From the category archives:

Web Development

This has been done many times by others, but just a quick tip on how to add or remove www. from your website’s address. This is helpful for URL canonicalization and user experience consistency. You can also achieve SEO-friendly canonicalization using rel="canonical". Oh boy, I’m getting too technical :-) 

Here’s the juicy part:

Add the following to the .htaccess file in your website’s root folder (often named public_html or www). If there’s not a file named .htaccess, you may create it. If you are creating the .htaccess file, set the permissions to 644. For security reasons, you don’t want others to be able to write to this file.

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Get a list of WordPress categories to sort and exclude them...kind of like fruit!

When you would use excluded categories:

When using WordPress as more of a content management system (CMS) than a blogging platform, there are many things that you need control over. One of them is special-case categories.

  • Frequently asked questions
  • Testimonials
  • Case studies
  • Press releases

When you have a category of posts that you don’t want to have comments, publishing dates, post author, etc., you can define a list of excluded categories. In most cases, you should use Category Templates to achieve this functionality, but that is not always practical or the best option.

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ColdFusion, BabyRedirecting a website in ColdFusion (.CFM)

I have been working on a ColdFusion website, and I wanted to find a way to require ‘www.’ in the URL (to consolidate all pages on www. for SEO). I normally work with PHP and Apache servers, so I’m used to .htaccess. I knew there had to be a way.

Here’s a simple method of redirecting a whole website in ColdFusion:

<!-- If the site isn't www... -->
<cfif (CGI.SERVER_NAME NEQ "www.example.com")>
<!-- Save the URL (and $_GET variables too) as the string 'strUrl' -->
<cfset strUrl = CGI.script_name & "?" & CGI.query_string />
<!-- Use 301 for SEO-friendly redirects -->
<cfheader statuscode="301" statustext="Moved permanently">
<!-- Redirect to new website (this case, added www.) with strUrl added on -->
<cfheader name="Location" value="http://www.example.com#strUrl#">
</cfif>

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Check your plugin or widget activation & settings

Ever wonder if your widget or plugin is activated on an external site?

Here’s how to find out.

When you register a sidebar widget, you use code like this:

register_sidebar_widget(array('Name of Widget', 'class-of-widget'), 'widget_function');

If you want to check whether the widget is activated (you may want to for a variety of reasons), you can do it like this (the “class-of-widget” value from above will be used in the code below):

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Career-Magic.com Launched

February 27, 2009

New CareerMagic Website Design

An updated website for a Denver career coach

CAREERMagic came to Katz Web Design to give their website some fresh blood.

When Career-Magic.com was last updated, I was in high school.  Yes, it’s true — and I said it. The website not only needed updating visually, but there were a lot of parts of the website that needed to be better integrated with how the business ran.  The new Career-Magic.com website launched last night.

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Recover your password from Interspire Shopping Cart

February 9, 2009

Where did my Interspire password go?
I develop my websites locally, so sending Lost Password emails never works. When I forget what my password is, it’s quite the hassle.

I’m developing an Interspire Shopping Cart website, and lo and behold, I lost the password.

Here’s how to recover your password from Interspire Shopping Cart:

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