Artem Russakovskii's programming and technology blog

Updated: January 25th, 2010

Introduction

If you follow web design at all, you probably see 5 billion top NN posts on a daily basis mentioning site and blog designs, fonts, icons, etc.

However, nobody seems to be paying attention to these little but important guys: comment forms.

If you have an appealing comment box, you are more likely to receive comments (this is based on days of scientific research that I imagined I did in my head) and your content is more likely to be re-shared, voted up, and saved.

I really do feel that way when I visit blogs, especially when an otherwise aesthetically pleasing site has a plain vanilla comment box.

Let's Go

So here we go. I have looked through hundreds …

Updated: August 30th, 2014

Introduction

In this tutorial, I am going to introduce a WordPress technique that I believe was unpublished until I raised the question a few days ago on the WordPress forums.

In short, the problem I was trying to solve was plugins unnecessarily loading their JavaScript and CSS on *every* page of the blog, even when doing so would achieve absolutely nothing and the plugin wouldn't do any work.

I briefly mentioned this approach here but Scribu decided to expand on …

Don't you just hate it when you visit somebody's blog, see an embedded Youtube video, play it, and find that the player is missing the full screen button.

Yeah, this one: .

Well, I hate it too, so please, try not to be that guy. I realize sometimes you copy the embed code wrong or, on a larger scale, you add the wrong embed code to your generic template.

Not a problem. If your Youtube embeds are missing this button, here is how you can easily fix it.

The Problem

Here's an example video that doesn't have the button (it's really good too, if you haven't seen it yet):

The fullscreen button is nowhere to be found because by default …

It's always important to know for developers what browsers they are developing for, who dominates the market, and what the current trends are.

I have gotten my hands on the Plaxo.com visitors' browser stats for December of 2009.

This information is valuable because Plaxo has a relatively general demographics, as it's not a site only geeks or only moms visit, and the statistics tends to not be skewed. Therefore, as you can see, Firefox doesn't occupy the same share as you might see on a techy site (on this site, more than 50% of users visit in Firefox).

Also, since Plaxo has a couple million monthly visitors and therefore a couple million data points, statistically speaking these numbers are relatively …

There are undoubtedly a lot of wallpaper sites. Even more undoubtedly, most of them suck, both in content and filtering capabilities (by resolution, theme, etc).

My preferred way until recently was Deviant Art, because it had a lot of content and very nice filtering – I could specify my exact resolution.

However, as of some time ago, Deviant Art browsing by resolution disappeared, as evident from trying to find it on their site and from the comments on this post announcing the capability in the first place.

The Solution

Sometimes the solution lies right in front of our eyes – we just have to open them to see it.

A while ago, Google Image Search expanded their support for …

ExpanDrive (formerly SFTPDrive) is a very handy Windows and Mac application that lets you take any SSH connection and mount it as a local drive. It saves me countless annoyances because I don't have to use a proprietary sftp uploader – in fact, I can simply open any file with my favorite editor, directly on the newly mounted drive.

The Problem

The problem with ExpandDrive is – it's quite simplistic. So simplistic that it doesn't offer an easy way to export its drive list and the associated settings. Because of that, you will have to enter all the drives all over again in case you reinstall Windows or want to replicate them to another computer.

Of course, there is a …

Updated: September 16th, 2012

The Problem

I've had MySQL on my Windows 7 laptop for a bit (as part of wampserver), mostly for local offline WordPress development.

However, even though MySQL is relatively stable, I've been observing a vast quantity of intermittent MySQL errors, as reported by WordPress in the PHP error log (C:\wamp\logs\php_error.log). Here are some examples:

[05-Jan-2010 09:47:51] WordPress database error Error on delete of
'C:\Windows\TEMP\#sql17e0_1a2_6.MYD' (Errcode: 13) for query SELECT t.*, tt.* 
FROM wp_terms AS t INNER JOIN wp_term_taxonomy AS tt ON tt.term_id = t.term_id 
INNER JOIN wp_term_relationships AS tr ON tr.term_taxonomy_id = 
tt.term_taxonomy_id WHERE tt.taxonomy IN ('category') AND tr.object_id IN (3) 
ORDER BY t.name ASC made by