I was watching a friend of mine type into Facebook and he was adding emoticons without using the emoticon menu. How was he doing it?

He was probably using the emoticon shortcut options that exist in Facebook. In fact, there are a collection of shortcuts that let you quickly add certain emoticons quicky and easily. Unfortunatly you can’t add any emoticon you’d like, but there are a fair few of the common ones that you can add in a jiffy. Here are some of the most popular ones:

Yes, you’ll notice that :poop: is right at the top of the list. Funny how that’s one of the more popular ones …

Enjoy your shortcuts

I’m heading to holiday in Asia in a few days. My mobile provider costs are really expensive for roaming. How do you recommend keeping in touch?

It would be great if mobile providers provided easy, cheap roaming packages, wouldn’t it? They all promise they do, but when you look at the costs involved it can actually get ridiculously expensive. Luckily this is where the Internet comes in and brings in some great tools to help. I’m talking specifically about VOIP services. Voice Over IP is a set of technologies that lets people talk across the Internet, share ideas and keep in touch. I won’t go into the technicalities of how it works but there are many different flavours and applications you can use.

As an example, here’s an infographic that shows a selection of VOIP providers, together with prices and reviews:

Via: Phone.com Phone Systems

As you can see, there are many options but a lot of people prefer to use apps that use VOIP without going into the intricacies of signing up for contracts and needing to set up systems. I tend to use Whatsapp for example, a mobile app that runs on multiple platforms and lets you speak to people on the other side of the world without paying a cent. There are a variety of other providers, but the upside is that you don’t need to use your mobile contract, all you need is a data connection, off a local SIM, internet cafe or hotel wifi. They all work 🙂

Online shopping is big business, as evidenced by companies such as Amazon and Ebay and the shrinking retail high street. Thus the underlying technology driving these websites has had to become more sophisticated and user-friendly to meet the demands of what the customer expects from their online experience.

There are many shopping content management systems, such as Shopify, Opencart and Magento to name but a few, however with the continued popularity of WordPress as a foundation for commercial web design, many companies are now turning to this platform for eCommerce.

WordPress has a number of eCommerce plugin solutions which include WooCommerce, WP eCommerce, Jigoshop eCommerce and Shopp. It is generally accepted that WooCommerce is the favourite eCommerce solution available for WordPress, but the other plugins can be useful depending on your needs.

In this overview we’re going to take a brief look at some of these eCommerce solutions on WordPress, to give you a base understanding of their respective functions.

This is the most popular of the eCommerce plugins with a large amount of addons and themes. It is supported by a large and passionate user and developer community with excellent documentation, knowledge base, helpdesk and forums. There are also hundreds of extensions and themes available to help you expand and make the most of your eCommerce site, plus complete inventory management, built-in support for popular payment gateways and the ability to sell both physical and digital goods.

Impressively, WP eCommerce is not just one of WordPress’ oldest plugins, but included many functions before they were ever incorporated into the WordPress core. In many ways, the development of WP eCommerce over the years has helped pave the way for new innovations in WordPress itself. The experience then of the team behind this plugin has ensured its continued growth and ability to match any and all alternative eCommerce solutions. The plugin is as feature rich as any, although many of the theme customisation options do have a rather steep learning curve for those unfamiliar with the process. This aside, WP eCommerce is a more than viable option for your online shopping website.

Developed around the same time as WooCommerce, the Jigoshop plugin is as feature-rich as they come, is completely free and runs on a minimalist code base, allowing you to get your online shop up and running quickly and easily. Functionality can be easily extended with over one hundred extensions and over 40 pre-built shopping cart themes. In particular, the UI is easy to use with solid explanations for settings, and the front-end provides an easy to understand consumer experience. All in all this is a solid alternative to the other eCommerce solutions mentioned here.

The Shopp plugin is a little different from the others mentioned above in that it is actually a paid-for plugin out of the box. However this does mean there is additional functionality included that is not provided as standard in some of the other free plugins. In particular, its implementation of subscriptions is extensive and really useful if you were an online magazine, for example. It also includes highly detailed shipping options, more so than any of the other free plugins. Overall, the Shopp plugin does a lot of what the other free eCommerce solutions do, plus the extra subscriptions support and shipping options, however unless you specifically needed those options, you may still find one of the free plugins equally as suitable for your basic eCommerce needs.

Wrap-Up:

Overall, it is clear from the above that there are quite a lot of different eCommerce solutions, many of which cover a lot of the same bases, with a few offering additional functionality. There are numerous other eCommerce solutions available on WordPress which we are not covering here, but they may also be worth having a look at, however for most users the above selection should be suitable for all of your eCommerce needs.

Often in web design we are given various media to use across a website by our clients, which can be very useful in determining what direction to take the design in and nailing down the various elements of the website the client wants. This can often include which fonts they want to use.

However, there are times when we are provided a logo or image which employs text with no indication of what font was used to create it, and no access to the original Photoshop layered PSD file. In this instance, there are various online tools we can use to try and determine the font that was used.

Some websites you can use to try and determine a font are:

http://www.myfonts.com/whatthefont
http://www.whatfontis.com
http://www.fontspring.com/matcherator
http://www.identifont.com

Let’s run through the process of trying to determine a font from just a logo. We’ll use the AskOwen logo as our example and we’ll start with the first website.

Firstly, navigate to the MyFonts link provided above and upload your image and click continue.

In this next screen you’ll see that the font tool as tried to decide what is and isn’t a font and then put in the correct letter that matches.

With our AskOwen logo, you can see that the first few squares are picking up the logo itself rather than the text, so you can ignore that. Further down you’ll see the first letters.

If the font tool misses any or gets any wrong, you can alter them here. In our example, there are actually two different fonts, so for our example we are going to concentrate solely on the ‘ASKOWEN’ text.

Once you have made any additions or changes on this page, click to ‘Continue’ to get your results.

As you can see from the results, this particular website has given us some suggestions, but none of them match the actual font in the logo. That’s okay, we can try a different website.

Repeating the process above on the website http://whatfontis.com gave us over 100 results, but in particular this one called ‘Hyundai Normal’ at number 8.

This font looks an almost exact match for our ‘ASKOWEN’ font. Now, as I have access to the original logo’s Photoshop PSD files, I know exactly what the font should be. In the original, it is listed as ‘Die Hund Normal’, however if we compare these two fonts we can see that they are, for all intent and purposes, exactly the same.

So we have successfully identified the font used for ‘ASKOWEN’ even with a slight difference in font name.

Before we wrap this up, let me just mention the website http://identifont.com. This site is slightly different than the others that we used in that rather than uploading an image for it to try and match fonts to, it asks you a series of questions relating to the shape and style of the font you’re looking to try and accurately narrow down exactly what you need. This can be useful if you’re having no luck on other websites, but it can be quite time-consuming so would be a last resort.

In most instances, the designer of the logo may well provide you with the original Photoshop PSD files which will contain all the information you need, however should this information not be available to you, its good to know there are tools out there which can help pinpoint exactly the font being used in any image/logo.

I have young children at home and I’d like to make sure they are safe online. What’s the easiest way to do this?

Online safety is very important for most parents. I can relate to the question as I have 3 kids at home (currently aged 10, 7 and 7) who have access to computers, tablets and phones that let them access anything they want online. As we all know, the Internet can be a source of great entertainment, allow them to tap into a wealth of knowledge and let them explore anything they like, but there’s also a dark underbelly that we are all painfully aware of.

So what options does a parent have? Well, at one end of the scale, they can allow unfettered access to the Internet and let the kids self-manage. At the other end, they can also turn off the Internet and deny all access. Most parents sit somewhere in the middle. There’s a number of options out there that can help you manage access, from settings on your router, all the way to monitoring software like spy software that keeps track of every aspect of your family’s online experience.

Most parental control packages allow parents to filter content and monitor websites that are being visited. They usually also provides time management functions so that access can be turned off at night, based on a child’s bedtime. One important feature is Chat Monitoring, where online conversations can be recorded and a parent can make sure that their child is not being threatened or bullied online.

It’s nice to see that the industry has developed to a point where monitoring software like this is available. I remember when I was a teenager getting introduced to computers, and my parents had no idea what I was doing online. The Internet was a different place then, but thanks to easy to use software like this, it can give parents the confidence that online spaces CAN be made space their their children allowed to explore to their heart’s content.

I’ve heard about Google hacking and I’m worried it might affect me. What is it and how do I prevent falling victim to it?

Very simply, Google hacking is a technique that uses Google’s search engine to find security flaws in your site. For example, if there is a particular type of vulnerability that returns a particular phrase, someone can use Google to see if this exists in the pages they have crawled on your site. If you’re interested in learning more there’s a database of Google Hacks here.

Protecting yourself is a bit of a misnomer in this situation. Your first instinct might be to stop Google from indexing your website, but this would stop legitimate traffic from finding your website. In fact, if you had to take a poll of some of the SEO companies in Columbus to see what they think of this, it’s likely that they would suggest this is the worst thing you can do. Search engine traffic is the lifeblood of most sites, whether it’s coming from Google or some other search engine, so closing yourself off from this could be detrimental to your audience.

My recommendation would be to run regular security scans against your site, to figure out what a potential attacker would be seeing. There are a number of services out there, ranging from free to obscenely expensive, but even a free scanner can give you an indication of whether you have a problem or whether there’s anything you need to worry about. Here’s are Five Free Penetration Tools that can help get you started on feeling more secure with your site, but if you need more, get in touch and we’ll see if we can help you!

Google Chrome is one of a few browsers that allows users to install extensions from its integrated app store.

Extensions provide the user extra functionality beyond what Chrome can offer as standard, from Adblockers to Screen Capture apps.

The benefit of using extensions range from showing you whether a site is trusted or not, to saving and storing emails and passwords in one location so you never need to remember them again.

An extension like WoT (Web of Trust) for example gives you the site reputation (in the shape of a circle) of websites next to search results in search engines, using the 3 universally recognised colours of RED for untrustworthy, AMBER for be wary and GREEN for trusted by other web surfers. This gives you a glance at whether or not the website you are about to visit can be trusted or not (a grey circle indicates there is no current rating). As with all things on the internet, discretion is still always advised, but WoT allows users to sign up and add their own ratings to websites they visit.

If you use Avast Antivirus, this also comes with a Chrome plugin which functions similar to WoT. This extension places a GREEN tick next websites that are trusted. You’ll notice in the image above that the WoT site has both an Avast tick and its own circle.

Let’s quickly run through how to install extensions and then take a look at some of the best ones to have.

1. First, with Chrome open click on the Apps button on the left hand side of the menu.
   
2. Now you’ll reach a page showing all of the common Google Apps. You want to click on the Web Store button.
3. This will take you to the main app store. You can browse categories, editor’s choices etc, or do a search from the left hand side.
   
4. Let’s search for Web of Trust. Once the results come up, you’ll need to scroll down to the Extensions section where you’ll see the Web of Trust extension. Click on the Add To Chrome button to install the extension.
   
5. You will get a popup asking if you want to Add the extension. Click Add Extension.
6. Once installed the icon for the extension will be added to the right of the search bar. From here you can click on the icon and change any settings (if the extension has any).
7. That should be it for installing an extension. Some more complex extensions may open up a new tab with full options for you to tweak, but something simple like Tabby Cat (a new cat for every tab – its brill!) won’t have any options.

Now that we’ve looked at how to install an extension let’s have a look at some of the best ones to have, in my opinion.

WEB OF TRUST

As we covered above, this gives you handy little guide to whether the website you’re about to visit from search results is trusted or not.

ADBLOCK PLUS

Adverts on websites tend to be rather invasive and overwhelming. While it’s understandable there are a lot of websites that rely on advertising to help fund the maintenance of the site, sometimes it’s just too much and so this plugin will help squash most of those pesky adverts. There are websites that seem to be able to circumvent what AdBlock Plus does, however this extension allows the user to hide (block) any elements on a website they’d rather not see – so if an advert has somehow managed to slip through, you could click on the AdBlock Plus icon and select to Block Elements, then highlight and click on the offending area to add it to the block list. The example below is Eurogamer.net without and with AdBlock Plus. You can see there is huge blank space where the background advert has been blocked, but this can be targeted separately to hide it completely, as per the third image which pulls all the content up to the menu bar.
The only downside to using Adblock Plus is that you will get websites that now detect that you’re using Adblock Plus and will show a pop-up asking you to disable the extension or in some cases, donate a small fee to eliminate adverts from the site without needing to block them, but this is a minor inconvenience compared to the benefits.

BLUR

This extension created by Albine allows you to mask your email address from any website you sign up to, while also providing an easy way to store and manage all your accounts usernames and passwords. So when signing up for Blur, you would use your actual real email address, but from then on any website you signed up for you could choose to use an opayq.com email address as provided by Blur. Any emails sent to that opayq.com email would be forwarded onto your real email, plus each individual site you sign up for is given its own opayq.com account.
Blur also allows you to mask your phone number and credit card, which works in very much the same way as with email addresses.
The concept therefore, is to give you more control over your personal information by limiting it to just one place (Blur) and then masking it whenever you require those details elsewhere with especially created email addresses, passwords, phone numbers and credit cards.

BUT WHAT IF I WANT TO REMOVE AN EXTENSION?!
There are two ways to remove an extension from Chrome. The first is to click on the icon of the extension and see if it gives you the option to uninstall it directly from there. If there is no option, then you can click on the ‘Hamburger’ icon to the far-most right of the browser extensions, More Tools and then Extensions.

To remove an extension, you then just click on the Trashcan symbol and confirm.

IN SUMMARY
We can see then that Google extensions can provide you with extra functionality, added security and convenience while browsing. And this is just scraping the very surface of how you can extend Chrome’s usefulness. Have a look around the app store and see if there’s anything else that catches your eye!

While other browsers may also have their own extensions and addons, it is my opinion that Chrome still remains the best browser and best place to improve your web browsing.

I’ve been looking at my WordPress files and noticed that my PHP files look a little bit bigger than they used to be before. Has my site been hacked?

Inflated files are certainly one way to find out if something is going on with your site. If you’re seeing bigger files the chances are that you’ve been infected by some form of malware. Here’s a quick way you can find out whether this is the case. If you look in your wp-content folder, there’s usually a file called index.php that’s just a placeholder. If should only be a few bytes long and if you open it up you should see this:

If it’s much larger you probably have been a problem on your hands. Here’s what an infected file looks like:

That code you’re looking at is obfuscated PHP, encoded in a way that hides what it does. Different types of malware work in different methods, but most times they scan for other PHP files and infect them too. They normally also have a different payload that appends content to the site, opens attack vectors to other sites, sends spam or some other nefarious purpose.

If you do find something like this you’ll need to start cleaning up your site, removing infected files and either cleaning them manually or replacing them with original copies. Hopefully the infection wouldn’t have spread too far.

So, how do you avoid this sort of thing happening. The key is to make sure your site is always updated. WordPress updates, theme updates, plugin updates; all of these need to be applied as soon as possible. Yes, there’s a risk that some of the site functionality may be compromised or impacted in some way; but dealing with that issue is preferable to having to clean up a messed up site, believe me I’ve cleaned up a number of these. Anyway, if you need help cleaning one up, just leave me a comment!

In our last article we discussed what Actions in Photoshop were and we had a look at the Actions that come with Photoshop as standard.

Now we’re going to have a look at creating our own batch image resizing Action.

For this article I’m using images taken from http://unsplash.com but you are free to use any images you like. All of these images are over 3000 pixels wide so let’s resize them as a batch down to match our screen resolution. Mine is 2560 x 1440. To find out yours really easily quickly visit this site http://www.whatismyscreenresolution.com/.

Okay, let’s begin!

• First, let’s open one of our images.
• Make sure you have the Actions window open (Alt+F9). I’ve closed the Default Actions set here just to make it easier to see what we’re doing.
• Now you want to click on the New Set icon to create a new set (basically a new folder). This isn’t absolutely necessary, but it helps keep things tidy.

Action Sets or folders if you prefer allow you to stack multiple Actions that will run sequentially, so if you had a batch of images that you wanted to quickly convert to black & white, resize and then save to specified folder, you could have all of those Actions in a set and you could then have that run with just one button press (rather than doing the 3 actions separately). You can still run the Actions separately within a set of course.

• Name the folder whatever you like. I’ve gone with ‘My Actions’ for now
• Next, click on the New Action icon to the right of the folder icon. To keep things simple, let’s name the Action, ‘Simple Resizer’
• Make sure you’re putting it in the My Actions set

You will notice that you can also set keyboard function shortcuts to make it even easier to run an Action, but we’ll leave that for now. You can also ignore the colour as well.

Now the fun starts! Hitting the ‘Record’ button will start the Action recording process and everything you do within Photoshop from that point onwards will be recorded, so it’s very important to know exactly the steps you’re going to take. With our example our steps are very easy.

• Hit Record (circle) and then Alt+Ctrl+I to bring up the Image Resize window
• Let’s change the pixel width to match our screen resolution
• Hit OK and then press the Stop Recording button (square)

You have successfully created your first Action! Now we need to apply the Action to our other images. Let’s close our image now and not save the changes (you could, but we’ll be running the Action on the same image next anyway).

• From the File menu, go down to Automate and then Batch. In here you can set the Action to Play as the Set we created and our Simple Resizer Action.
• The Source Folder will be wherever you saved your images (alternatively, you can open all your images first and then choose the Opened Images option).
• Next you’re likely going to want to set the Destination to a new folder, just so that if you need your originals, they’re not overwritten. For this article, I’m going to use Save and Close, because these images are just going to be used as Desktop backgrounds, thus I don’t need the originals.
• That’s it. Click OK and the Action will run.

Now, you’re going to find that for each image Photoshop runs through, it’ll popup and ask you to set your JPEG options. This is fine, you can just go through and hit OK each time. You could set up another Action which would automate the save process which would make this even faster. Perhaps you can try that one yourself!

And that’s it! Your very first Action!

I use Photoshop quite a lot and for the longest time I didn’t know anything about Actions, but once I discovered their power, I found myself using them more and more. So what are they? 

Actions are the automated process of tasks so that you can apply the same settings across a batch of files with ease. They can be something as simple as image resizing to more complicated complete image overhauls (changing expose, levels, adding filters, applying effects etc).

For this article we will just take a quick look at some of the Actions Photoshop provides as standard, before moving onto setting up our own Actions in a separate article.

• With Photoshop open you want to make sure your ‘Actions’ window is open by going to the Window menu at the top and clicking on Actions. This will bring up the Actions window. Alternatively, you can press Alt+F9 for the same result.

You can see in this window that Photoshop provides various Actions for you. Let’s try one out.

• Open up an image of your own, or download this example from Pixabay.
• From the list of Actions let’s just choose ‘Sepia Toning’. Click on the name to select it.

If you want to see the processes that make up the Action, you can click on the arrow next to the name.

At the bottom of this window you’ll see the symbols for STOP and PLAY. Click on the PLAY symbol to start the action.

After the process completes, you should have an image that looks like the example on the right. In the right hand ‘layers’ column you’ll be able to see that the Action created a new layer and then applied a Hue/Saturation layer to achieve the Sepia Toning.

Next let’s add a frame.

• First, click on Layer 1 in the ‘layers’ pane.
• Next, let’s click on the Action ‘Wood Frame’ and press the PLAY button.

If a notification comes up saying “Image size must be a minimum of 100 pixels wide and tall” you can click continue.

Once the process is complete you should have an image looking like the one on the left.

So as you can see, Actions can be useful for automating simple tasks such as adding Sepia or adding a frame, but they can also be set up to automate far more complex tasks.

In our next article on Actions, we’ll take a look at setting up our own Action to automatically resize a selection of images.