Reviews »

Getting web traffic can be one of the most frustrating and rewarding things about starting a new website. Luckily, it just got a little easier. Enter ReviewBack and Adgridwork. These two websites, created and maintained by the same group, let you create an easy flow of traffic to your website by participation in blog post exchanges (RevewBack) and an ad swap (Adgridwork). Both are easy ways of brining in traffic to your new site. Oh, and both are free. Hey, you may even see these services around here once in a while. Read on to find out the details.

Let’s start with ReviewBack. Swapping blog posts with other bloggers is not a new concept. But ReviewBack has…

Useful Tools »

I’ve had a number of people email me this past week and ask how I got code to show up so nicely in my post about a Fisheye Menu Script. The standard way is to use the <code> HTML tags. Unfortunately, even if you don’t use a WYSIWYG HTML editor, Wordpress still tries to clean up your code and seems to ignore the <code> tags. So how can you get around this?

There is an easy way. After looking for 30 minutes one day on the best way to effectivly publish code on my blog, here it is. And it’s actually remarkably simple.

First, download a plugin called “Preserve Code Formatting” by coffe2code here. Refer to the…

Tutorial/How-To, Useful Tools »

I’ve always been a fan of Macintosh’s Dock. Something about that sleek mouseover effect gets me every time. Recently, I was working on a project that needed a minimally invasive similar effect on a website. During the course of getting it ready, I came across a number of scripts that attempted this very thing. Some of them were good, some weren’t. Fisheye Menu by Marc Grabanski is so easy to install that I thought I’d share it here.

The script is open source, though I’ve only made minimal tweaks to it. All credit and blame go solely to Marc Grabanski. The only thing I’ve added is a single line of code that changes the mouse cursor to…

Reviews »

This article was originally written for Site Scrutiny, a blog I wrote that has since ended. This has been merged here as part of the consolidation process.

I always love good plugins and code snippets for websites. There are tons of sites that offer free javascript or PHP or whatever code, but JS-Kit seems to offer something different. I discoverd JS-Kit by chance. I was actually looking for a self-maintained commenting system for Simply-Basic.com. I was too lazy to code one myself and too cheap to hire anyone to do it for me. I found several PHP database driven commenting systems, but I wanted something easier. That is just what JS-Kit is.

They actually offer several different…