The Antispam Bee plugin is my favorite free anti-spam plugin for WordPress. I've used it for years on several sites, and it's extremely effective. It integrates right into the default commenting system in WordPress. It doesn't work with Jetpack Comments or forms (Gravity Forms, Ninja Forms, etc.). Why not use Akismet? It's excellent and free […]
Note added June 18, 2020: When this post was originally written, TLS/SSL certificates could be expensive and difficult to install. Fortunately, things have changed for the better over the last few years. Many web hosts will give you a free Let's Encrypt certificate, and they make it easy to install. Another thing that has changed is […]
Handcrafted CSS: More Bulletproof Web Design by Dan Cederholm My rating: 4 of 5 stars In this visual book, Dan Cedarholm and Ethan Marcotte demonstrate 3 principles of “handcrafted CSS” through several specific examples. The examples feature border-radius, RGBA, modular floats, fluid grids, typography, and jQuery. The examples won’t age well, but the concepts certainly […]
Introducing HTML5 by Bruce Lawson My rating: 3 of 5 stars An entertaining introduction to HTML5 with real-world examples. Bruce Lawson and Remy Sharp have a creatively funny writing style, and I laughed at many of their code samples. The book covers several topics: structure, text, forms, video and audio, canvas, data storage, offline, drag […]
CSS: The Definitive Guide by Eric A. Meyer My rating: 4 of 5 stars “Definitive Guide” is a fairly accurate title for this 3rd edition of Eric Meyer's CSS textbook; it’s a deep dive of sometimes eye-glazing detail. It’s quite technical in its explanations of the math and calculations that CSS performs. There are CSS […]
I've been changing the permalink structure for WordPress sites to simply postname, and you can do the same! I'll show you how to generate the redirects you need. In the past, I've configured WordPress to use the permalink structure Day and Name, which formats the URLs for posts as /%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/. Although I knew that a […]
WP101 has many high-quality WordPress training videos in their WP101 tutorial series. These are just a few of the topics covered: The Dashboard Creating a New Post Using Categories and Tags Creating and Editing Pages Add Photos and Images Managing Comments Adding Widgets
The Web Design Business Kit 2.0 by Brendon Sinclair My rating: 5 of 5 stars This SitePoint kit is packed with actionable advice and recommendations for web design and development businesses. The author draws on 10 years of firsthand experience plus tips from other successful web professionals. It’s a well-organized, easy read with summaries and […]
You can never be too security-conscious with WordPress, so let's look an excellent security plugin: WP Security Scan. I found out about this plugin from the WordPress 3: Developing Secure Sites course on LinkedIn Learning. This plugin does several things, but I especially like the initial scan, permissions scanner, and database prefix changer. Initial Scan […]
I like to replace the default search functionality in WordPress with Google Custom Search. While recently redesigning a site using a child theme of the Twenty Eleven theme for WordPress, I found that Google had discontinued the IFrame option for Google Custom Search. Fortunately, I found this post: Integrating a Google Custom Search Engine into […]
The Principles of Beautiful Web Design by Jason Beaird My rating: 5 of 5 stars An excellent introduction to the artistic side of web design. Beaird teaches that a site’s design should reinforce the identity of the organization, and expertly shows how to use layout and composition, color, texture, typography, and imagery. He explains the […]
Creating a Website: the Missing Manual by Matthew MacDonald My rating: 3 of 5 stars This book is a decent introduction to many topics related to web design; too many topics, in my opinion. I expected the HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, but a large part of the book teaches how to use Twitter, Facebook, Blogger, […]
