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Tips on phpMyAdmin CSV Importing
Recently I needed to bring a spreadsheet of data into a MySQL database table using the phpMyAdmin web front-end. It had been a while since I had last done this, and some of the import screen’s options didn’t seem to make sense. Why was the default value separator a semicolon? Was there something I had forgotten about the CSV file format? Time for some research. I found very little useful information online, and decided to muddle through it and document the process for the next time it comes up. Here goes.
Website Design Checklist
A lot of print designers now find themselves tasked with designing for the web, and handing their designs over to a team of web developers to actually implement. It’s one thing to design a beautiful landing page, but what’s really needed from them is a set of fully realized PSD mockups that leave very little to the CSS developer’s imagination. Here’s a list of often-overlooked interior page elements that designers should provide for every site.
Joomla Plugins: Embedding Video, Part 1
Continuing our series on Joomla plugins, this week we tackle the surprisingly complicated task of embedding video into Joomla articles. What makes embedding videos in Joomla so troublesome (especially for those accustomed to working in blogging software like WordPress) is that Joomla’s content editor strips out any embedding tags (like OBJECT, EMBED, and even SCRIPT tags).
Joomla Plugin: Tabs & Slides
A stock Joomla 1.5 install has no built-in facility to display page content in tabs or slides, and so developers must either cobble something together from scratch or use a third party plugin. And that’s what takes us to our first plugin of the series… Joomla Tabs and Slides (in content items).
WordPress Plugin: WordPress.com Stats
If you’re already using Google Analytics for WordPress (see our post on Google Analytics for WordPress) then you already have a ton of information about your blog’s traffic. So much information, in fact, that it may be hard to get a bird’s eye view. That’s where WordPress Stats comes in.
WordPress Plugin: Flexi Pages
The built-in Pages widget does a good job of listing, well, pages, but its options are limited. Which brings us to Flexi Pages, a highly configurable WordPress sidebar widget to list pages and sub-pages. Can be used as an alternative to the default ‘Pages’ widget. It even has a special option to include a Home link, which can come in handy if the title of your home page is something other than Home.
WordPress Plugin: Advanced Category Excluder
Advanced Category Excluder doesn’t just let you omit categories from the category list. It lets you omit categories from just about every form of item there is. You can even specify categories to be omitted from your RSS feeds. It’s glorious!
WordPress Plugin: Widgets Reloaded
The built-in WordPress widgets are great, but were designed for simplicity and ease of use. If you want true control over the output of your widgets (like to exclude certain items, change the order, or display the results of a custom query) you need something more sophisticated, and that brings us to Widgets Reloaded…
WordPress Plugin: Wordbook
It’s handy to be able to post it to your blog and not have to turn around and then also post it to Facebook. That’s where Wordbook comes in. It’s a great little plugin that takes each blog post and submits it automatically to your Facebook feed (photos and all).
WordPress Plugin: Twitter Widget Pro
Surely there must be a way to integrate your Twitter feed with your WordPress blog, right? Right! Meet Twitter Widget Pro. This little gem adds a widget item to your blog that you can then effortlessly add to the sidebar of any widget-enabled theme.