I’m not going to lie – the widget built into WordPress for searching your blog is ugly. Just today I was looking to add some functionality to the blog here, and upon adding the Search widget to my sidebar, discovered how plain and outdated it looked. After some quick thinking I came up with this simple method to making your own search box without any server-side coding, and thought I’d share with you guys.
After far too many months with the same old version of ProjectPress installed on my portfolio, Straw and Berry, I finally got the time to change it up a bit. One of my classes in school this year is Photography, and as an assignment we need to complete a portfolio of our work. So I got the creative juices flowing and decided a joint photography/web design portfolio would be a novel idea.
I programmed and designed a concept theme called Slidefolio, in which all WordPress posts with images are extracted and displayed in the form of a slideshow powered by jQuery. It’s neat and tidy, with a nifty PNG overlay resembling a frame around the images. I’m still working out some kinks in it, but I’ll probably release a public version of the theme on here in the next week or so.
Go check out my portfolio here and let me know what you think!
I just discovered a new means of writing web-based applications for touch screen phones like the iPhone, Palm Pre, and G1. jQTouch allows you to convert simple websites into touch-ready apps with barely any code at all. I’ve been working on implementing it into TutorialFeed, so keep your eyes open for an iPhone version very soon!
Recently I started a small side-project, called Statistics API. Basically, you supply the website statistics-api.com with a URL of your choice, and it retrieves ranking information and caches it for quick fetching in the future. The information it returns to you includes:
The website also has the option to return data in XML format, if you wish to fetch data with a script. Just add &mode=xml to the end of the URL and you’re good to go! Even better, if you want to analyze websites on the go, you can now add a small bookmarklet to your browser’s toolbar!
Just today I finished up the final touches on TutorialFeed, the once great tutorial indexing site powered completely by RSS Feeds. Complications arose with the previous site, and the data was lost sometime last year. With a brand new design, faster and more versatile core framework, and more extensive user functions, it’s back to reclaim its fame 
I’m currently looking for any and all tutorial sites who want their tutorial feeds crawled by the bot – if you know of any please suggest them at the site! If not, feel free to learn from the hundreds of tutorials already listed.
Make sure to sign up for a free account – it’s easy and only takes a minute or two to complete, plus you get all kinds of awesome features that the standard visitors don’t have the luxury of. Go check out the site at TutorialFeed.com!