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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 …
Three WordPress Admin Area Plugins
Have you ever said to yourself “I have got to cleanup the WordPress Admin area and menus and then did nothing? Well here are 3 plugins that are free, easy to use and make your WordPress Admin better suited to your needs. WP Custom Admin Interface free with a 4.4 rating provides very handy point …
Web Development: The Move to Making Connections
Work on Messaging Protocols by DARPA set the stage for the Internet in the early 1990s Internet Protocol Suite Application layer BGP – DHCP (v6) – DNS – FTP – HTTP (HTTP/3) HTTPS –IMAP = IRC – LDAP – MGCP – MQTT– NNTP NTP – OSPF – POP – PTP – ONC/RPC – RTP – RTSP RIP …
WebBuilders Challenge: Coping with Web Change
Website Builders and CMSs have merged in the past 3 years as backend + cloud services have melded the two small business web creation tools. Web Builders like Wix, Weebly and Shopify have emphasized their common hosting, performance, and advanced setup features. Likewise, CMSs have honed in on delivering easy website setup and maintenance with …
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 …
Cookies Required in WordPress
How often have you as a WordPress User gotten this demand in any browser – Chrome, Firefox, Opera? Too often or hardly at all? My question is what causes the message. And does the “Get out of Jail ” link [taking you to a legitimate sign-on startup screen] always appear when you encounter the screen. …
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 …
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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Why CSS Is So Busy
Inherently CSS, Cascading Style Sheets, do not have to be busy or complex. Classic CSS 1 & 2 commands like color, margin, text-size, and others are easy to understand. However, CSS commands have 3 inherent layers of potential complexity. The first is the fact that every HTML element can have many CSS commands styling the …
Whipping up your own free WordPress Site
There are the many reasons for Whipping up a WordPress Website. Because a free, full-service website can can meet immediate needs: 1 -Temporary testing site for trying out WordPress themes, plugins, styling and apps. Stay upwith new WordPress trends an technology by trying out the tools on a real temporary WordPress site; 2 -Staging site …
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 …
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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WordPress AMP for Mobile Speed
AMP-Accelerated Mobile Pages is mobile page speed up technology pioneered by Google. Web & WordPress users have had to come to grips with major mobile speed deficits in the light of changes in mobile usage: The Global use of the Web has shifted from desktops to mobile devices – desktop=44% vs mobile devices=56%. There are …
Measuring Website Speed – State of the Art
Performance tuning of WordPess sites is currently in the best of times and the worst times. Best of times because there is a consensus about 6 key performance tuning methods which should be applied as a set of triage steps while doing performance tuning. These six standard steps are featured in the upcoming WP Speed …
WordPress Speed Matters – A Free Meetup
TuesdayNov 8th 2022 evening at 6PM is the date for a free and very informative Zoom meetup about the latest trends in WordPress Performance Tuning. Lets start with three basic points. First WordPress is used on 43% of the top 10 million Websites worldwide. Therefore WP technology is an important factor across all web development. …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Mobile WordPress Trends Meetup
Mobile WordPress Development often gets the short end of the analytics stick. Fortunately, Hootsuite publishes annual reports on the state of the Web World which clearly shows the pivotal role mobile devices play on the Web. Mobile in their many forms play everywhere in contemporary computing. For the past 5 years these reports have marked …
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 …
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, …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
Gutenberg: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly
In honor of 3 years + 1 day after the Gutenberg editor was announced, The Toronto WordPress Meetup Group will have a free zoom Presentation at 4:PM Wednesday discussing the virtues and shortcomings of the Gutenberg Editor. Here are the preliminary notes: In addition, here is another view on Gutenberg Editor – the newly appointed …
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 …
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 …
Cyberattacks By Software Vendors
Cyberattacks are usually associated with data breaches where hackers steal valuable information for sale to a variety of “info merchants”. Or behind the scenes there are BDDoS=> Bot-based Direct Denial of Service attacks designed to cripple competitive websites. But as the Dark Web emerges with increasing malvolence there is an an increase of attacks on …
Gutenberg Block Editor, 2 Years Late
Two years after the 2018 introduction of Gutenberg, the Plugins rating tells the story: ,Despite being the default Block Editor on a WordPress Install, Gutenberg can still barely scrape above 2 on 5 in the WordPress plugins ratings. Yet recent WPTavern reviews show some major strides in the improvement of Gutenberg and Block Editor offerings: …
Data Recovery Processes
Data loss through a failed PC hard drive or cyber-attack is a galling problem for three reasons. First, you missed the warning signs of disk slowdown hinting at failure or somehow let a hacker get access to your PC or online system to loot or lock it up. Second is that both cyber attacks and …
Mobile Development With “No-Coding-Required” Mandate
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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Google Sites: Website Builder
A video demo of using Google’s new Sites Builder Model for Live Editing of a Web Page All of the Website Builders tend to follow a consistent layout of their Page Design tools. First and foremost, users get to see a live Web Page Canvas where all their edits are shown live.– so as users …
FOSSHub Discoveries: WinDirStat
FOSSHub is the place to go to get Free Open Source Software without hassles, relentless advertising or a myriad of hoax offers. The screenshot above shows some of the free open source graphic software packages available for Linux, Mac and Windows use. Note not all of the software is available for all 3 major operating …
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” …
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 …
New WordPress.com Editor
WordPress.com has added a new editor and its is very nice. The side bar is much smoother and more convenient to use. The response time is still crisp and the old familiar editor is ready on standby if you have problems. And I did. This user could not get the editor to publish properly. That …
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 …
Isotope.js for Grid Widget Sizzle
Currently responsive sliders are being used in more SPA-Single Page Applications for Mobile clients to replace deep menus and and button driven designs. The idea is to get portfolio/product impressions upfront as a visitor investigates a website. But there is a whole new class of responsive grid widgets that do image sliders one better by …
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 …
Major Media Miss on Windows 8 and its Convertibles
Now this reviewer does not like to gloat but it is always a nice to see how far ahead of the Major Media Pack one can be. First the NYTimes and now Marketwatch, more than a year late, have “seen the opportunity and lead” that Windows 8 has in 2-in-1 or convertible laptops/tablets and with …
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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.
Windows 8.1 Is What Windows 8.0 Should Have Been
Windows 8.1 is here and this is what Windows 8.0 should have been. All the usual IT reviewers are out on the day of the launch and they are cautiously optimistic about Windows 8.1. Gizmodo says – Windows 8.1 Review: Little Changes Make a Big Difference TheVerge says – It’s take two for Microsoft’s ambitious …
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