posted on December 29, 2012 by
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Extract Email Addresses from a Website, Without Coding…

A few days ago, I needed to compile a database of local business emails without spending a lot of time or exertion doing so. Being a linux fan, I ran across the following: combine GNU Wget with Grep’s regular expression (regex) capabilities.

Wget is an open-source tool used for mirroring directories, and likewise, has the ability to download files from most directories that are unrestricted (html, asp.net, php, et cetera).

Step One: Download and install wget for use with linux or windows.

Step Two: Run the following through terminal or a command prompt:

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wget -nv -nH -r -A html robots=off --ignore-tags=img,link www.example.com

Step Three: Run the Grep regex:

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grep -Eiorh '([[:alnum:]_.]+@[[:alnum:]_]+?\.[[:alpha:].]{2,6})' ./ > ouput.txt
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posted on December 23, 2012 by
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Localized Copy of WordPress Codex, 12/23/12

I created a fully recursive and localized copy of the WordPress Codex today. Feel free to grab it off of my server as a zip file here! It’ll be uploaded to GitHub shortly.

Be advised that because the copy is fully recursive, all translated languages are included.

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posted on December 19, 2012 by
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Free Marketing Tools Roundup

Alexa

Alexa provides site ranking based on domain age, inbound links, traffic, social interaction, and estimated reach. See your score today.

AppFog

AppFog provides free hosting for up to 2GB of bandwidth. Great for the common bootlegger!

Bing Webmaster Tools

A combination of both Bing and Yahoo Webmaster Tools, Bing offers domain mapping, troubleshooting, and operations support for the Bing and Yahoo search engines and crawlers.

Dlvr.it

Dlvr.it offers extensive functionality within the area of content delivery. Dlvr.it purveys feed and post scheduling, analytics, 3rd party API integration (Bit.ly & Feedburner)—as well as content optimization.

Feedburner

Feedburner, owned by Google Inc., offers RSS feed management for millions of domains. Even though their have been many rumors posted lately about being shut down, we think it’s here to stay!

Flickr

Creative Commons A source for free stock photography. Licenses vary, so be sure to read the informational page before implementation of graphic assets!

Google Analytics

Google Analytics provides a powerful api for tracking just about everything that a customer could possible do on your site. From event tracking to custom variable tracking to ecommerce tracking, Google’s API is one the best tracking tools available.

Google Webfonts

Google Webfonts provides an extensive collection of open source font-kits. Awesome for somebody who doesn’t want to buy a collection from TypeKit.

Google Webmaster Tools

Google Webmaster Tools provides a simple yet great domain management tool. Offering site speed optimization, crawl settings, and report automation, Google Webmaster Tools is a premier tool for webmasters.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite offers premier social media management including post scheduling, pushing updates to all social accounts, and tracking social traffic.

Mailchimp

MailChimp offers email list management, sign-up form creation, social integration with Facebook, email templates, and automated emails based on a UX trigger.

Pingdom

Pingdom offers domain monitoring services—keep track of how your site performs, receive performance notifications over multiple mediums, and troubleshoot server problems with ease. Pingdom’s page speed tool provides you with an instantaneous breakdown of http request load times, with suggestions for page load optimization.

WordPress

WordPress offers a powerful and customizable Content Management System (CMS), on which you can build landing pages, blogs, and e-commerce systems. Limited to only ingenuity and development time, WordPress offers the largest collection of open source plugins and free template themes for a myriad of rapid development needs.

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posted on December 19, 2012 by
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Spend Less Time Changing Source Files: Sublime SFTP Package

An incredible add-on, the Sublime SFTP package, offers the functionality of embedded SFTP/FTP capabilities directly into the Sublime 2 text editor. As if Sublime couldn’t get any better! Licenses do cost $16 dollars, but the cost is well worth the cost.

For WordPress developers, it can be a pain to set up a local development environment for the one-time site development on an external host.

Instead of having to manually update through a 3rd party FTP client such as filezilla, simply configure your SFTP/FTP settings and root mapping, and let Sublime do the rest! A simple save command with push the updates via SSH. Keep in mind that you’ll need to first install and configure Package Control (open source) in order to allow for third party extensions.

You can grab a copy of the Sublime SFTP Package here.

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posted on December 19, 2012 by
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Hacking Links with Jquery

In some instances, it is necessary to hack links on a landing page with Jquery. This is especially useful when you do not have access to the back-end of a site, or need to make a quick fix while waiting on a webmaster. Keep in mind that you’ll need to call the latest Jquery library into your page:

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(<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.2/jquery.min.js"></script>)

One way to do this is with Jquery’s attribute method. You can see the example below:

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<script type="text/javascript">
	$(document).ready(function(){
	$("a#id").attr('href', '/replacement-link');
});
</script>

You can also switch out text and html elements:

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<script type="text/javascript">
   $(document).ready(function(){
                $('div#id').replaceWith("new-html-encoded");
                });
</script>
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posted on December 16, 2012 by
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Responsive Design and Media Queries Explained

For those of you not familiar with responsive design and coding, web design is now highly focused on making web-sites compatible with any browser size or client. There are multiple ways to go about creating a mobile friendly site—with common responses being jQuery Mobile or HTML5 template builders—but today we’re focusing on media queries in relationship to creating a mobile friendly and responsive design.

Simply put, media queries are conditional styles within your stylesheet, or if you choose, query specific stylesheets. One can simply add alternative styles per sizing within each media query (much like LESS nesting). You’ll essentially need to rewrite the same css multiple times for however many media queries you choose to go with. Keep in mind that font-sizes, images, and button sizing will need to change between queries in order to keep a viable user experience.

See below for implementation examples:

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	/* Media queries */
 
	@media screen and (max-width: 1200px) {
		    div#content-wrapper {
		        width: 1000px;
		        background:url(/images/00-background.png) no-repeat 0px 0px;
		    }
 
		    div#sidebar-wrapper {
		        width: 200px;
		        background:url(/images/00-gradient.png) no-repeat 0px 0px;
		    }
	}
 
	@media screen and (max-width: 980px) {
		    div#content-wrapper {
		        width: 860px;
		        background:url(/images/01-background.png) no-repeat 0px 0px;
		    }
 
		    div#sidebar-wrapper {
		        width: 120px;
		        background:url(/images/01-gradient.png) no-repeat 0px 0px;
		    }
	}
 
	@media screen and (max-width: 750px) {
		    div#content-wrapper {
		        width: 680px;
		        background:url(/images/02-background.png) no-repeat 0px 0px;
		    }
 
		    div#sidebar-wrapper {
		        width: 70px;
		        background:url(/images/02-gradient.png) no-repeat 0px 0px;
		    }
	}
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posted on December 16, 2012 by
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CSS Opacity Compatibility

Css compatibility can be a pain in the butt when coding for obvious cross-browser compatibility issues. I’ve put the small code snippet below for opacity compatibility. Enjoy!

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.transparent {
 
	/* This works in IE 5-9 */
	filter: alpha(opacity=50);
 
	/* Below Firefox 2.0 */
	-moz-opacity:0.5;
 
	/* Safari 1.x (before WebKit!) */
	-khtml-opacity: 0.5;
 
	/* IE 9+, Firefox 2.0+, Chrome 4.0+, Safari 3.1+, Opera 9.0+ */
	opacity: 0.5;
}
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posted on December 11, 2012 by
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Best Sources for Free Stock Photography

1. Flickr Creative Commons

Flickr is one of the largest and best known photography sharing sites in the world. The majority of the content is copyrighted by its’ creator (the photographer and intellectual property creator), but some content is released under Creative Commons. Make sure you read the Creative Commons license disclaimers before using any works!

2. Stock Vault

Stock Vault is a free repository with over 35,000 uploads to date. They really have some amazing stuff.

3. Stock.xchng
Stock Xchng is one of the leading providers of stock photography given downloads. They provide a decent selection, however, I prefer Flickr.

4. Your Neighborhood Photographer
Yes, you know the one—hey always have their camera out. One of the best ways to solicit free or dirt cheap stock photography is to get a local photographer to help your cause. Usually they have thousands of photos laying around, own exclusive rights, and want the publicity. Bootstrap, negotiate, and market!

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posted on December 11, 2012 by
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PageLever Launches Real-Time Facebook Metrics Tool

Introducing PageLever: Real-Time Facebook Analytics, Publishing, Monitoring & more. from PageLever on Vimeo.

PageLever, an established social media startup focused on optimizing and growing Facebook reach, has recently launched their PageLever Now tool on November 6th.

PageLever Now offers the ability to visualize real-time metrics, alerts web-masters to highly trafficked posts and user generated content, and introduces a campaign mark-up similar to that of Google Link Tagging.

In addition, PageLever Now offers an intuitive post-scheduling that rivals Hootsuite. Based on past post metrics, the app assists in scheduling posts in order to achieve maximum reach.

Co-founder Jeff Widman stated that, “We’ve got a reputation as the premier tool for analytics about your Facebook page, but as we talked with customers, they kept pushing us to go one step further — they wanted a single tool that combined analytics with page management so they could immediately act on the data … Our goal with PageLever Now was to create a tool for social marketers that puts everything at their fingertips — publish posts, respond to fan comments, real-time analytics for making data-driven decisions, etc. Think of it like the Bloomberg terminals that enable stock traders to make instant decisions, except this is for marketers.”

PageLever offers a free 7-day trial, with plans starting at $99 subsequently. More information can be found at http://pagelever.com/products/now/.

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posted on December 9, 2012 by
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Robots.txt Usage

Robots.txt, also referred to as the Robots Exclusion Protocol (http://www.robotstxt.org), forms a basis for all white-hat crawlers to run by. Simply stated, it tells crawlers which pages it’s allowed to access when crawling a particular website. Common pages not allowed are: any page containing intellectual property, download pages, hidden member areas, login pages, and back-end access pages.

How It Works

The Robots.txt file contains descriptions of which file/folder paths crawlers are not allowed to access, and when a crawler attempts to access that file/folder path, inserts the Robots.txt file into the url path. For example a robot trying to access http://www.example.com/downloads/index.html would be redirected to http://www.example.com/robots.txt if the Robots.txt file disallowed access to the /downloads/ file path.

The Robots.txt file is inserted into the root folder of your domain upon generation for correct usage.

Implementation

Simply auto-generate a robots.txt file from the following generator, find an appropriate WordPress plugin, or write it yourself following the syntax guidelines at robotstxt.org.

Security Expectations

Robots.txt is an industry standard for white-hat (non-malicious) crawlers. Keep in mind that black-hat (malicious) crawlers will disregard the file, and can raise security concerns if appropriate security standards are not met.

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