Triquetra Design

Welcome to www.triquetra-design.com.

I have been designing websites since 2000 and apart from all the other websites I have created for others I now have fourteen different websites under my personal umbrella. Like many webmasters out there I am completely self-taught and there have been many times that I have had to research a particular problem, or have needed to find useful scripts and software, both free and paid.

Many times I have had to ask myself “Why doesn’t this work?,” or “How do I do that in CSS?,” Where can I find free whatever?” – All the sort of questions any budding webmaster will ask. Finding the answer is not always easy. Sometimes, but most times not. Many times I have downloaded “free” software only to find that it doesn’t do the job I want it to do, or it isn’t free. “Free Download,” God how I hate that term. When I search for free I want it to be free. Not shareware, not function disabled, not time disabled.

This blog is about my experiences in finding out what works or doesn’t work – at least for me – and passing that information on to you in an easy to understand way so that you may benefit from my trials and tribulations.

Some while back I was having issues with Outlook 2010. Every time an e-mail was flagged as a follow-up task I would see two entries in the task pane, not one. I also got duplicate entries for calendar alerts. To complicate matters on the Tasks “Tab”, I saw double tasks shown under the “To-Do List” view, but single tasks under the “Tasks” view. I tried “repairing” Outlook. No good. I uninstalled it and then reinstalled it. Still no good. In the end this fixed it for me…

1. Go to Control Panel and select Mail.

2. Click on Data Files button – There were TWO data files (pst files) listed with identical file paths.

3. Highlight the data file that is not marked as the default and remove it.

Lo and behold! When I opened Outlook only single tasks and single calendar alerts were seen in all screens and views.

I have no idea how two data files appeared but removing the non-default one fixed it.

I first bought one of these back in 2009. Since then they have come down in price and Amazon are doing a really good deal on these at the moment. Since then I have added an additional three units.

Iomega are not hard drive manufacturers so I don’t know if all their units have the same drive inside or not. All mine had Seagate Barracuda drives in them. The drive comes with a three year warranty which is somewhat rare in the US. Most times you’re expected to cough up more money for anything over 90 days. Iomega are obviously confident of the drive’s durability and reliability.

The drive has a brushed aluminum finish and a small stand which enamble you to mount it vertically which how I have all of mine. It comes with a power supply cord (12v adapter if I remember correctly), a USB cable and various back-up software options. I have always liked Retrospect’s offering so that’s what I use. The software is available for download and you get a licence key in the instructions.

Setting them up is extremely easy. They are true plug and play. No driver disks are required. Windows XP, Vista (32 bit) and 7 (64 bit) all recognized the drive instantly and installed the correct drivers. One PC has the drive plugged straight into its USB port, the other three all go into a hub and were recognized instantly.

The drives are extremely quiet running. There’s no cooling fan installed in them and none of them have ever run hot despite being left on 24/7. There is a power switch at the back should you wish to use it and that’s a feature that seems to be fast disappearing in this “cost conscious” age in which we live.

This is a high quality unit which has performed flawlessly over the past 15 months and I thoroughly recommend it.

WordPress does not show post counts by default. You need to change it if it’s your desire to do so. Simply log in to your dashboard and click on the down arrow of the “Appearance” option. You will see “Widgets” there. Click on it and when the page opens you will be presented with three options:

1. Show as dropdown
2. Show post counts
3. Show hierarchy

Check the “Show post counts” option and click on “Save.” Close the widget and your blog will now show the total number of posts within each category.

By default WordPress puts all category links in alphabetical order. For some blogs this isn’t a problem and many people just leave it like that. But if you have strongly related categories that would be better as sub-categories of a category then you need to change it.

So, how do you change Wordpress categories to show a hierarchy? When I first wanted to change one of my blogs to this setting I expected to find it in settings somewhere. It isn’t there of course – that would be too easy. What you need to do once you are logged in to your dashboeard is click on the “Widgets” link – it’s there under “Appearance.” Once the page has opened up find the sidebar in which your categories widget is located and click on the down arrow. The widget will open up and you will see 3 options:

1. Show as dropdown
2. Show post counts
3. Show hierarchy

Check the “Show hierarchy” option and click on “Save.” Close the widget and you are good to go.

I will (from time to time) be uploading various banners (blanks) in various sizes that I have found useful over time. These banners are 468×60 and are considered to be of standard size.

Simply “right-click” on the image and choose “Save Picture As” or whatever method you normally use to save an image to your computer. As they stand each image is about 2K in size and is in GIF format.

Personally I don’t wish to have a link to WordPress.org in the sidebar “Meta” widget so if you’re like me you will want to remove it and that means going into the files that come with WordPress – it can’t be done through the admin panel.

You will need to look in the “wp-includes” folder and find a file named “default-widgets.php.” Open it up in the editor of your choice and locate the following line…

<li><a href=”http://wordpress.org/” title=”<?php echo esc_attr(__(‘Powered by WordPress, state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform.’)); ?>”>WordPress.org</a></li>

…and then delete it. Save the file and then upload it to your website and the WordPress link will be gone.

There are occasions when you need a special character within your text and although some are available through the html editor you are using not all are. Not all browsers support all the codes so always check.

Below you will find a list of  special ACII html codes:

In this day and age there are lots of readily available tools to help us avoid obvious mistakes in website content. Whether you write your articles in something like MS Word™ or directly into Dreamweaver™ you should always use the spellchecker.

But don’t stop there. Spellcheckers are a valuable tool but they are not foolproof. Take the following sentence:

“My girlfreind is a widget.”

Your spellchecker will correctly identify “girlfreind” as being misspelt. What it will not do is identify the typo “widget” which should have been midget. Widget is a perfectly valid word and will be ignored when spellchecking.

There’s no excuse nowadays for misspelling words but unless you proofread everything you write you will end up making silly mistakes and that does not look professional. Proofread, slowly and out loud. That way you will usually pick up on any mistakes.

Just as an aside, for those of you who copy text from somewhere else to use (which is an SEO no-no anyway but many do it – particularly for product descriptions), don’t assume that it is error free. Proofread it yourself.

What is a splash page? Well, basically it’s a page that sits between your visitor and your website. Typically it is graced by an “Enter” button. When a visitor comes to your website they have come for a reason. They want to see the content that interested them in the first place. They do not want to be held up while your splash page loads.

This is even more important if your splash page has a pretty, pretty flash intro. Some 40% of website visitors still use dial-up. It’s wrong to assume that everyone has access to high-speed Internet connections. So for many of your visitors you are not only putting a barrier between them and your website but you are expecting them to wait while your masterpiece loads. They won’t. They will go elsewhere. Always remember that there is an alternative to your website and with today’s search engines they’re easy to find.

About the only time you should ever use a splash page is if you are going to present your visitor with unique and USEFUL information prior to entering your website. And that doesn’t mean an “in your face” ad.

Remember, just because you can do something doesn’t mean you should.

Like all webmasters I like to know how my websites are doing. And that means using website statistics. There are many free offerings out there but I wanted an alternative to Google Analytics. The service I finally decided upon was StatCounter. It’s not perfect, your log (in the free service) only holds 500 (the last 500 once you’ve exceeded 500) entries so it can be difficult to track long term page trends but I’ve found that that is no real biggie. Once your sites start to get significant page views (5000+ per day) it’s easy enough to see trends in the daily figures alone.

Compared to many free offerings StatCounter offers a lot of information. You get an overall summary, popular pages, entry pages, exit pages, where your visitors come from, where recent visitors come from, keyword analysis, search engine comparison, exit links, exit link activity, downloads, download activity, visitor paths, visit length, returning visitors, recent page load activity, recent visitor activity, recent visitor map, country, state, City, ISP, and browser usage. Not bad for a free service!

It’s easy and straightforward to sign up and they offer various flavors of installation code. I’ve found that the default code works wherever I have put it. Whether that’s on a standard html website or a CMS website. It works and it’s accurate. You can choose to have your stats public or private, you can have a visible counter or an invisible one. Personally I have always opted for private stats and an invisible counter but the choice is yours.

You can visit and/or sign up for StatCounter by clicking here.