The Caveena Solutions Blog

At the risk of giving away my age I’d like to share an anecdote. Over 10 years ago when I was playing around with magic & illusions, an experienced magician said to me that he didn’t consider himself a magician but rather a story-teller; each routine in his repertoire of illusions had a different story to tell the audience.

Microsoft recently previewed a new member to the Office family: Sway. The official website has a preview video but if you’d like a more hands-on demonstration here’s one by the Office Garage Series.

Here’s how the Microsoft Office Blog describes Sway:

[Sway] is a new way for you to create a beautiful, interactive, web-based expression of your ideas, from your phone or browser. It is easy to share your creation and it looks great on any screen … Sway helps you focus on the human part: your ideas and how they relate to each other. Sway takes care of the design work—a Sway is ready to share with the world as soon as it is born.

Perhaps it is no coincidence that lately I’ve also been looking into the Aesop Story Engine, a WordPress plugin which positions itself as a way for website authors to write stories instead of code.

I see this as the next stage of website development. We went from hand-coding HTML to making use of WYSIWYG editors and Content Management Systems. But these were all aimed at the technical aspects of building a website. Using your content to tell a story or create a narrative has often been left by the wayside or given to branding experts and the marketing department. I for one am glad that tools are being developed to help streamline the way we pull information from different sources and present our created stories through different channels.

Content has always been king. It’s time we dressed it up and paraded it on the catwalk.

This billboard design at University Brunei Darussalam reminded me of the movie and comic Persepolis

I saw this billboard on the campus of University Brunei Darussalam and had to do a double-take. I initially thought it was an advertisement for showing the movie Persepolis but instead it was a timely reminder to continue seeking knowledge.

I have neither seen the movie Persepolis nor read the comic on which the movie was based yet it was the first thing that came to mind when I saw this design. That really says a lot about the extensive reach of the movie’s art style.

So I was doing routine maintenance on the Caveena Website today when a conflict between two WordPress plugins mucked up our Portfolio page. Being a service-based organization, yeah that’s a pretty big deal.

And this is why I always test website updates on a development server.

So what happened? The issue was between BestWebSoft’s Portfolio Plugin (which, as you probably guessed, we are using for our Portfolio page) and Jetpack. The v3.1 release of Jetpack comes with a new custom post type: Portfolios. I didn’t dig into any of the code but my guess is they used the same name for the Portfolio custom post type. When both were active the http://caveenasolutions.com/portfolio permalink would not work and none of our portfolio project pages would display.

The fix was simple enough:

  1. Disable the Custom Post Type module in Jetpack’s settings.
  2. Re-build the permalink structure.

If you happen to be using the Portfolio plugin along with the Custom Post Type module in Jetpack, I unfortunately have no answer for you.

iThemes recently held a free two-part webinar discussing WordPress Security. The first video takes an introductory level approach but I still grabbed a couple good tips from it.

The second video talks about the company’s iThemes Security Plugin and also hosts a Q&A session with Chris Wiegman, the developer of iThemes Security, as well as Tony Perez, CEO of Sucuri. Unfortunately the sound was non-existent during Chris’s portion so you might want to skip that section until it’s fixed.

I found Tony’s section particularly interesting as he talks about higher-level approaches to security. He also touches on the wide-spread belief that using a shared host is less secure because you run the risk of other websites on that host being infected or hacked. The tl;dr is this does not happen much today with reputable web hosts (Tony specifically mentions BlueHost, HostGator and GoDaddy as being OK).

Here’s that portion of the video:

CSS veterans probably know this already but it’s one of those minor things that tripped me up when I was learning CSS.

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Much like our little Chinese New Year re-skin we decided to dress the website up again for Hari Raya. Hey, if everyone else is going to be flaunting new clothes and accessories I think our website deserves a little bit of shine on this day as well.

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In The Easy Way to make nice looking Gradients I shared a technique to create pleasing gradients easily using a graphics application like Inkscape. The thing is you can just as easily apply the principles to CSS. Browser support for CSS3 gradients is quite good across the board (save IE9 & Opera Mini) so this’ll work fine.

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Here’s a simple tip I learned to create clean, presentable gradients. The key word is subtlety.

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I have a feeling Jakob Nielsen may balk at this design but I like it all the same.

When you go to the University of Cambridge’s Research section you’ll be greeted with this menu in the sidebar:

research-at-cambridge_submenu-01

Pretty standard fair. But click on any link under Research at Cambridge

research-at-cambridge_submenu-02

and you get something that looks like the fair-headed child of a menu and breadcrumbs. The pages higher in the menu hierarchy have upward pointing arrows signalling “click me for a higher-level view” while also having a downward pointing nub that invites the user to drill deeper.

Very sexy!

So it looks like Google is getting in on the Domain Registration Business. I’m all for another player in the field but am cautiously optimistic considering this is Google.

Domains come with up to 100 email aliases which forward your emails to existing accounts. I wouldn’t be surprised if eventually they integrated this with Gmail through Google Apps for Business. More information on their Features page.

And like all things new at Google, the service is under an invitation-only beta.

Domain Privacy at No Extra Cost

Google Domains Free Domain Privacy

One thing I do applaud Google for is they will be providing Domain Privacy (what they call Private Registration) at no extra cost to the buyer. I’ve been a huge proponent of Domain Privacy and even included a section on it in our Websites 101 article. Kudos to Google for taking this step.

Google Domain Pricing Revealed? USD 12 a year

Google Domains Pricing

 

If you’re anything like me you quickly asked “OK Google, how much?” So far there is no official word but an image on their Features page seems to indicate a price of USD 12 a year. Considering they are throwing in Domain Privacy as well, that’s not too bad.