UILayout

Looking into Perplexity Pro for Better Search Answers

Perplexity.ai, the Better Answers Engine, is cursed with a name that Thesaurus links to puzzlement, abstruseness, inscrutability, and brain twisters. Yes, this reviewer is an enthusiastic user of Perplexity for its ease and speed in finding  answers to tough multi-target queries, But other reviewers have also consistently cited many positive Perplexity attributes: 1 – full …

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A Google Software Miss

A Google Software Miss 5 years ago would be hard to ponder with its world-leading search engine, pioneering work in website analytics and performance tuning plus advances in mobile and cloud integration. But of late the fallibility notion might be regarded as more plausible as Google plays catchup in AI, switches to major investments in …

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AI Writing Tools – Aint Going To Change My Style

AI Writing and Music tools have an early and deep presence in savvy AI usage. And as a  Yoast user in WordPress and Grammerly with Office being a constant companion one can say this scriber is not exactly a Wordcraft Virgin. But ChatGPT has suddenly inserted real muscle into the auto-generation of paragraphs, presentations, and …

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What Is Google Searching For?

For the past year, Google Search has been under self-induced duress and now serious Chatbot direct competitive threats. The self-induced trauma comes from so many popup and inserted ads, unexpected Schema Location and SEO inserts/elaborations under less user control. Based on  Kinsta’s 21 Alternative Search Engines to Use in 2023 [which was last updated back …

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WordPress Media Roadmap

While working on a review of WordPress Photo Editors at the PhotoFinishes.ca a number of WordPress Media Library questions arose for which immediate answers were not available That is what this post is about; so lets consider the deferred issues: 0 -3rd party, free Media Library photo editor plugins certainly  enhance image editing in the …

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Benchmarking Breakdance, Bricks Builder and Oxygen Builder

It is  interesting times in WordPress Frontend Development as UI vendors contend for developer loyalty by offering new Layout frameworks [Flexbox, CSS Grid, 3D Float, etc] , more templating features/flexibility,  novel plugin consolidations and better runtime performance. Yes,  developers and agencies, you have a lot on your  decision plates as WordPress UI vendors contend for …

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WordPress ThemeBuilders Under Stress

Our MasterWP.guru blog recently posted WordPress Under Duress, a report underlining multiple signs of pressure impacting WordPress. The WP Tavern Posting acknowledged several signs of stress. The article cited intensive competition from other CMS systems  such as SquaresSpace and Shopify, increased complexity throughout the rapidly changing WP Core and profound shortcomings in both the Gutenberg Editor …

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Toronto WordPress Group Mobile Performance Meetup

Normally Toronto WordPress Meetup Group has a monthly meeting designed to help fix any WordPress problems that attendees want to pose to the Meetup Organizers, Robin MacRae and Drew Mathers. But yesterday’s November 15th meetup featured a discussion of how to improve mobile performance  which lags the desktop speed for the same page.contents but different …

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More Elementor Duress

Having already done a review of Elementor Under Duress just 2 months ago, it hardly seemed timely  to do  another More Elementor Duress. But having tried to create a container with attached Motion Effects and then an Elementor Popup – both  using the new Elementor 3.72 with full Flexbox container implementation abruptly changed plans. There …

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The Elementor Briefing

Elementor is such a pivotal player in WordPress Development starting with its 11 million actives users and the popularity of its namesake PageBuilder now become a  ThemeBuilder UX. If one does development work in WordPress you are very likely either using Elementor directly  or interacting with other Elementor based websites as W3Techs sees Elementor as …

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Gallery Tests Elementor

Elementor Pro Justified Gallery All New Gallery Masonry UAE Elementor Add-on Gallery These Elementor gallery widgets are very competitive with top Galley plugins like FooGallery or Envira Galley. Elementor’s gallery widgets have a host of features including popular layouts [masonry, justified, and grid], lighthbox display of full size images, captioning of images, display of all …

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Elementor Flexbox: A MVP Achilles Heal?

Elementor has reached the pinnacle of WordPress Frontend tools  – a PageBuilder become ThemeBuilder that has 10million active user websites, has just released a Elementor Cloud Hosting Service [to mixed reviews and runtime performance concerns], and is undertaking a massive shift to Flexbox CSS Framework as the core of  its UI Interface. It is the …

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CSS in WordPress – Sep 20th Meetup Review

This afternoon’s free WordPress CSS Style Editors Meetup is so crammed with helpful info  on WordPressDesign and Styling we will have to take the Trevor Noah  Daily Show approach to Headline News by telling you just the most useful  styling tricks and tips to help ease and expedite your WordPress layouts and designs.  For example, …

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WordPress Revolution: Elementor Cloud Website

Elementor Cloud Website is Elementor’s dramatic entry into the WordPress Cloud Hosting Service business. Here is what you get: $90US/year = 1 cloud website “No hidden costs, no  price hikes.What you see is what you get. Period.” Additional Elementor Cloud Websites require a  subscription costing $99/year/website A subscription delivers 1 full Elementor Pro powered WordPress …

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Cloudflare Performance Anomaly

Cloudflare lately has been garnering interest and strategic WordPress alliances not just with its CDN_Content Delivery Network but also Domain Management, Security Services and Performance Optimization. For example, Elementor Pro Cloud new offering CloudFlare as part of the overall bundle. More recently Cloudflare acquired Area 1 to bolster its Secure Email services. But the crux …

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Are Gutenberg Editor’s Speed Results A Big Lie??

Within the past year there have been  many reviewers  claiming Gutenbrg Editor delivers faster web pages than popular PageBuilders – see Metabox*, WordPress.com[ is blind to theWYSWYG gap in the Block Editor], Jack in the Net*, Jack Cao Tests*[fails to use normal caching and media optimizations]. In sum, there is a common factor of limited information …

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Meetup-WordPress Backend Bustout

Most of the attention in the WordPress community  for the past five years has been about the effort to build a better WordPress frontend – a  Visual Editor using React JavaScript that becomes an integral part of the WordPress core and runs increasing portions of the WordPress “No Coding Knowledge Required” system. But the Gutenberg …

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Hiding Nuisance Notices in WordPress, etc

Okay, Nuisance Notifications [aka Nags] are not exclusive to WordPress. You may also be plagued by unsolicited notices in the lower right-hand corner of your PC screen as Google and Facebook and Microsoft and just about every app you have bought now presume to have the right to popup unsolicited  PR notes at random moments …

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New Surge Performance Plugin

This banner headline at WP Tavern recently caught my attention. Surge: A New Page Caching Plugin for WordPress with No Configuration Required Having just done a WordPress Meetup featuring WordPress performance plugins, one that delivered performance tuning without having to do any tinkering with performance settings – this was of keen interest. So the logical step …

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The WordPress Editors

WordPress has seen a relatively slow succession of editors in its 18 year history. But in the past 5 years the situation has changed dramatically as WordPress has experienced a rapid progression in what can be done beyond the Basic Editor. This review will look at this evolution in how WordPress users create and edit …

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Gutenberg vs the PageBuilders- Performance Speed Tests

Among the many WordPress PageBuilders, the conventional wisdom is that Gutenberg Builder is on the rise as long overdue features such as more styling options for blocks and use of block patterens as templates  begin to match long delivered PageBuilder capabilities. Perhaps the breakthrough feature is Gutenberg’s  delivery of  true drag and drop operations for …

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Gaslight Banner Ad from Microsoft

Wikipedia defines gaslighting as Gaslighting is a colloquialism that is loosely defined as making someone question their reality.. The term is also used informally to describe someone (a “gaslighter”) who persistently puts forth a false narrative which leads another person (or a group of people) to doubt their own perceptions… Some would argue that because gaslighting has …

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Mobile Development With “No-Coding-Required” Mandate

moble data traffic trends

While doing a review of Google Sites, a second “no coding required” app making system was encountered. Forrester calls this tool system – Mobile Low-Code Platforms For Business Developers. Forrester and Clutch identify this as a fast  growing development segment as companies look to speed up data and information exchange internally between offices and divisions …

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Posting PowerPoints in WordPress

Document Embeds in WordPress The most reliable embeds of PowerPoints into WordPress Posts and Pages found so far is using Google Docs viewer WordPress plugin by F.Davis. Here is some PowerPoint comments from 5 years ago on Website building [gview file=”http://theopensourcery.ca/2ndfree.ppt” width=’700′ height=’520′] Here is an Excel file on stats about Small Business websites: [gview file=”http://thephotofinishes.com/0csiweb.xlsx” …

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3 WordPress Visual Page Builders

WordPress has seen an explosion of no-coding, drag and drop Visual Page/Post Builders. These Visual Page/Post Builders bring 5 major benefits to the WordPress design world: 1)They are truly drag and drop,  no coding  Visual Designers; 2)They  should work for both pages and posts but not all do; 3)Most work with any theme which allows for multiple …

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Single Page Web Design:Luminato Festival

For the past few months theOpenSourcery has been emphasizing web tools that expedite info-intensive SPD-Single Page Designs. These tools include jQuery based routines that expedite layouts of grids/tables of images and and HTML blocks but also CSS powered layouts as well. For example, see the following reviews: Isotope.js for Grid Widget Sizzle – shows power of …

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Microsoft Surface Pro 3 Makes Big Waves

Remember the adage about Redmond – 3rd time charm. Well  Microsoft’s Surface Pro 3 appears to garner that lucky state big time. This machine announced today is already pulling in strong reactions all over the tech and business press: Motley Fool declares “Microsoft Corporation Launches Thermonuclear War On Its Own Partners With Surface Pro 3” Seeking …

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Using CSS Selectors First-Line, First-Letter, :Before, :After

The following is a demo by example of some very useful CSS Selectors. This JSFiddle page also allows developers to try out their own variations, just click on Edit in JSFiddle: [iframe width=”100%” height=”500″ src=”http://jsfiddle.net/jbsurveyer/b7Wcr/7/embedded/result,html,css,js/” allowfullscreen=”allowfullscreen” frameborder=”0″] Click on HTML or CSS to see the underlying code.

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