Robert Lodi

Don’t you just hate it when… your quoted paragraphs look like this? 

Or have you ever even noticed?

The typographic problem here is – the punctuation isn’t “hanging.” That’s when, in this case, the first quotation mark isn’t moved off to the left creating a smooth left margin. 

This is big problem! 🙂

I saw it, and went to fix it. Happily, typographic controls in CSS continue to improve and evolve, and yesterday I was reminded of the ‘hanging-punctuation’ property.

The ‘hanging-punctuation’ property makes it super easy to clean up your quotation marks using 

{hanging-punctuation: first;} (or last, or first and last.)

Since there is limited browser support – only Safari 10+ desktop and mobile at the moment, it still may be easier to do it old-school and adjust as needed for each case with: 

{text-indent: -0.5em; /* Change number based on your font */}

Use whatever method works best for your typefaces and browser needs, as long as you do it! 

And if you need to tighten up more of your website’s typography? We can help – just let us know.

If you’ve recently launched a website and are wondering why you aren’t showing at up in Google after a few days, there is one setting you should make sure to check.

WordPress and other CMSs have a setting that blocks the site from being indexed. 

This is usually used during development so that you don’t have two sites getting indexed at the same time, or you are not getting indexed until you are ready.

But – if you forget to turn it off before launch – it can prevent your site from getting indexed when you want it to get indexed.

In WordPress it’s under Settings -> Reading – scroll to the bottom and you’ll see Search engine visibility and a checkbox. You want the box un-checked like below:

In Squarespace, it’s under Visibility. I know Wix has a similar setting somewhere, too.

If your visibility is turned on, and you are still not getting found – you may need further SEO help.

You can start here – https://www.rockpixelscissors.com/overly-simplified-seo-001/ – and if you need further assistance, please let me know.

Down the hill behind our deck is a – pond. Sort of. I think technically it’s a vernal pool, since in dry years it dries up. This time of year, if there is water, it is mostly green. 

Off to one side, sticking out in the water, is a rock.

Almost every afternoon there are turtles on the rock. But sometimes there are birds – ducks, geese, and very rarely a heron. This year we’ve seen a Green Heron and a Great Blue Heron on the rock. 

Which is fairly unusual. I think we’ve seen a heron here just 4 times in 5 years.

Rare things happen rarely, but they do still happen.

And you don’t see anything if you never look.

Which is why it is also important to check the back end of your WordPress site every so often. Don’t just add a post and close the window.

Because a rare thing like a bad plugin conflict can still happen. It happened to me just the other day, in fact.

To prevent this rarity from becoming common – you can make sure your plugins aren’t too out of date, especially these next few months as a bunch of updates are headed out way. 

Look for those red dots with white numbers. 

Back up the site, and update the plugins. 

Then go outside and see what is on your rock, whatever that may be. You never know- there could be something good today. 

Some days we simply have too much cache.

For better or worse, we live in the era of cache (pronounced like the money), with local cache, browser cache, server cache, Google cache, CDNs, and sometimes double secret cache all seemingly conspiring against us as we make website edits and updates.

Because what cache does is store copies of the site files, so they don’t have to load over the internet or download to your device. But this also means that sometimes when you make edits, they never show up on the site. Or they don’t show up for a while. 

What can we do about it?

The easiest way around this is to use what they call an incognito or private window when checking for your edits. 

This special browser window will load a new copy of whatever sites you are browsing, and not use any locally cached files. 

Another option is clearing your browser cache. This is either super easy or near impossible, depending on which browser you are using. Chrome in particular is adamant about caching everything while making it very hard to empty it out.

If that didn’t work…

If you have cleared your local cache or gone incognito, and still don’t see your edits, the problem could lie on the server or hosting end. WPEngine, my favorite hosting company, caches the @#*! out of everything, but they also make it easy to clear it. Other hosts may require more steps.

If you’ve cleared what you can and still don’t see your edits, then, well, take a break. Give it some time, and check again in a while.

And if you’d rather not deal with any of it at all – give us a call. We’ll happily handle your site issues and edits for you, so you can focus on your own business cash flow needs.

Last month I had to replace a ceiling fan.

When we moved in, this fan sort of worked. It was stuck on ‘low’ speed, and the part of the fan that controls the speed was broken. Parts were not available. So, finally, we ordered a new fan and I went to install it.

Other than the inherent awkwardness, this should have been a simple task. Take down one fan, put up another.

But we hadn’t known about the size mismatch in the part of the trim that goes up against the ceiling and covers the wiring and fan support.

The new fan trim piece was smaller.

And when the previous owners painted the ceiling, they didn’t take the old fan down – we could tell, since they got some on the fan too. 

And because of this, it was going to leave a circle of old ceiling color around the new fan.

Suddenly, what went from a routine fan swap, turned into a prep and prime and paint multi-day extravaganza, to get a few square inches of ceiling painted prior to new fan installation.

Which brings me to today’s website related point.

When dealing with any given web site and making changes, some things are easy. 

Some things are not. 

And some things we think will be easy, and are instead crazy complicated fan swaps.

For example. 

Recently we’ve been working on integrating Salesforce.com with a WordPress site. There’s a tool for that, and it works fairly well. But the tool doesn’t account for the quality and structure of the data on the Salesforce.com side of things. With secret objects and hidden data and mismatched information and crosslinked elements and more. All of which turned a “hook up the plugin” project into a months-long custom coding and testing project. 

So what, you say? 

Well, what this all means is, when I am estimating a project, I know to allow for some weirdness. We anticipated some issues with Salesforce, so even with the complexities, we’re still on track within the approved budget.

I try to be very transparent with pricing and estimating and set expectations based on what we know about the website in question. I provide ranges, options, and on bigger projects, what happens if things end up over or under the estimate.

I try to be clear about what is covered, and why, and what might happen if there are some unknown issues. This is also why I often ask for a login before working on an estimate. The more we know, the better we can estimate projects. 

Because nobody wants to get a surprise fan-swap-level invoice for what we all thought could be a simple project.

So if you don’t like surprises from your web team – and if you have a fan to swap on your website that you could use help with – contact us today.

In the olden days, file names on a PC could only have 8 characters. Then with Windows 95, all of a sudden… you could name files almost anything you wanted.

And, as far as web servers go, things took a turn.

11+NAME+Resource+Reference2+Managing+Development+&+(1)Workshop+09132022.docx.pdf

I downloaded something with that file name the other day (some words changed to protect the client.)

That’s 80 characters and hard to read. Yikes.

A file name like this may be all well and good locally on your computer for your use, but, it isn’t going to work well on some websites, web hosts, or platforms. And some servers will not even allow you to upload it.

Dale Vecere Seabury had a great post last week about linking PDFs or not. (‘not’ is recommended.)

But if you must link to a PDF, or for any image or file you are uploading to and including on your website, name it something that’s easy to read and understand. 

• Don’t use any punctuation or special characters other than a hyphen or underscore and a period before the file extension. 
• Google prefers the hyphen to the underscore. Hyphens turns the name into separate indexable words, the underscore links them together so you lose any SEO value for the individual terms.
• Keep the name short yet descriptive. I try to stop at 20-30 characters. I cannot tell you how many clients have sent me a file called logo.png. Instead consider instead a name like ibm-logo-blue.png or cisco-logo-white-2022.png.
• Do include the dot file extension, .jpg, .pdf, .png, etc. 

When you can, just keep it simple and don’t make your file names look like auto-generated passwords! (more on passwords later…)

Your audience, your web host, Google, and your developer will thank you.