Tips, tricks & tools

Are you sick of that annoying spaceball.gif overlay that attempts to stop you saving “protected” images on Flickr.com? There’s a really simple way around it.

• 1. Install Adblock Plus for Firefox
• 2. Go to a Flickr page with a “protected” spaceball.gif image
• 3. Right click on the image, and select “Adblock Image”

  

• 4. In the Adblock custom field, add “*spaceball.gif” (without the quotes).

  

• 5. Click “Add Filter”. Reload. Done.

Once you’ve done that, Adblock Plus will prevent spaceball.gif from loading – which uncovers the image underneath, allowing you to right click it, view it, save it, whatever.

Here’s an incredibly easy way to get geo targeting working on your website. It’s free, and it works pretty well.

Continue reading…

If you want to encourage your users to bookmark or share your site, then put an AddThis button on it. It enables your users to share your site via Twitter, Digg, MySpace, Facebook etc, and you don’t even need to sign up to get your button code.

More info at AddThis.com.

Here’s a simple little tip to make embedded YouTube videos autoplay – simply add “&autoplay=1″ after the video ID in the embed code. Using autoplay is a really good idea if you’ve got YouTube videos on your landing pages – it immediately engages your audience and keeps them focussed on your sales pitch. More info on using autoplay here.

Quick Escape is a neat little tool that lets you quickly convert HTML to escaped characters – for example converting <a> to &lt;a&gt; – which can then be pasted back in to your HTML source code so that it renders on screen as code. This is perfect for adding visible code to your WP posts, forum posts, or your website. It’s here.

By default, WordPress automatically inserts paragraph tags all over the place when displaying ‘the_content’ – this often gets in the way when you’re trying to space out your text, and also creates validation issues (inserting implicit <p>). If you want to strip the automatically inserted paragraph tags from your content, simply insert this line in your template file above ‘the_content’ tag:

<?php remove_filter (‘the_content’, ‘wpautop’); ?>