Category Archives: Web Design

Nov
07
2012

by James
1 Comment

2,250+ Unique visitors in one night.

Last night (even though Romney lost) I am still somewhat happy because my website had a huge surge in hits with 2,259 unique visitors in a single day. It has pushed my monthly total up to 3,772 unique visitors in the past 30 days. Unprecedented website traffic for me… Even though the election is now over and the search terms that gained me so much traffic over the last few days will probably fade, I hope to continue to grow my site and keep on writing! Thanks to … Continue reading →

Oct
31
2012

by James
3 Comments

1,000+ Unique Visitors!

Today I’ve reach a milestone in my website’s existence: 1,056 Unique Visitors in the past month. While I am sure a large number of them were merely bots, I am still happy with the results! Thanks to all those real people who read my writing and ranting, and thanks to you bots for bolstering my numbers (and confidence)!

Sep
01
2012

by James
0 comments

Happy Birthday, Zen Insights!

One year ago, I launched a website called Zen Insights as a place to post inspirational quotes and articles. The goal was to collect and analyze spiritual and philosophical thoughts, inspirations and personal experiences gathered on the way to enlightenment. I feel as though I have changed and grown over the past year, expanding my outlook on life and hope to keep opening my mind in the coming year. With the help of some wonderful people, and all you readers the site is going strong. If you have … Continue reading →

Aug
09
2012

by James
0 comments

Website Design for Ben Jeapes, Science Fiction Writer.

I just completed a new website design for Ben Jeapes, author of one of my favorite books (The Ark, also known as His Majesty’s Starship). The website is a modified WordPress theme featuring custom CSS, spam blocking comments, a fully functioning blog, contact form and over 100 pages of content, making it my largest scale project to date in sheer amount of content. Ben is already happily blogging away, having picked up the use of WordPress quickly. There is a reason it is so popular: it’s extremely user … Continue reading →

Jul
26
2012

by James
0 comments

RSS Feed News Ticker

I decided to create a news ticker tool which pulls RSS feeds from some of my top sources for news coverage. Using this tutorial, I adapted some code to suit my needs. Features: 4 separate RSS feeds Shows article title, description, link and date Auto rotates through the top articles Pauses the rotation when article is hovered over The ticker features 4 feeds from the most trusted names in journalism to aid in my efforts to stay informed: Al Jazeera, BBC, New York Times and NPR.

Mar
22
2012

by James
6 Comments

Change CSS style based on time of day using jQuery

I wanted to build a site that was responsive to the time of day. My idea was to have the background shift gradually throughout the day to reflect whether it was day, sunset or night. I originally used one coded in PHP, however, since PHP is a server-side language the theme would change based on the time for the server rather than the user. After realizing I needed to use Javascript in order to get the user’s local time instead of the server I spent some time Googling … Continue reading →

Dec
14
2011

by James
0 comments

WordPress Spam (Part I)

I run a couple blogs and nearly every single day I have another new spam comment. I know these are mostly just back link traffic generator bots, but sometimes the language is so lifelike it almost sounds like a real user. They even add in typos and punctuation mistakes to make it seem like a legitimate person. Sometimes, if they sound close enough to an actual user I approve the comment just for kicks. Other times the language is so absurd and I wonder what the coder of … Continue reading →