Blog

Official Dao By Design Blog – focusing on tips, opinions and information about blogging, design and the IT industry at large.

New WP Plugin: ToTop Link

I’m pleased to announce the release of our latest WordPress plugin, ToTop Link.

This simple plugin gives WordPress-powered sites an easy way to add a “return to top” link to their pages. Rather than explain how it works, simply scroll down the page here and you’ll see the link image appear in the top right corner.

Settings allow you easily to adjust the positioning and style to best fit your site. As always, it’s the first version, so all …

Drupal and WordPress founders interviewed together

A bit of a landmark co-interview with opensource CMS luminaries Matt Mullenweg (founder of WordPress) and Dries Buytaert (founder of Drupal) at SchipulCon 2011 in Houston, Texas. Bear with the initial audio — the irony of tech stuff going wrong is not lost on me either.…

Best reason not to outsource your SEO work to the lowest bidder

In addition to running a Web design and development business, I also run numerous “side project/hobby” sites and blogs that appeal to various interests of mine. Without exception they all suffer from copious amounts of spam — and some of it might be coming from you without your knowledge.

This spam is virtually all “link building” spam. This means that — unlike e-mail spam — the intention of the spammer is not to get you to visit the site or …

SEOSimple Joomla plugin – now for J1.5 J1.6 and J1.7!

SEOSimple BoxAfter almost exactly two years of no updates, I’m quite happy to announce the release of SEOSimple 2.0 — now compatible with Joomla 1.6 and Joomla 1.7 as well as Joomla 1.5 .

That’s not all — I’ve finally fixed a number of small bugs that have been growing dust on my todo list – including fixing the K2 compatibility issue and the occurrence of an “uninitialized strong offset” error.

I’ve also added a couple new features, namely an expanded

Adding a little honey to WordPress’ Contact Form 7 Plugin

I’ve just released a new WordPress plugin that adds honeypot functionality to the popular (and frankly, awesome) Contact Form 7 plugin for WordPress.

Built out of self-necessity, the Contact Form 7 Honeypot plugin simply gives CF7 users an additional “honeypot” element to use when building their forms. A honeypot, for those unaware, is a spam trap that attempts to prevent spam bots from clogging up forms with their junk.

This is a non-intrusive method of spam stopping that, in contrast …

Dao By Design Launches China Blog Network

In early 2008 Dao By Design added a feature to its China-expat focused community site — Lost Laowai — which allowed bloggers focused on China to connect with one another. In the time since the feature has become increasingly popular and outgrew its position as a periphery feature on another site. So, we did the only thing we could: redesigned it, repackaged it, and relaunched it on its own domain.

As such, we’re extremely proud to present the China Blog

NeochaEDGE featured on Australia’s ABC

Good friends and clients of Dao By Design, NeochaEDGE, were recently featured on the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s ART NATION program.

While the program doesn’t focus on the role NeochaEDGE’s Web site plays in achieving the Shanghai-based company’s goals, you can catch several glimpses of people using the site in the video above — which as far as Web sites getting featured on TV goes, is pretty cool by me.

NeochaEDGE is one part creative agency that represents leading-edge Chinese …

Cracked.com’s Guide to Fonts

The following is The Cracked Guide to Fonts. Yes, that Cracked — the magazine we read as kids that was the Gobots to MAD’s Transformers. I’ve recently started following their site, and absolutely love its completely whacked cracked sense of humour.

It’s nice to see someone from the graphic design industry poking a bit of fun, as it’s well needed — as lets face it, there’s no shortage of designers who take themselves far far too seriously. From the …

Dao By (new) Design — our shiny new look

New Dao By Design siteI’m way (way) behind on announcing the new look and identity of Dao By Design, but cobblers’ kids and their shoes, eh?

So, welcome to the new look of Dao By Design. Slicker, more organized (or will be when we get everything in its place), more useful and generally just much much better.

Previously the site utilized Joomla for the main CMS and WordPress for the blog. With the CMS-focused improvements that WordPress development has brought over the last two …

WordPress 3.0 “Thelonious” Released

And doesn’t it look fantastic.

WordPress 3.0 has some features that have been in high demand for some time, and that theme developers have had to muddle their way around when using WordPress as a project’s CMS. Namely:

  • Custom backgrounds & headers (no more custom fields and php wizardry needed)
  • Shortlinks (our tweets thank you)
  • Menus (I can’t tell you how exited I am to retire the rather massive PHP function I use to do this now)
  • Custom Post types
Page 1 of 612345...Last »