A software that looks promising for some mass emailing is phpList: open source and free.

Very useful stuff here!

I see Prashant Vikram has written a post about ten search engine news blogs to read daily. It actually looks like a pretty good list.

You may have discovered that one of the best content management systems is none other than the free, open source Word Press. I love Wordpress. Do you? Or, perhaps you haven’t discovered it yet. If not, fire up the internets and start typing in the Google. The cool thing about Wordpress is if you’re looking to make your web money through multiple sites…WP makes it quite easy to set them up.

Okay, seriously, I was just reading about a Wordpress plugin that seems almost too good to be true: it’s called Wordpress Automatic Upgrade.

This is what it does:

Backs up the files and makes available a link to download it.
Backs up the database and makes available a link to download it.
Downloads the latest files from http://wordpress.org/latest.zip and unzips it.
Puts the site in maintenance mode.
De-activates all active plugins and remembers it.
Upgrades wordpress files.
Gives you a link that will open in a new window to upgrade installation.
Re-activates the plugins.

Sounds great. For whatever reason, I just sort of tend to not trust hacks like this one…but, I will give it a try when the next upgrade comes out…

http://www.m3nt0r.de/blog/lightbox-wordpress-plugin/

If you want to Lightbox a row of photos:
All right… so, you just line up images in any manner that you normally would… you give the images the same name in the squiggly brackets in the title (which is part of the a tag)…. that’s what allows you to click through the images of the pop-up …

next time I’ll style the thumbnails with some css to make things a bit more attractive!

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If you want to lightbox text… you just hyperlink it to the image on the server (the .jpg or .gif or whatever) …

all right… that was fun… I think my Lightbox posts explain it better to a non genius sort of web designer who needs specifics… I am a little messy … I know that… but, did this help you at all?

okay, in this one the images are simply getting hyperlinked to the big image … there’s not that crazy list of squigglies… God, I hope these directions help somebody, because it’s not that complicated… but, DAMN THOSE INSTRUCTIONS!

Okay, if you look at Lightbox Experiment 2, you’ll see how to link text to the pop up image.. that’s easy… you just basically hyperlink the text DIRECTLY TO THE IMAGE FILE ON YOUR SERVER… really couldn’t be any easier…

okay, now I’m going to try a row of 3 images again… let me prepare the images…

First I’ll just put the thumbnails in here and see what happens I guess.

okay, so when I did that the images just lined up vertically on the screen …. just what you’d expect … I just put them in using the standard img src =

Okay, now I’ll past it again but hyperlink them to the big image on the server:

Okay, so far so good… you basically just hyperlink the smaller image to the bigger version on your server…that’s pretty easy…

Okay, now to line up the images…

In the hyperlink a tag you give the image a title and in the title’s quotation marks you use these{} to give it a name that will be used for all of the images in their respective titles… so, i’m going to use {hot} and, this will go into the a tag’s title in all three images along with a title okay …. so, in the “quotation marks” of the title you’ve got the squiggly brackets{} that have a name you designate (same name for all of them) and then a different title for each…

then you make a list that has your squiggly thing… in this case
{hot} and after the {hot} you type in the title you designated …. let’s try

{hot} this is number one
{hot} this is number two
{hot} this is number three

okay, they didn’t line up like I was trying… we definitely have made a lot of progress…but, why aren’t they lining up right? hmmmmmmm…. back to those instructions!!!!!!!!!!!!

on second thought… it did sort of work because it gives the next option on the pop-up

okay, let me try this

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want to create some space from above tests

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okay, let me start a new post lightbox experiment 4

(this one was successful for using lightbox to link a text hyperlink to an image pop up…and, it’s a really nice plugin… really… I just found the directions confusing)

Okay, the first experiment was a huge pain in the ass! Now, let’s try again with text links!

CLICK

OH, HALLELUJAH!!!!!!

Now, granted … I’m not the smartest guy in the world, but, damn…

Here’s an experiment

CLICK

here’s another experiment

CLICK

okay, so, in the example above…for single images, you don’t need any crazy brackets or anything…. you just hyperlink the text directly to the image on your server…

/CLICK

Are you like me in that you’ve been using CSS for three or four years now…and, you’re definitely able to rock it…but, if you want to get really honest…you just sort of get by with it…meaning, yea, you can design web pages, and, you understand CSS; but, you know pretty well that you’re not utilizing its full powers…and, though you recognize what does what…you really don’t know the terminology?

Gee, that was a pretty long question with pretty of ellipses … so, anyway, that’s the category I fall in…and, when I had the recent need to tweak the hell out of a particular Wordpress theme…I decided it was time to really master these style sheets. Over at Borders there were about ten books on the topic. I chose CSS The Missing Manual by David Sawyer McFarland. I pretty much mastered most of Dreamweaver’s functionality by using his Missing Manual on that…so, it seemed like a pretty reasonable choice.

Take the term selectors for instance…I never really used this term: in conversation or in my mind. But, the selector is just the part outside the brackets: either the tag or the class or id … that’s all….. and all the rules or instructions for the selector… that’s called a declaration block.

This book has about 400 pages. I figure I can rip through it in 8 days by reading 50 pages a day. Not bad. And, then I should be a CSS ninja. I may type some of my notes into here too. It should be useful for the sort of advanced-beginner CSS ninja-wannabees out there!

And, when you format the different states of links…something that you’ve probably done before…well, those are called pseudo-classes. Another cool thing I read about was how to use the :first-child selector to format the very first element in a list…very cool.

when you see this

margin: 0px 20px

that means that top and bottom are 0px
and right and left are 20px

Isn’t kind of cool the way some web or magazine articles start off with the big first letter? It makes me think about how it’s the little touches that can make a big impact. These are the things I think about. Among other randomness…like why my cat is currently drinking the coffee out of my cup? Are cats supposed to do that? A Maine Coone with coffee breath! So, Css is pretty cool…right?

Anyway, here are two tutes:
1. Mandarin Design
2. Design Gala: holy shit when I used that css … it must be just me… but things got so incredibly janky I started blinking rapidly …… all of a sudden text sizes changed all over the place and lists became bulleted and it was like the Twilight Zone!