Do You Want to Take Better Digital Photos?

Scott Kelby Boxed Set

I’ll admit right up front that I am not a great digital photographer, so I am always looking to take better digital photos. I can take some great shots from time to time, but there are many times I look at the pictures and think, “what did I do?” It is all part of the learning process – I learn by doing not by taking classes. If I take a bad digital photo I always like to analyze why the photo didn’t work out the way I had intended.

Speed Up Your Web Site By Using CSS Sprites

CSS

If you own a web site or blog, chances are you have thought about how to make your pages load as fast as possible. This is an obsession with many, while a learning experiencing for others. I am one of those that look for ways to make my blog display faster. I have tried and used many different tactics, including changing settings for the browser cache, gzip compression, WordPress caching plugins, reducing the number of graphics, and reducing the number of third-party widgets that appear on my blog. The more that has to load, the slower a page will become.

When I created this new WordPress theme, I wanted to try something new – CSS sprites. CSS sprites are used by some of the larger web sites to reduce the number of image downloads that are needed to display a web page. While I am not an expert by any means, I have managed to get some of the common images that appear on this blog to load from an image sprite.

Read more

Web Server Returns 404 Instead of 200 Status Code

404 Not Found

I have been experiencing a rather weird issue with my blog recently, and one that I hadn’t noticed until I accessed my Google Webmaster account. The reason I hadn’t noticed the issue was because it wasn’t easily identifiable when viewing my blog, or the administrative pages. The problem was the fact that several of my posts were returning a “404 Not Found” status code instead of a “200 OK” status code.

What has made this problem weird was that it was only happening on about 5 pages of my blog. All the other pages were returning a “200 OK” status code. Since all post pages use the same template file, and therefore are created the exact same way, I couldn’t figure out what created the problem. While the headers of the pages indicated a 404, the pages were displaying in the Web browsers without any problems.

Read more

How to Backup Your Data Automatically for Free

Mozy Logo

I have talked about how I backup my data, the tools and applications I use, and also how I have organized my data. I have also stressed many times in the past about the importance of data backups. Many people probably still don’t realize how easy, and cheap online storage can be to backup their data. If they experience a hard drive crash, it may be too late.

In this post I will show you, step-by-step, how easy it is to use an online backup service to automatically backup your data. On top of that, the steps outlined below can be accomplish without spending a single dollar, meaning you can backup your data absolutely free!

Read more

How to Become a Techie: Understand Don’t Memorize

Have an Idea

Back in college I had taken several computer programming languages. I had the opportunity (at times I use that term loosely) to learn COBOL, RPG, Visual Basic, C, Assembler, and the markup language called HTML. This was over ten years ago, so many of the languages used today, such as C# weren’t around then.

I remember the first time I had to write an exam in one of those languages. It came as a surprise to learn that the exam was open book. In face, pretty much all exams for the programming languages were open book. After thinking about that for a moment I realized why they were open book.

Read more

Advantages and Disadvantages of RAW Files

RAW Format

This is the second post in my two post series on discussing the JPEG and RAW file formats. My previous post discussed the advantages and disadvantages of JPEG files, and this post will discuss the same topic for RAW files.

Unlike JPEG files, however, there are many drawbacks to using RAW files, and most who use digital cameras probably won’t want to use this format. The more experienced photographers, on the other hand, may love what RAW has to offer.

Read more

WordPress: Cannot Modify Header Information

Wordpress Logo

I have created and edit the templates for my WordPress blog long enough to come across a few confusing errors. While I have had good success solving many of the errors fairly quickly, there is one that has continuously come up, and caused my blog from loading.

Recently, however, I managed to find the cause of this common error, and since then have quickly corrected any problems that have caused the error. This post explains the error, and how I solved the problem.

Read more