Tips, Expertise, Articles and Advice from the Pro's for Your Website or Blog to Succeed
Google’s release of Chrome 97 this week brings along with it the formal introduction of the heavily criticized keyboard API. This API simplifies the identification of key presses in non-standard keyboard layouts, while also introducing potential privacy issues that developers from Apple and Mozzila have criticized.
The Google announcement of the new API outlined the reasons why the company decided to include this API in the Chrome 97 release:
Hi guys what you will do when you work as a SEO professor.
Lets share something about your experience.
Our profession evolves every year, whether through the introduction of a new tool, a new cloud service, or a new working method. This constant evolution requires the establishment of a learning culture to continuously share experiences and ideas, thus encouraging everyone to gain new knowledge each year.
Obviously, this demands a portion of our working time and an online library of training resources maintained by entities with authority in the domain. These entities are responsible for updating the content to allow us to continuously improve our skills, sometimes to advance in our career in order to aim for an internal or external evolution. Therefore, relying on trusted education partners is important to ensure the highest-quality learning content.
Every day, the ProgrammableWeb team is busy, updating its three primary directories for APIs, clients (language-specific libraries or SDKs for consuming or providing APIs), and source code samples.
Yesterday, Anariel Design’s third block theme, Bricksy, went live in the WordPress.org directory. Ana Segota, the co-founder and self-proclaimed “creative motor” of the company, has almost become a master at block-based theme design at this point, and this project is just her showing off her skills.
I actually took the theme for a spin over the weekend when I saw it was waiting in the review queue, so I have had a few days to play around with it. Despite a few trivial issues, it has quickly become one of my favorite block themes.
While I have generally liked Anariel Design’s two previous block themes, Naledi and Clove, I could not see myself installing them on a real-world project. They were simply not my personal style. However, Bricksy is a theme I would definitely use if I had a project for it at the moment.
One of my favorite design elements is the cursive handwriting for the site logo, which is also used across various patterns.
The downside is that these are images, so they are not easily recreated by end-users without Photoshop chops. I would like to see the team reconsider using a handwriting-style font — maybe one from Google Fonts — that allows users to add custom text directly from the editor.
Bricksy has, hands down, some of the most beautifully-designed patterns I have seen in a block theme yet. In total, there are 32.
It is making an early bid for my favorite theme of 2022, but I will not get ahead of myself. We still have almost an entire 12 months to go before I make that call.
It even includes a custom social links layout. More and more themes are bundling their own takes on this pattern, but Bricksy’s color scheme and default Cover block image stand out.
With 32 patterns, I could dedicate an entire post to them all, but I am limited on time. For the most part, they are layout-focused rather than industry-focused patterns. This means they can be used on a vast range of sites. However, the pricing tables and team sections make sense for small businesses. Bricksy also supports WooCommerce.
The most striking thing about each pattern is that they all seem to fit within the theme’s overall design. Often, when themes include dozens of block patterns, some of them can feel like an additional option simply for the sake of adding one more thing in. And, that never feels like the case with Bricksy.
For long-form content, the theme is decent. However, it could be better. Its 720px content width and 18px font size can quickly grow hard to read. Cutting the width anywhere from 80px to 120px makes it much more comfortable. Bumping the font size up a couple of extra pixels works too.
When I first activated the theme, I thought it was utterly broken. I had wondered how it managed to slip through the review system. The theme’s header was outputting seemingly random demo content. But, it was also familiar. I was positive it was a test post from my install.
The issue was tough to hunt down. After everything from deactivating plugins to scrubbing templates from the database, I finally found it. The ref key for the Navigation block in the theme’s header.html template part was the culprit. Bricksy pointed to a specific post ID in the code:
<!-- wp:navigation {"ref":4790,"layout":{"type":"flex","setCascadingProperties":true,"justifyContent":"right"}} /-->4790 is the ID of a literal post on my test install, so the Navigation block showed its content instead of a menu. Most likely, this was directly copied or exported from the site editor. Theme authors need to watch out for specific ID references in their code when building from the editor, making sure to remove them before shipping.
Aside from a couple of trivial issues and a single OMGBBQ one after activation, I enjoyed using the theme. It has found its place in my recommended-themes list.
After 10 years in the WordPress ecosystem as one of the most popular plugin businesses, Yoast is branching out with a new SEO app for the Shopify market. The app will offer Shopify merchants a set of optimizations for search results and Google Shopping, automatically add structured data, and allows users to optimize for desired keyphrases. It will launch in the Shopify app store on January 18, 2022.
“An app on the Shopify platform is a huge business opportunity,” Yoast CEO Thijs de Valk said. “Shopify is growing fast. It makes sense to build an app and profit from the growth of that specific platform.”
Shopify is the second-fastest growing CMS, according to W3Techs’ 2021 data, used on 4.4% of websites, up from 3.2% last year. The next closest contender, Wix, passed up Joomla and Drupal in 2021, furthering a trend of hosted, closed source software platforms burying open source CMS’s.
In his biannual CMS market share analysis, Yoast founder Joost de Valk observed WordPress’ slowed growth as compared to earlier in the pandemic and commented that the platform does not appear to be heading towards 50% market share as he would have projected based on the numbers a year ago.
“Shopify continues to show amazing growth, in some months in the last 6 months it even managed to match the growth of WordPress in absolute numbers,” de Valk said. “Similarly, Wix has stepped up the pace and is growing rapidly.” He projects Shopify’s market share will be over 5% within the next six months.
“The growth of Yoast (up until now) has been highly dependent on WordPress,” Thijs de Valk said. “That makes us a bit vulnerable. When deciding to build the Shopify app, we were not acquired by Newfold Digital yet. The decision to build that app was also one of risk-diversification. Having an app or plugin on multiple platforms just makes sure that our company can grow sustainably.”
Breaking into a new market, de Valk said the experience so far is very different.
“Shopify is a different ecosystem, much more commercialized than WordPress,” he said. Product pricing for the hosted platform is higher than what users might pay monthly for a plugin in the WordPress ecosystem. The Yoast SEO app is starting out on the Shopify App Store at $29/month, which de Valk says is competitively priced.
“That makes the Shopify market attractive to extend to,” de Valk said. “We have big dreams to grow our company further (in and outside of WordPress) and success in Shopify would make that a lot easier.”
Unlike the WordPress plugin repository, the Shopify App Store doesn’t publish numbers of users for each app, so it’s not easy to see who Yoast SEO’s main competitors will be. SEO apps for Shopify are already a someone crowded space and many apps, such as SEO King, have more features, a free plan, more competitive pricing, and hundreds of positive reviews already. Yoast SEO will have a challenge ahead, entering a market with many established competitors.
de Valk said Yoast has not hired any Shopify developers but is relying on the current employees’ skills.
“Most of what was needed we already knew, or learned on the job, as we do,” he said. The company has had internal discussions about the fact that employees are now asked to write closed source software.
“We’re breaking with our tradition to only release Yoast SEO software to open-source platforms,” de Valk said. “Shopify is closed source. We had a lot of conversations about that because at Yoast we’re open-source fanboys and girls. At the same time, making the web better is also something very dear to our heart. And we think that Shopify is making the web better.”
de Valk confirmed that all Yoast employees were on board with developing closed source software and none of them moved on as a result of the change. The company’s more nebulous “making the web better” mission trumped its commitment to open source software in this case.
In 2021, Yoast was one of the biggest contributors to WordPress core through its Five for the Future pledge. The company plans to continue its commitments to WordPress and will be expanding its charitable giving from the expected Shopify profits. Yoast is calling this new initiative “Five for the web.” This strikes me as an odd choice, as the intention of the Five for the Future program is to avoid the “tragedy of the commons” scenario, which affects open access resource systems like open source software. This is clearly outlined on Yoast’s website in the section on open source where it states, “At Yoast, it’s at the heart of what we do.”
“With the money we make in Shopify, we want to give back as well,” de Valk said. “We’re going to give that money back to initiatives that make the entire web better. We’re already doing some things there. Yoast is a member of the W3C, and our very own Jono Alderson is in the AMP advisory board. We’re planning to grow our efforts and initiatives to make the web better and give 5% of our Shopify revenue back to the web.”
Yoast’s intention to support the controversial AMP project with a portion of its 5% profits is a curious choice, as the initiative is already heavily financially backed by Google and doesn’t appear to be soliciting donations. When asked what kind of influence or accountability the company is bringing to the AMP Advisory Board, de Valk said their primary goal is to offer advice.
“AMP is just one of the things we do, we also support w3c, we make tools for PHP testing, and we’ll be supporting a lot more,” he said. “We put time into the AMP advisory committee with the goal to provide advice to the Technical Steering Committee. And in that way we try, as I said, to make the open web as strong as possible.”
Yoast will be hosting an Online Yoastcon – Shopify Edition on January 20, which will kick off with a product demo. The event is free and attendees can expect to hear from SEO industry experts and learn how to improve their online stores.
CSS overrides can change the default look of almost anything:
It just goes on and on…
In my experience, everyone has a different line. Nearly everybody styles their buttons. Nearly everybody styles their links, but some might only customize the hue of blue and leave the underline, drawing the line at more elaborate changes. It’s fairly popular to style form elements like checkboxes, radio buttons, and selects, but some people draw the line before that.
Some people draw a line saying you should never change a default cursor, some push that line back to make the cursor into a pointer for created interactive elements, some push that line so far they are OK with custom images as cursors. Some people draw the line with scrollbars saying they should never be customized, while some people implement elaborate designs.
CSS is a language for changing the design of websites. Every ruleset you write likely changes the defaults of something. The lines are relatively fuzzy, but I’d say there is nothing in CSS that should be outright banned from use — it’s more about the styling choices you make. So when you do choose to style something, it remains usable and accessible. Heck, background-color can be terribly abused making for inaccessible and unusable areas of a site, but nobody raises pitchforks over that.
Should CSS Override Default Browser Styles? originally published on CSS-Tricks
I'm making a html/js game, and attempting to add on screen controls for mobile use. However, I have found that pressing and holding on a button on mobile will highlight the button as though it is pressed but no onMouseDown event is fired and the page is simply waiting for you to swipe to scroll.
Is there an easy fix to this, to allow a mobile user to press and hold a button, or some other way to emulate the separate OnMouseDown/OnMouseUp functions?
Although we would like to live in a paperless world, that dream is still far away from reality. The truth is that we need printed docs more than soft copies because they offer better physical presentations. With this realization, many people prefer keeping most of their files in printed form and have invested in the...
The post Top 10 Best HP Envy Printer Reviews appeared first on DesignrFix.
Going to a wedding, trip or party can be more enjoyable if you carry your camera and printer to explore your photographic skills. You can have the best mini photo printer for superior photo printouts thanks to advancing printer technology. This is a small device that can make prints into tangible memories. Besides, it is a pleasure...
The post Best Mini Photo Printer Reviews appeared first on DesignrFix.
I think RPA is independent as it's about automation. Which is fine if you're a factory drone. But it doesn't work for today's generation of workers, who are used to being treated with a little more respect to feel empowered about doing a job they believe in.
The real future of better process management is making it mainstream i.e.
Easy for anyone to model and run with it, with no consultants/IT/pain involved.
Easy for anyone to track it and do it within either a UI or a tool they already use for hours every day - e.g. chat apps
Easy to get pre-canned process improvement insights through machine learning tech to help show and fix bottlenecks.
Conversational - i.e. it's not robotic but feels like a human conversation - the way people actually work today.
Showing simple, real use cases - and elevated pain to 5 years ago. An example is the gig economy - since a large %ge of people do temp/flexible jobs now and it's increasing, it's even more important now to both define and track work in a simple, agile way.
The above are critical. Without any one of them - we're just back to the tired and dead BPM of today.
I’ve encountered two bugs in Chrome while testing the new CSS text-decoration-thickness and text-underline-offset properties, and I want to share them with you here in this article.
But first, let’s acknowledge one thing:
Let’s add a text link to a plain web page, set its font-family to Arial, and compare the underlines across browsers and operating systems.
As you can see, the default underline is inconsistent across browsers. Each browser chooses their own default thickness and vertical position (offset from the baseline) for the underline. This is in line with the CSS Text Decoration module, which specifies the following default behavior (auto value):
The user agent chooses an appropriate thickness for text decoration lines. […] The user agent chooses an appropriate offset for underlines.
There are two new, widely supported CSS properties that allow us to precisely define the thickness and offset for our underlines:
With these properties, we can create consistent underlines even across two very different browsers, such as the Gecko-based Firefox on Android and the WebKit-based Safari on macOS.
h1 {
text-decoration: underline;
text-decoration-thickness: 0.04em;
text-underline-offset: 0.03em;
}
Note: The text-decoration-thickness property also has a special from-font value that instructs browsers to use the font’s own preferred underline width, if available. I tested this value with a few different fonts, but the underlines were inconsistent.
OK, so let’s move on to the two Chrome bugs I noted earlier.
If you set the text-decoration-thickness property to a font-relative length value that computes to a non-integer pixel value, Chrome will “floor” that value instead of rounding it to the nearest integer. For example, if the declared thickness is 0.06em, and that computes to 1.92px, Chrome will paint a thickness of 1px instead of 2px. This issue is limited to macOS.
a {
font-size: 2em; /* computes to 32px */
text-decoration-thickness: 0.06em; /* computes to 1.92px */
}In the following screenshot, notice how the text decoration lines are twice as thin in Chrome (third row) than in Safari and Firefox.
For more information about this bug, see Chromium issue #1255280.
The text-underline-offset property allows us to precisely set the distance between the alphabetic baseline and the underline (the underline’s offset from the baseline). Unfortunately, this feature is currently not implemented correctly in Chrome and, as a result, the underline is positioned too low.
h1 {
text-decoration: underline;
text-decoration-color: #f707;
/* disable “skip ink” */
-webkit-text-decoration-skip: none; /* Safari */
text-decoration-skip-ink: none;
/* cover the entire descender */
text-decoration-thickness: 0.175em; /* descender height */
text-underline-offset: 0; /* no offset from baseline */
}Because of this bug, it is not possible to move the underline all the way up to the baseline in Chrome.
For more information about this bug, see Chromium issue #1172623.
Note: As you might have noticed from the image above, Safari draws underlines on top of descenders instead of beneath them. This is a WebKit bug that was fixed very recently. The fix should ship in the next version of Safari.
The two new CSS properties for styling underlines are a welcome addition to CSS. Hopefully, the two related Chrome bugs will be fixed sooner rather than later. If these CSS features are important to you, make your voice heard by starring the bugs in Chromium’s bug tracker.
CSS Underlines Are Too Thin and Too Low in Chrome originally published on CSS-Tricks
A landing page is any web page that a consumer can land on, but in the marketing realm, its usually a standalone page, distinct from your homepage or any other page, that serves a single and focused purpose. A landing page is a follow up to any promises that youve made in your content. Essentially, its the next step toward a visitor becoming a customer. Your landing page lets you make a trade, some sort of special offer, piece of information or a deal, in return for providing contact information.
Are you seeing the ‘Comments are closed’ message on your WordPress posts?
This message is displayed when comments have been disabled on a post. However, some users report seeing the message unexpectedly.
In this article, we’ll show you how to fix ‘Comments are closed’ in WordPress.
The comment area of your WordPress blog allows your website visitors to give feedback, ask questions, offer their own point of view on the topic, and respond to other comments.
Comments are disabled on all WordPress pages by default, and you won’t see the ‘Comments are Closed’ message on pages. However, you can still follow the steps below to open comments on your pages as well as posts.
For blog posts, you can disable comments on specific posts or on your entire WordPress website. For example, you may wish to disable comments on an announcement post.
When you disable comments on a post that has at least one comment, you will see the message ‘Comments are closed.’ This explains to your visitors that even though there are comments on the post, no further comments can be left.
If you disable comments on a post that has no comments, then you won’t see the ‘Comments are closed’ message. WordPress will simply not display the comment form.
Perhaps you’re seeing the ‘Comments are closed’ message on your website unexpectedly. While WordPress is easy to use, some error messages can be hard to troubleshoot for beginners. That’s why we put together a list of the 50 most common WordPress errors and how to fix them.
This message is most likely being shown because of a WordPress setting that’s not configured correctly. That’s because WordPress has comments settings in multiple areas, which can make it hard for beginners to find the right settings to fix the problem.
In this post, we’ll walk you through all the settings you should check in order to reopen the comments on your blog posts.
With that being said, let’s look at how to fix ‘Comments are closed’ in WordPress.
Comments are often closed on a WordPress site because at some time in the past a setting was checked was that disables comments on new posts by default.
You can check this setting by navigating to Settings » Discussion. Here you’ll find a set of checkboxes that control how comments are handled on new posts.
The first setting to look at is ‘Allow people to post comments on new articles’. This box should be checked so that the default setting for future posts is to allow comments.
Next, look at ‘Automatically close comments on articles older than XX days’. This setting is useful if you don’t want users to be able to comment on older posts. However, if you want to allow comments on all posts, then you should make sure this box is unchecked.
Once you’re happy with the discussion settings, make sure you click the ‘Save Changes’ button at the bottom of the screen to store the settings.
This will make sure comments are open on all new posts you create. But it will not enable them on posts that have already been created.
That’s what we’ll do in the next step.
This method will show you how to enable comments on existing posts one at a time. However, if you wish to enable comments on many posts, then you should follow the ‘Enable Comments in Bulk’ method that we cover below.
If you use the block editor on your WordPress site, then you need to scroll down the settings pane on the right of the screen until you come to the Discussion panel.
Now you should click on ‘Discussion’ to expand the options, and then make sure the ‘Allow comments’ box is checked.
Once you click the Update button at the top of the screen to save the setting, comments will be enabled for this post.
You should repeat these steps to enable comments on other blog posts. You can also follow the same process to enable comments on WordPress pages.
How to Display the Discussions Panel if It Is Hidden
While the Discussions panel is displayed by default, it may be hidden on your website. If you can’t find it, then you will need to click the Options icon at the top right of the screen. This icon looks like 3 vertical dots.
You then need to click on ‘Preferences’ and navigate to the ‘Panels’ tab. Once there, you can toggle the ‘Discussions’ switch on so that the panel is displayed.
If you are using the classic editor, then the steps for enabling comments on a post are a little different. Here, the Discussion meta box is hidden by default. To display it, you will need to click on ‘Screen Options‘ at the top right of the screen.
Next, you should check the Discussion box under ‘Screen elements’. After that, simply click ‘Screen Options’ again to return to your post.
You can now scroll down to the bottom of your post where you will find the Discussion meta box. You should make sure the ‘Allow comments’ box is checked.
After you click the Update button to save the setting, comments will be enabled for this post.
If you need to enable comments on multiple posts, then you can update them in bulk. To do that, navigate to the Posts » All Posts page where you will find a list of all of your posts.
You need to select the posts that have comments disabled by clicking the checkbox next to each post.
After that, you should choose ‘Edit’ from the Bulk Actions dropdown box and then click the ‘Apply’ button. This will open the bulk edit screen.
Here you need to click the ‘Comments’ drop down menu and then select ‘Allow’.
Don’t forget to click the ‘Update’ button to change the setting for all selected posts.
How to Select All Posts At Once
If you want to enable comments for every post on your website at once, then following the steps above would take a lot of time if you have hundreds of blog posts on your site.
To do it faster, there are a few extra steps you should take. First, you will need to make sure that all posts are displayed on a single page.
You can see a count of all the posts on your website under the ‘Posts’ title at the top of the screen. If you have 20 posts or less, then they are already displayed on one page. If you have more than 20 posts, then you will have to increase the number of items per page.
To do that, you should click ‘Screen Options’ at the top of the page. Then, under Pagination, find the ‘Number of items per page’ setting. Here you will need to type a number larger than the total number of posts on your site.
For example, if you have 65 posts on your website, then you could type the number 70.
After that, you need to click the ‘Apply’ button and all of your posts will be displayed on one page. You can now click ‘Screen Options again to hide the settings.
You can now select every post on your site by simply clicking the checkbox next to ‘Title’.
To enable comments on all of these posts, you should click ‘Bulk Actions’ then ‘Edit’, and follow the steps we covered earlier in this section to change the Comments setting to ‘Allow’.
Note: We don’t recommend trying to update hundreds of blog posts at once if you have slow web hosting, since your site may time out or freeze up before completing all the updates.
If you have tried all of the steps above and comments are still disabled on your site, then it may be because of an incompatibility with your theme or one of your plugins.
Sometimes poorly coded WordPress themes may wrongly display the ‘Comments are closed’ message even when comments are open.
To check if your theme is the problem, you should navigate to Appearance » Themes and temporarily activate some other theme.
If the ‘Comments are closed’ message is now fixed, then your theme is the problem. You can ask the theme developer to fix the issue. For more details, see our guide on how to properly ask for WordPress support and get it.
Alternatively, if you’re an advanced user, then you can try to fix the issue yourself. You need to refer to our guide on how to disable comments in WordPress, and then follow the instructions under ‘Remove “Comments Are Closed” in WordPress’.
If you think a plugin may be causing the issue, then you can head over to Plugins » Installed Plugins and make sure you haven’t installed a plugin designed to disable comments, such as Disable Comments. If you have, then simply disable that plugin and test to see if comments are now working.
If comments are still closed, then you need to test for incompatible plugins. You’ll need to temporarily deactivate one plugin at a time by clicking its ‘Deactivate’ link.
Now test to see if comments are enabled on your site. If they are still not working, then this plugin is not the problem. Simply click its ‘Enable’ link and move on to the next plugin.
We hope this tutorial helped you learn how to fix ‘Comments are closed’ in WordPress. You may also want to learn how to increase your blog traffic, or check out our list of the best social media plugins for WordPress.
If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.
The post How to Fix ‘Comments Are Closed’ in WordPress (Beginner’s Guide) first appeared on WPBeginner.
I notice a bug..
This post is not written by Dani, but it shows Dani is the writer ?