Category Archives: Misc.

Sketch and Adobe Fireworks: Thoughts/Comparison

With Adobe’s decision to kill off Fireworks, there has been a lot of discussion of what would replace it. Most seem to be pointing to Sketch. So… I decided to do a video on my thoughts of Sketch and how it compares to Fireworks. I wanted to compare some of the common things that I do in Fireworks and how I could translate that to Sketch. Here is what I found, so far.

I have not spent a great deal of time with Sketch but I will say, Sketch is easy to use and is definitely on the right track to being a great alternative. I do not plan to ditch Fireworks at this point, but it will be on my mind over the next few months as a contender to replacing it.

How about you? Have you made a switch to an alternative?

WebResource.axd and ScriptResource.axd 404 error with WordPress

While working on a WordPress project, one of the requirements was to keep an existing web application in ASP.NET which also meant that this would be on a Windows server. No big whoop, right? Here is something I learned…

The rewrite rules for WordPress in the web.config can interfere with calling the WebResource.axd and ScriptResource.axd. The problem is they show up as 404 errors when called via the ASP.NET app.

The fix was to modify the rewrite rules as follows…

The difference is changing the patternSyntax from WildCard to ECMAScript and adding the pattern for .axd.

Dynamic Subpages in WordPress

When working with client websites (or your own), it important to make it easy to navigate content. In many cases, you will have a horizontal top (parent) level navigation menu and you might have drop down menus to drill down through child pages. This is helpful, but not easy to use, especially if your menu is several levels deep. In general, you should not rely only on drop down menus alone. It is bad UX design and frustrates users. So what can you do?

subnav-example

As noted in the example image above… You can have a sub-navigation element that displays dynamically based on the top (parent) level navigation that was selected!

Fortunately, there are a few  plugins that will help you do just that. My current favorite is “BE Subpages Widget” by Bill Erickson.

Plugin: BE Subpages Widget by Bill Erickson

But don’t limit yourself, there are several out there

WordPress: Load jQuery From CDN

Add the following snippet to your function.php file to load jQuery from a CDN.

Source: WordPress Codex

Create QR codes!

http://www.generate-qr-codes.com/ Just for the heck of it, I created a QR code generator based on google APIs. Nothing special. Just a tool that will allow to create a QR code and add it to your site. It will let your users to take snapshots of the QR code on your site using their mobile device to easily gain access to pages, contacts and more. 

www.generate-qr-codes.com