We wish you the very best of holidays and hope you have a wonderful new year. We’re very grateful to everyone we work with – thank you very much for putting your trust in us!

I really like how Google publishes the most popular search queries… here’s one of the lists for 2007:

Google Zeitgeist 2007

I haven’t tried searching for many of these questions online, but I hope people are finding some good information.

We’ve been setting up a lot of WordPress blogs lately. It’s very powerful and makes web page editing easy. While researching how to make a page to show the latest blog posts, I found this great tutorial on making WordPress do your bidding:

WordPress Theme Hacks by WebDesignerWall

These tips highlight what makes WordPress so great – solutions are simple and elegant.

I’ve been working on an interesting new project involving WordPress, and while I was looking for a plugin to display theme thumbnail images, I found a whole bunch of very cool stuff! Here’s a list of what I found, in no particular order:

• All in One SEO Pack – A simple and very powerful plugin to manage all the items that make your site attractive to the search engines. You can set the meta tags for your blog’s home page and for any individual page.
• Sabre – To protect your signup process from automated signup bots. You can enable captcha (where the user types in a security code) or a math test to verify the visitor is human.
• WassUp – Peek at what your visitors are doing while they visit your blog. This is a supplement to a normal statistics program (like Google Analytics) and has some really nice features, such as who is on your site right now, and what pages have been viewed recently.
• WordPress Automatic Upgrade – Makes a backup of your blog files and database, downloads the latest version of WordPress, and sends you to the upgrade page for completion. Updating doesn’t get much simpler than this! It’s important to keep up with the latest versions, so this is a really great tool to have!
• WordPress phpMyAdmin – Gives direct access to all of the contents of your database. Very useful, but also a potential disaster… don’t use empty, drop, or delete unless you mean to do it and know what will happen!

So there you have it, some very useful plugins. As always, let us know if you want one of these or any other plugins installed. We’re happy to help!

We’ve made an update to the backup program to correct an issue with the attachment file name. Please let me know if you have any trouble with your backup file.

Thank you!

Cookies are files placed on your computer by web sites, and they can be used to track your movements online. Many of the large advertising networks use cookies to see what kinds of sites you visit, so they can target their ads to your interests. If you would like to opt-out of this kind of tracking, here’s a site to do it:

Network Advertising Initiative

Simply check the advertisers from which you wish to opt-out, and you’re all set! You may want to visit this on a fairly regular basis, or if you delete your cookies for some reason, because you have to accept their cookie in order to opt-out.

For even more ways to opt-out of advertising, see this article: World Privacy Forum’s Top Ten Opt Outs

For all of you database nuts out there…

Exploits of a Mom

Thanks goes out to Bleys for this little tidbit.

Here’s a really neat site where you can load an image and get a color scheme from the colors in the image. Way cool!

colr.org

One of our clients has several Microsoft Access databases which we developed, and when I need to work on them, we email the files back and forth. Recently, his email program has started renaming the attached files!! For some reason, it comes through named as database.zlh instead of database.mdb. So I did a little digging and it looks like some program along the way is doing that for protection, to prevent viruses, trojans and such. Here’s an article which details the different extensions given to files when they’re being automatically renamed. I’m still not sure which program is doing this, but it’s good to know why it’s happening and to be assured that the contents are not being changed, just the name. The solution is to give the file the proper extension when saving the attachment.

We want to be sure our customers are happy! So here’s a site where you can go to get all the good news of the day:

http://www.gimundo.com

Enjoy!!