So the site probably looks really bizarre right now. I’m FireReadyAiming this redesign. The previous design was over 4 years old and quite dated. This new version will be more fun and hopefully better in all ways. If you have any brilliant ideas design or functionality, share them please! -Blake    

A guy I met while at college pinged me on Facebook and asked: I was looking at starting a small graphic design/ website design company and was wondering if you had any pointers or tips on the best way to start, and how to develop a client base. I was thinking about starting by bidding [...]

A recent WordPress project required having a recent posts widget that each link was styled differently with CSS based on what category the post came from. A bit of a jargon loaded sentence I admit. Basically, if a “recent post” link in this widget was from the “Tools” category (for instance) then it could be [...]

I’m on a workation right now (this was last week, just got around to publishing now). Yep, I am sitting poolside in sunny California. (no jealousy)  This has been a glorious week of exploring the San Jose/Los Altos/San Franciso area. The work part of this vacation comes every morning when I get up before 6 [...]

This is a wicked quick way to add the necessary MX records to your site so that you can use Google Apps for Domains. This is probably only useful and worth the effort if you are like me and create dozens of these setups for clients. Here is where you can download Texter. Here are [...]

Every year the Internet collectively goes berserk for one day. I figured this year I would try and catalog some of it as it happens. What follows is my log of the festivities. Happy April Fools Day! (I will update this post as the day goes on) 6:00am – YouTube from 1911 6:10am – My [...]

I recently got the idea to have all my external links to Wikipedia have a little “W” icon next to them in order to indicate that the links went to Wikipedia. The solution I came up with is to use some CSS and Regular Expressions to automatically add the image to any URLs that have http://en.wikipedia.org/ [...]

A client needed to import her RSS feed into a MailChimp campaign but the image wasn’t showing up. Here is how I finally got it to work. MediaRSS You first need to make sure the feed (yoursite.com/feed usually) is correctly bringing in the first image. I used a plugin called wpRichFeeds (view plugin author site) which [...]

If I want to get search traffic for blue widgets that are able to make spaghetti, what are some SEO factors that can tip Google in my favor of ranking for that? This post is partly just a test to see how quickly I can rank for that phrase :) Bear with me and I [...]

Ever wanted to see how prices for an item on Amazon have changed over time? Eh, maybe not but a new Chrome Extension does just that. It is called theTracktor and here is a screenshot to show what it does: I installed it because I am going to be buying my second Canon Powershot (Great [...]