Feature overview

• Centrally manage your events
• Add events that happened in the past (dates can go back as far as 1980)
• Label your events so you can control which events should be displayed
• Limit the number of displayed events
• Only show upcoming or passed events, or show them all
• Only show the start date and time of an event
• Only display the dates of an event (hiding the time)
• Output is microformatted with the hCalendar standard
• A tweet button so your visitors can directly Tweet your events
• The twitter button can be turned off
• Option to use your own CSS
• Change the output time from 24 hour military time (default) to 12 hour (am/pm) notation
• Set how you want the links to be opened (new window or same window)
• Set the authorization level for managing events
• Set your timezone
• A beer or a book to say thanks

• Month and day names are now localized based on your language settings in WordPress. So if your installation of WordPress is in Dutch, events will now be displayed as “do maart 17″.
• Events can now be edited! So if you’ve made a typo or the times of the event have changed, you can easily just go into the Simple Events Calendar, click the “Edit” button, just change whatever you want changed and press “Update event”.
• The description field was always limited to 250 characters, but would just cut off anything exceeding that limit. Now as you type you will see a counter showing you how many characters are left. (If you wish to add more info to an event, just write a post/page for the event and add the URL of it to the event in the Event URL field.)
• You no longer enter an end date, but only and end time. As an event will never last for 24 hours in one go, it didn’t really make sense to fill in (and display) and end date. In case of a three day event, most of the time it will be several hours during each event day. In this case, just create an event for each individual day.
• More languages for the admin panel. Initially it will include Dutch and French and German will be added soon. If you wish to help us add more languages, please let us know which language you could translate to.
• Limit the number of events to be displayed. You can now add limit=x to limit the maximum number of events to be displayed. So if you have stored 20 events but you only wish to display the first 3 upcoming events, just add [events limit=3].

As you can tell, we’ve added so much extra functionality to the plugin that we decided to call this our first official release and labeled this version 1.0.

Again we’re really looking forward to hearing from you. Just to say thanks or with feedback how we could make the Simple Events Calendar even better.

Thanks for using our plugin!!

Microfortmats: hCalendar

Every event is published with the hCalendar microformats to make it fully semantic, thereby optimising its indexability.

Never outdated

By default the plugin will only display upcoming events. Expired events will be removed for your pages and posts. This way your articles will always look updated.

If you wish to do so, you can display the expired events or both the upcoming and the expired events.

Group your events

By giving your events labels you can use that information to display only events that have that label.

Download the Simple Events Calendar

Installation instructions

1. Download the WordPress plugin Simple Events Calendar
2. Unpack the zipped file simple-events.zip
3. Copy the directory including its files to the plugin directory of your WordPress installation
   (make sure it is uploaded to/wp-content/plugins/simple-events/)
4. Go to the Dashboard of your WordPress installation
5. Open te plugin menu
6. Activate the Simple Events Calendar

Your feedback

Please let me know what you think and leave your comments below.

Thanks!

Another one of those weekends. Every now and then this happens. You wake up on a Saturday morning, the sun is shining (which is even more uncommon here in ireland than the issue in my story today) and you think “Today I’m not going to do anything. Just chill out for a change.” Then you check your email (mistake no. 1) to find a message from a website visitor telling me that there is something wrong with the translation of certain elements on my website. I’m still optimistic and convinced that this is probably a small thing and that I will only need a few minutes to fix this (mistake no.2).

A little bit of background information: On my website I link to preview websites so visitors can see what that particular website looks like and how it works. Because I work with multiple languages I use sessions to remember where a user is coming from to show certain elements in their language.

Now according to the email, this bit of translation was not correct – yet it worked perfectly fine for me. Digging a bit deeper I found that the author of this email was using Internet Explorer 8. I’m using Google Chrome and sporadically Mozilla FIrefox myself, but never Internet Explorer. Of course I know how horrible IE works with CSS, but I expected PHP to be working similar for all browsers (mistake no.3). For some reason the sessions just didn’t seem to stick in Internet Explorer 8 nor in version 7.

Then the research started. At times like these you wonder what people would have done without Google. I’ve searched for every set of keywords that slightly matched my problem, but nothing offered a solution. So at some point I decided to move away from sessions and start working with Cookies. A bit of a workaround but at this time I had been spending (read: loosing) so much time on Sessions that I wanted to try something else. But no joy: same issue still occurred only in Internet Explorer. To give you a bit of an idea, it was 7pm now, so the sun was long gone and there was no sign my nice chilled out Saturday anymore.

I kept on reading and trying out a million different things varying from year long expiration times (when the time on your server is off or your server is in a different timezone this becomes a serous problem in IE but the other major browsers only work with one time and don’t have this problem) to writing the sessions to a database. It just didn’t want to work.

And then… when I was reading the millionth blog post, way down in the comments, someone mentioned the use of underscores and that those could be problematic in Internet Explorer. Since I was using subdomains with names that included underscores (mistake no.4) it was worth testing this theory. As it turns out, Internet Explorer cannot cope with Sessions nor with Cookies for subdomains containing an underscore.

Seriously, Internet Explorer… I can understand why the EU is picking on Microsoft so much. Most internet users (I’m talking about laptop and desktop users now) are still running Windows and even though it now asks you which browser you want to use, Internet Explorer is the most well known and the one included in the package. But it is also the absolute worst of the worst. I would love to just ignore Internet Explorer browser issues but still about 1 in every 2 internet users is using it… we simply can’t. But if you are part of this group, if you are still using Internet Explorer, please realize that all the websites you see on the internet have required so much extra work to build, to function and to look as they do.

I will fix this problem on Monday, so luckily I still have my Sunday left. If only the weather was as good as yesterday…

It sounds horrible, cheap web design, but there is no other way to call our work. It does not refer to the quality, but to our prices. Our cheapest version is just $279. This will get you a professionally designed website that you can maintain yourself. No longer do you depend on your web designer, your cousin or a friend of a friend to change that one sentence. Or to change that picture. All websites from Studio Stacks offer the ability to login to your website and change everything you want to change yourself. We will provide you with a unique username and a password and thereby empowering you to take control of your own content. And all of that for just $279! That’s simply really cheap web design right?

A self-manageable website is only $279

But a cheap website alone doesn’t get you there yet. For a website to work, it needs a home and an address. When we talk about the home of a website, we refer to web hosting: the place on the web where the website gets stored. A place on the hard drive of a web server somewhere in the world. The internet is basically a spiderweb of interconnected web servers. All web servers together make the internet and for a website to work, it needs to get a home on one of those web servers.

Compare it to building a house in the middle of a field: in order for people to find you, you will need an address. The same goes for your website. The address of a website is often referred to as the domain or the domain name. In our case for example this is www.studiostacks.com. It’s the internet address to the home of Studio Stacks. So long story short, a website needs a home and an address to be accessible for visitors on the internet. Because some people already have a domain name (internet address) and web hosting (the home of a website), we offer just the website for $279. But for those who need everything, we offer a professionally designed website with a domain name and web hosting for just 50 euro’s more. So at only $279 you get high quality cheap web design including a home and an address.

A professional website including hosting and a domain is only $279

There is one thing you need to know about web hosting and internet domain names: you don’t buy them, but you lease them. We have invested in web servers to provide you with fast an reliable web hosting. For occupying space on our web server you will receive an invoice from Studio Stacks every year. At a charge of €8.25 per month, which comes down to €99 per year, we will host your website, keep it secure and make sure you can enjoy – and keep enjoying – superb performance.

The same goes for the domain name. You cannot buy a domain name, but you can see it as a subscription. Every year you’ll receive an invoice which gives you total ownership of that domain name for a period of 12 months. And this domain will remain in your hands as long as you pay this yearly ‘subscription’ fee. When you let this 12 month period expire without renewing this contract, your domain will become available again to anybody who is interested. The price of a domain name is determined by its extension. The extension is the letter combination at the end of a domain name. For www.studiostacks.com this would be .com. Some of the most common extensions you’re probably familiar with are .com, .ie, .co.uk, .org and .net. The price of domain names are quite low and most extensions will cost around €10 per year. An exception is the Irish national extension .ie which is slightly higher priced at around €30 per year.

Top it up with professional email and Google submission for just €100 more

The €249 deal, which we call our Silver Package, includes the web hosting and the domain name for the first 12 month period. That is seriously cheap web design! But Studio Stacks offers something more. Apart from cheap web design we offer super fast web design. We promise that within 7 days after purchasing one of our websites, it will be online on the domain you’ve selected. And that is super fast. Most web designers will need a period of time ranging from 2 months up to 6 months for a website to be finished.

So where do you start? How can you benefit from the professional but cheap web design of Studio Stacks? Click on any of the big green buttons you will find on studiostacks.com or scroll all the way to the top and there you click on ‘start now’. This will bring you to a page that shows you 10 website designs. (See, that this cheap web design looks pretty good!) Each of these 10 designs will lead to to a page that shows 12 variations of that design, getting the best match for your business. Clicking on the ‘Preview’ link on this page will bring up a live demo version of this website so you can see exactly what you are getting. Happy with what you see? Click on ‘Order now’ then select the package of options to go with your website and press ‘Select’ at the bottom of the option pack you desire. Next you’re asked to enter your details. Click on the PayPal button and follow PayPal’s instructions from there.

Security and the safety of your details were our main concerns when selecting a payment processor and PayPal provides this high level of security. PayPal recently upgraded its systems and doesn’t require you to have a PayPal account anymore. Just a credit card is enough to order our cheap web design.

After completing the checkout through PayPal you are redirected to the Studio Stacks website again. In case you’ve selected either the Silver of the Gold website package you will be asked to enter your desired domain name. You can check if your name is still available and if so you can request that right away and we will add this to your order.

Only 7 days later you will find your website live on the domain which you have requested. That is cheap web design according to Studio Stacks. Easy, fast, effective… and pretty cheap.

Just the other day I was approached by one of my clients with this request. Luckily she contacted me and avoided making the mistaking of simply adding these icons herself. She wanted a link to her LinkedIN profile, her Twitter account and an RSS feed added. So that’s what I did! Have a look at the images below or look at the website as a whole at detwist.nl.

Although the changes they applied are minor and very subtle, the result is a fresh and more appealing presentation of the big search engine and its result pages. The change that might even go unnoticed by some is the logo. Much of the shadow that was present before has been removed and the gradients (the transitions of one color to another) are warmer. The result is a more flat logo which doesn’t appear to be floating anymore. Have a look for yourself:

The second big change can be found at the bottom of your search results, where there used to be a blue box giving you the option to go to the next or previous search result page and which gave you some search refinements options. The design team has removed the blue background here to make it look brighter. Also the dark blue of the links has been brighten up, the underlining has been removed and they have decreased the font size. All these changes made the bottom part of the result pages much more clear and clean compared to the previous situation.

The final part of the Google makeover lies within the Search options panel on the left side of the screen. When you do a search you’ll now see a little Google icon on the left side that says Everything. Just below that icon you have the possibility to show more options by clicking on More. Doing so will make a list of search options and fresh new corresponding icons slide in. Very clear and colorful. Have a look:

The Google redesign is an excellent display of how just a few tiny tweaks to an existing design can have such a huge effect on the presentation of a page. It also shows the importance of the detail. We all know the saying “a chain is as strong as its weakest link” and the same goes for designing web pages: A design is as strong as its worst pixel. Never think “nobody will see it if I leave it like this” because quite a number of people actually do see it. And besides that, you will always see it, when ever you look at it. Make sure you can look back at every design you do and be proud of it!

WordPress is shipped with a version of jQuery included in it. But since jQuery is updating its functionality at a much higher pace than WordPress is, the current version of jQuery used in WordPress is not very up-to-date anymore. And this might be necessary in some cases.

For those of you who are not familiar with jQuery just yet: jQuery is a script that simplifies several very advanced and complex applications of JavaScript . If you look on the front page of StudioStacks for example you’ll find a Like-button on the left side of you screen and when clicking it, a little window slides into your screen. Because I did this with jQuery, it only took me a few lines of code. It’s really easy and if you’re interested, I highly recommend having a look at their large collection of tutorials. Even with a very basic level of knowledge of JavaScript you will already be able to code amazing effects with jQuery after only a few hours of studying.

By adding the following code to your template’s functions.php your template can use the latest version of jQuery while leaving the shipped version of jQuery intact so your admin panel will remain using its own version (you could seriously mess up its functionality):

function scripts() {
if ( !is_admin() ) { // this makes sure that the admin panel remains using the old version
         // jquery
               wp_deregister_script('jquery'); // turns off WordPress' edition of jQuery
               wp_register_script('jquery', ("http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.4.2/jquery.min.js"), false); // the new version of jQuery (in this code it uses the version hosted by Google but of course you can point this to any location and host it yourself)
               wp_enqueue_script('jquery'); // Now it's automatically applied all over your templates, but you can do this on parts as well
         }
}
add_action( 'wp_print_scripts', 'scripts'); // this executes the script

Hopefully this has been to useful for some of you.

But with last week’s update, Facebook extended the use of this button to be used on any website now. By integrating this feature into your website, visitors can Like whatever they see by clicking on the Like button on that site. By doing so, their friends on Facebook will see that this visitor liked a certain website and now they can click on that link to see if they agree.

Let’s put this in clear benefit for site owners: everybody can share your website with all their friends with only one click of the mouse!

You don’t even need to have a Facebook account yourself to make use of this tool. Just install the code (just one line) on your website and your visitors can start spreading the link. The following line of code is all you need:

<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/widgets/like.php?href=http://www.studiostacks.ie" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" style="border:none; width:450px; height:80px"></iframe>

Use the Facebook API in WordPress

If you want to use the Facebook API in your WordPress template, then use the following line (remember this is for changing the WordPress template! If you’re adding the link to an individual post, then use the one above):

<iframe src="http://www.facebook.com/widgets/like.php?href=<?php the_permalink(); ?>" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" style="border:none; width:450px; height:80px"></iframe>

And that’s all there is to it. See the blue button that says Like just below this article to see the new Facebook API in action.