It doesn't take much to make me happy, but then it doesn't take much to annoy me either.
Tech tips I'd like to remember, especially after a lot of frustrating web searches trying to figure things out. A lot of this has to do with putting together a website, but there are other things as well that are related to tech. Especially regarding a website, I'd like to think it was easy but it really took a few times to get the hang of Expression Web. It also doesn't hurt to know some HTML.
That said, the honest truth is I'm too lazy to do something that isn't easy. So if I can do it, pretty much anyone else can do it too.
Posting Photos From Your Phone - I'm learning that you need to be careful when taking photos with your cell phone of pictures you want to post online. Apparently the phone attempts to keep track of the photo up/down orientation. When holding a phone directly in front of you it's easy to figure out, but if you hold the phone flat, when you'd take a photo of something on the ground in front of you, the phone has a hard time figuring out top from bottom. If it guesses wrong, you can end up with a picture that is rotated incorrectly. This doesn't matter if you're just looking at a picture on your phone, but if you want to view it elsewhere, say on a website, then it can be rotated wrong.
It gets even more complicated when the meta data, the information about the picture that is also stored with the picture, has incorrect orientation stored as well.
All this to say that if you plan to view a picture on anything other than your phone, try to orient the cell phone in an obvious up/down orientation so that the phone doesn't get confused about it.
Email Filter Using Sieve - this isn't really a website building tip so much as a place to put things I learned about using Sieve as a mail filter. There are several steps involved:require ["fileinto", "mailbox"];
if address "from" ["alerts@citibank.com", "notifications@disqus.net" { fileinto "Archive"; stop; }
if address "from" ["ml@2brightsparks.com", "noreply@sender.acronis.online" { fileinto "Trash"; stop; }
Web Hosting Service - TigerTech.net. I can't say enough good things about these folks. I've been with them since 2007 and they've been great in every way. Their support site is very good, with step-by-step instructions (personalized to your account) for nearly everything. Every year I get a notice about admin contact updates for my domain, as well as early renewals. Payment options are either monthly or go for a discount of several years.
TheSiteWizard - Excellent site with much info and many tutorials about how to create a website, specifically a great step-by-step tutorial for Microsoft Expression Web 4. Also has an abundance of suggestions and tips about websites. Great resource if you're building a commercial site with the intention of using it for a business.
Microsoft Expression Web 4 - The free version of Microsoft Expression Web. Use this software to setup a website a build it from the ground up. The download will mention "demo" but it's the full version with all features available to use.
Custom Fonts - Using CSS @font-face for custom fonts on your website. A good explanation of fonts. You can setup custom fonts for just the most popular browers, or cover all the bases with instructions for every browser out there.
Permanent Links - Wherever the symbol ∞ appears on my website it represents a permanent link. This is a method for saving the contents of a webpage to an archive that won't change, even if the original website does. I figured out a way to do this using Evernote. For example, if I wanted to save the page yahoo.com, I would open that in my browser and use Evernote Web Clipper to save it to Evernote. Then open Evernote and export the saved note to an HTML format, located in an archive folder on my website. Next simply create a hyperlink using the ∞ symbol which opens the archived page.
Photofiltre - free editing software that I use to resize and drop-shadow photos.