Website Designers and Webmasters

On my Free Website Quote page, I have a cool little AIM chat box that allows visitors to chat with my AOL Instant Messenger account.

Just a few minutes ago, I had the funniest conversation I’ve ever had over a chat program. Here’s the transcript:

aimguest56199364
hi

WebsitesinaFlash
Hi

aimguest56199364
sandy

WebsitesinaFlash
Hi Sandy

aimguest56199364
how many your webisite
to build your web site

WebsitesinaFlash
I’m sorry?
How much did it cost to build my website? (ie. WebsitesinaFlash.com?)

aimguest56199364
ADoes it cost for a web sites
yes

WebsitesinaFlash
I didn’t charge myself to build my website so I don’t know how much it cost.
Are you looking for a website?

aimguest56199364
how many

WebsitesinaFlash
How many what?

aimguest56199364
just
just one

WebsitesinaFlash
What kind of website are you looking for? Every website costs a different amount to make.

aimguest56199364
Ashton are you here
Jewely

WebsitesinaFlash
You want to sell Jewelry online?

aimguest56199364
yes

WebsitesinaFlash
So you’re looking for a fully e-commerce website with website design, development, shopping cart, security system, online merchant, etc.?

aimguest56199364
SandyIs there a phone number that I can called to

WebsitesinaFlash
What?

aimguest56199364 signed off

HAHAHA. I have no idea what just happened.
-Ashton Sanders

Today was my first time using Thickbox, and I’m pretty satisfied. It’s got all the features I was looking for, namely “pop-in” images, iframes and galleries.

I didn’t really like how you had to add a querystring for the Thickbox iframes (I would prefer to use the rel attribute), but it still works fine.

Gallery Images Not Working

I’ve been banging my head against the keyboard for hours trying to fix this one little bug with Thickbox. For some reason, when I used the Thickbox Image Gallery, I couldn’t get the image to appear at all! Continue Reading…

If you are not familiar with htaccess, you are missing out. It is one of the greatest things about linux/php hosting. One little file that gives you a wide range of control. Here is one of the most useful parts of htaccess:

Redirecting Many Pages From .html to .php (or “/”) at Once

Today, I am finishing converting a static, HTML website to Wordpress. So all 58 pages that used to be /page.html are now /page/ and it would be a pain to go through all of the .html pages and force redirects to their new page. I found this page on Web Weaver that explains this well:

Changed file extension?

This example is perfect if you’ve decided to switch to .php from .html pages. It will look for any .html page and redirect it to .php (ie http://www.example.com/yourpage.html and redirect it to http://www.example.com/yourpage.php). Now, be careful with this, it does mean any html page. I did this on one of my sites and had totally forgotten I had an iframe with .html content on some pages… I didn’t notice for weeks that it was broken :S.
So learn from my mistake check, double check, then check again.

RedirectMatch 301 (.*)\.html$ http://www.example.com$1.php

In my case, I put most of the pages into a subfolder (and without .php) so my htaccess redirect looks like this (example website for placeholder):

RedirectMatch 301 (.*)\.html$ http://www.websitesinaflash.com/website-services$1/

In this example, the $1 get’s replaced with everything from the (.*) which is everything after the domain name and before the .html.

Enjoy,
Ashton Sanders

This is a great trick to find out the exact price people are bidding to be #1-3 at Google Adwords PPC.

Google Adwords (Pay Per Click) is a very easy way to market your website. You choose the keywords and how much you are willing to pay for each click. Then Google takes your bids and all the other people bidding on that keyword and organizes them with the highest bidder on top. A day or so after you have submitted your first bid, Google will tell you if you need to increase it to get onto the first page. But what if you want to know what it takes to be in the 1st, 2nd or 3rd spot in the Google Adwords (sponsored ads)?

Detecting the Google Adwords PPC Bid Price

Continue Reading…

I recreated the normal RSS icon as a vector image, and thought I’d make it available for free (and store it for the next time I need it). Having the vector images make it so much easier to tweak colors and size.

Download Free RSS Icons
Here are three file types of a large RSS vector Image I created.

These RSS images were created as vectors in Fireworks and then exported as layered vector images to PhotoShop (.PSD) and Adobe Illustrator (.AI). I don’t have Adobe illustrator to test, but the other two seem to work fine.

You can see where I added this RSS icon to the top of my sidebar on this blog as well as the blue RSS icon I made for CSS Videos.com. Although the RSS is supposed to be orange, I wanted to go as different as possible while still being useful with CSS Videos.com.

Enjoy,
Ashton Sanders