Up Past Midnight

You really should charge your portable devices every night.

Once you begin developing web content, it doesn’t take you long to figure out that how your web site appears to people is, to a lesser or greater degree, a matter of which browser they are using.

One of Moodle’s greatest strengths is that you can create banks of questions that you can use in a variety of ways.

One of Moodle’s most useful, yet most often underutilized features is the ability to back up an entire course.

I’m online a lot: there are probably two dozen or so websites that I read regularly; another fifty or so that I read intermittently, and several hundred that I keep an eye on.

Moodle is a powerful CMS (course management system), because it allows a high degree of interactivity, both between students enrolled in a course and between students and the course itself.

If you like the spirit of Matt’s “Hello Dolly” plugin, which adds a line from Louis Armstrong’s song “Hello, Dolly” to the top of your WordPress backend, but feel that it doesn’t do much for your inner geek, I give you the “He’s Dead, Jim” plugin for Word…

One of the nice things about using Firefox as a web browser is that it is extensible—you can add things to it that help you do things you otherwise couldn’t.

Custom menus in WordPress give you a lot of control over the arrangement of your menus.

Like children, plugins don’t always play nicely together.

In my first spreadsheet tutorial, I described how I wanted to take this information from iTunes: and calculate the average song length.

There is a lot that you can do with a spreadsheet beyond simple sums and averages.

I recently replaced my old Dell Latitude D630 laptop with a bottom-of-the-line Toshiba Satellite C655.

WordPress’s Screen Options feature is relatively unknown to a lot of people.

I recently migrated over to a different laptop (a Toshiba C655), and was faced with the prospect of moving several hundred bookmarks and passwords over from my ancient Dell—a task I was not looking forward to, as I am really pressed for time right now, but

Someone over on the WordPress forums asked for a way to display the category description when using Graphene‘s front page category option.

In my earlier post about using Graphene action hook widgets, I neglected to mention how to target each widget in the style sheet.

I started blogging with WordPress long before I knew anything about how WordPress actually works.

A while ago, I asked on the support forum for Graphene if it would be possible to include the permalink for each comment.

Now with 1.6, the Graphene theme for WordPress offers a quick and easy way to change the width of your blog.

One of the neat things about WordPress is that it adds a unique id to posts, pages, tags, categories, and widgets (plus lots of things I’ve left out), making it not just possible but incredibly easy to target the CSS styling for one particular instance of…

I have the RSS feeds of several hundred blogs and websites bookmarked*.

I see a lot of requests on the Graphene support forum regarding changing the width of various elements of the theme.

A few years ago, my parents told me about an episode of ABC’s The View which featured a man who had published a book on how to make money on the internet.

In the first part of this tutorial, I showed you how to insert both pictures and code into a text widget in WordPress.

WordPress makes it very easy to link to other web pages, especially pages within your own blog.

If you’re using the Graphene theme for WordPress, you’ve probably realized how powerful it is, and how easy it is to customize.

This is a very basic introduction to the HTML language.

This is a sample picture.

One question I often get about WordPress is how to create a list of links to all the posts in a given category.

I am constantly recommending that people who are trying to tweak various elements on their WordPress blog use Firebug,* which will allow them to easily see the exactly the element in the code they are trying to change.

One of the great things about WordPress is that you can add a text widget to any place on your blog that handles widgets.

When designing a website or blog, you sometimes need a background.

For some time, I’ve wanted to add the ability to change the font size of a selected portion of a post, as if I were adding a footnote.

Earlier, I posted the custom CSS that I use on this blog, with the idea that others might want to see how I accomplished certain tasks.

I sometimes run into folks who have a hard time understanding the difference between pages and posts and how they act on a WordPress blog.

If you look at this blog, you’ll notice that the main background is a picture of stones under blue water, but that the background of the central content area has a white overcast to it.

A while back, I posted this on the Graphene support forum.

In order to talk about a custom menu, we should first talk about what a “default menu” is.