Here’s a neat site where you can upload a PDF, then fill it in. I tried it out and it works great!

Fill any PDF

For your security, do not use this service for forms which ask for your credit card or other sensitive information.

A customer asked me to make a bunch of changes to the theme of a very active web site. Since I couldn’t risk breaking the site or having it look strange for any amount of time, I had to find a way to work on a new set of header and footer files without disrupting the active theme. I found the simple answer here:

WordPress support – How to swap a theme

Basically you’re just adding a test to the page template which tests what page you’re on, and shows a different header and footer for that page. Here’s the little code snippet from the page:

<?php
if(is_page('somepagename')) {
get_header('test'); // Looks for a file called header-test.php
}
else {
get_header(); // Looks for regular header - header.php
}
?>

If you wanted to make the home page have different header and footer files, you could use the is_home() function instead of is_page.

Recently I set up a blog which has a bunch of users who will be posting articles, and I wanted the page which lists the author’s posts to have the author’s name in the link. The solution is to Add User Profile Fields and substitute user_nicename for twitter in the code. Thanks to Change the WordPress Author Archive Permalink by Kyle Eslick for the idea of getting it fixed up!

Sometimes people ask for more information to be stored about their WordPress users. Today I found a very nice solution!! I used this technique on the Career Thought Leaders Blog, for storing author bios.

Justin Tadlock on Adding User Profile Fields

It’s as simple as adding two things into your functions.php theme file. Then you have access to that info in your theme. Sweet!

Today I learned how to embed a Flash video on a web page. It was pretty easy after we converted the WMV file to a Flash video (.flv). The key was to get a Flash player for the web site, which we found here:

Flowplayer.org

It’s a free, open-source package which makes it simple to embed Flash movies on your web site. I was impressed with how quickly we got the video up and going. It involved adding a javascript file and then a call to the player:


<script type="text/javascript" src="flowplayer-3.1.4.min.js"></script>
<a href="Galapagos-3m-30-full.flv" style="display:block;width:450px;height:330px" id="player">
</a>
<script>
flowplayer("player", "flowplayer-3.1.5.swf");
</script>

That was it! Nice and easy. Thanks to Boutell.com for pointing me in the right direction.

Here’s a really neat resource for getting all kinds of useful information about your web site:

Grader.com

The Web Site Grader program will give suggestions for getting better results in the search engines. One of my favorites on this site is the Gobbledygook Grader… it tells you if you’re using outdated phrases or too much industry jargon on your pages. Neat!

Warning: Hardcore geek stuff ahead! Ok, it’s not that bad, but it is very technical and of interest mainly to programmers.

One of the most powerful tools a programmer has is regular expressions… small bits of code that can examine a string and pull out all sorts of information. Here’s a tutorial on eight of the expressions every programmer should know:

8 Regular Expressions You Should Know – from nettuts+

I like how they color code the expression and explain what each part does. It really makes it easy to understand.

As we move more of our stuff into the “cloud” of internet computers, we need a way to get a copy of the important stuff. Here’s an article which details different ways to get at your data.

Free Tools to Backup Your Online Accounts – from Lifehacker

As always, if you need any help with backup, contact us.

Today’s Lifehacker brought a very interesting tip. To stop sponsored ads from appearing alongside an email in gmail, simply include the following two sentences somewhere in your email:

I enjoy the massacre of ads. This sentence will slaughter ads without a messy bloodbath.

Cool!

I just love Web Marketing Today for advice on all things SEO. This is an area where I only dabble… I know the basics and am trying to learn more about it so I can help our clients get better search engine rankings. Here’s a really good article about how to make the best description meta tags:

How to Get Compelling Descriptions into Your Search Results

If you’re using WordPress, you’ll want to get the All in One SEO plugin, which allows you to set meta tags for every page and post.