has happened and you are in the search engine result pages (SERPS) then it will depend on some key factors on your website.

First and foremost before I even mention keywords which is more often than not the first thing I am asked about, you must forget all that and concentrate on the structure of your website.

The structure for your website is the most important part of your website. Depending on how it has been built it can aid accessibility, usability and search engines.

How can structure help search engines?

If you were to read a book that instead of having lots of nice formatted text, nicely separated paragraphs and labeled with titles and so on but had lots of unknown text intermingled into the words on the page would you find it hard to read? Yes!

If we consider a search engine reading your site and your site is not built to be “readable” then you will make it a lot harder for a search engine to list your site.

The first thing I do if it is not one of my own websites that they want to get higher in the SERPS,  is to take a look under the hood and check out the structure of the website.

I usually run the website through a HTML validator and I also run through it manually looking at how each section reads and how clean the code is.

How clean the code is ?

This is referring to the code that is used to create your website, in todays standards it should be written in such a way that only the structure of the site and the content is visible. The styling, the bits that make it look good are contained in a separate file. This is important as it allows the search engines to get to your content and read it without much fuss.

Once you have the structure of the website correct and ready to insert your content you then need to begin to consider the keywords. This doesn’t mean you need to write every other sentence with your favourite keyword as this will be penalised by the search engines. This part will need some research into finding out what words are used in the search engines to find your website. If you have a new website then you will need to look at your competitors. You can look through websites and also ask friends or family to write down some words they think they would type to find your site. It is an art to finding out the correct keywords for you and your website as it will form the basis on which you will create your content.

You will need to consider your domain name, the title that is the top text in the browser, the page title which is like the news title in a paper, the paragraphs of text in the first few lines of content, the links within the page and emphasis on text such as bold text. These are only a few items that need to be looked at, there is a lot to consider so please take your time.

Even when adapting your site to the relevant keyword terms that you have discovered it still doesn’t mean your website will jump to the top of the search results as there is going to be competition especially if your business is in a category with many websites on the same subject. Take a look at your competitor’s websites and see how they are doing are they using the same keywords to make their website findable in the search engines? Do your research and do not rush it, you will reap the rewards later when you know your website search engine strategy inside and out. This will be an ongoing strategy that will change on a daily or weekly basis so be patient and make sure you use something like google analytics to track what is happening on your website.

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Funk house Upgrade to Anyvar WordPress plugin

Monday, August 10th, 2009

After stumbling on a WordPress plugin called Anyvar I found it was extremely useful. However, one thing I really did not like about the plugin was the fact that a user had to use code to type anything in unless it was some simple text.

anvar-wysiwyg

After some thought I decided to add the same WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor that WordPress uses to the plugin to allow everyone to be able to add text and even more useful is the ability to add images. Now a user can add images to the plugin just as you would do when editing a page or a post.

How did I add the WYSIWYG editor to the plugin?

Generally to add a visual editor with the media uploader to a plugin where there is a text area for editing then it is a simple process with just a few lines of code:

/** In plugin file **/

add_action('admin_print_scripts', 'add_thejs' );
add_action('admin_print_styles', 'add_thecss' );

function add_thecss()
{
    wp_enqueue_style('thickbox');
}

function add_thejs()
	{
		if ( user_can_richedit() ){
			wp_enqueue_script('editor');
			wp_enqueue_script('media-upload');
			add_action('admin_head', 'wp_tiny_mce');
		}
	}

/** Then wherever the textarea is replace it with the following **/

    <?php the_editor('Some content here','content'); ?>

It is good to note that if you don’t use the id of content then the visual display will not be selected automatically it will select the HTML view first.

It is quite amazing that all you need are these few lines of code to enable the use of the editor. The code i used was slightly different for the Anyvar plugin as the following needs to be added as an array:

add_action("admin_print_styles-$page", array(&$this,'anyvar_css')); // Add required css file(s)
add_action("admin_print_scripts-$page", array(&$this,'anyvar_head')); // Add required JS file(s)

Hopefully the code above to add the editor is straight forward enough to add to your plugin.
Just to give you a quick overview of what it does here is a quick run down.

The add actions are how the functions are called then in each function the CSS or the Javascript is added in turn.

One thing I added was the:

if ( user_can_richedit() ){

This then allows you to only show the editor if the user has the rights to use one.

I hope this is useful to someone and I hope that Matt from devspace includes it in the next release.

Here is the my updated file for you to download: Anyvar Updated – You may need to right click and save file as.
You will need to change the .txt extension to be .php

*Please note that although I have tested this on a few sites you should make sure you test it and backup before using it on a live website.

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