Install WordPress on your home computer

I like to try new things with WordPress, but it's time consuming, and occasionally risky, to upload every incremental change or tweak to a remote web host for testing. Wouldn't it be great to have a local test environment with MySql, PHP, and WordPress?

After doing a little research, I discovered XAMPP, with Apache, MySQL, [...]

June 3rd, 2010 | Tags: , , | Category: Web Building, WordPress | Leave a comment

Link to product details in an aStore iframe

It’s easy to link to product detail pages in a standalone Amazon store, or to use the target attribute with a custom navigation menu on the same web page as an aStore iframe. But what if you have several product reviews on various pages of your site, and want to link to their product [...]

March 2nd, 2010 | Tags: , , , , , , , , | Category: Amazon, Web Building, WordPress | 13 comments

Trying out jing

I have coveted Camtasia ever since I downloaded it as a 30-day trial several years ago, but couldn’t justify the cost. Last week, I discovered Jing. My goal was to find screencasting software for demos on how to access databases from a portal site. First I tried using my trusty copy of SnagIt, which gave [...]

February 10th, 2010 | Tags: , | Category: Web Building | 2 comments

Precise font-size and line-height

I love the flexibility of the Atahualpa WordPress Theme Options list, but I confess to making one change to a core file outside of the Options interface. I added a line to css.php to set the font-size of the root element to 62.5% so that the body font expressed in ems could be calculated as [...]

January 4th, 2010 | Tags: , , | Category: Web Building, WordPress | Leave a comment

Amazon Video on Demand Widget

Amazon has had a Flash widget for previewing shows offered by its Video On Demand service. Amazon Associates may add the widget to web pages or blog posts. The first step in creating the widget is to select popular types of shows from a menu or choose items from keyword search results. The widget wizard [...]

January 3rd, 2010 | Tags: , , | Category: Amazon, Web Building | Leave a comment

Create an Amazon Image link

There are several ways to create Amazon image links in WordPress. This post describes how to download a product image from Amazon (or construct a direct URL to a product image), and then use the WordPress Upload/Insert Media wizard to upload the image (or specify the image URL), and create the image link.

Experienced web developers [...]

October 18th, 2009 | Tags: , , , , | Category: Amazon, Web Building | 5 comments

Amazon code without a plugin

Just paste the code into the HTML editor. It’s advisable to not use the Visual editor if the post is edited after saving. A plugin is not necessary, just convenient. For example, at left is a text+image iframe link. It has not been modified except to ensure that no line breaks are in the [...]

October 6th, 2009 | Tags: , , | Category: Amazon, Web Building | Leave a comment

Amazon MP3 widget in a post

Just testing addition of Amazon's Widget Source MP3 widget example playlist to see if it works here. Widget Source uses swfobject.js instead of <object> and <embed> tags to display the flash file. The code is cleaner and it does not cause validation to fail. The example below is a mini version of the MP3 widget, [...]

September 12th, 2009 | Tags: , , | Category: Amazon, Web Building | Leave a comment

Amazon Carousel in a post

I pasted the code for this Amazon Carousel Widget into the post using the HTML editor. I had just installed the tiny RawHTML plugin because it adds several convenient options to the HTML editing screen, so I also enclosed the widget code in "raw" comment tags. The syntax is <!--start_raw--><!--end_raw-->. Unexpectedly easy!

I prefer to use [...]

September 11th, 2009 | Tags: , , , | Category: Amazon, Web Building | Leave a comment