These courses are offered through this website and can be considered “self-study” which includes email support from the instructor.
Note: All lessons reference the most current release of WordPress (version 3.0.1).
Introduction to WordPress: ($25) Six lessons guiding you step-by-step through all of the basic aspects of WordPress development.
- Manual installation of WordPress software on a remote web server.
- Understanding the Dashboard interface
- Installing different themes to change your blog design.
- How to use plugins to extend the functionality
- How to market and monetize your blog
- SEO tips and tricks
- Review of WordPress template tags
- Learn the basics of PHP syntax.
- Creating a basic theme from scratch (including example files).
- Code review of basic theme (line by line).
View the complete first lesson (.pdf) to give you an idea of how topics are covered.
Intermediate WordPress: ($5) One lesson on how to setup and install a local ‘development’ blog on your home computer.
Once you creating your online blog, you will probably want to continue ‘tweaking’ it (themes, plugins, pages, etc.). Professional designers and developers always have a local environment to develop and test before it goes ‘live’. WordPress is no different.
- Easily install Apache, PHP, and MySQL on any Windows PC (or Mac)
- Setup a local installation of WordPress as your local ‘development’ blog site
Intermediate WordPress: ($15) Three lessons showing you how to create a theme from scratch.
- Blog design considerations
- Development of a 3-column HTML/CSS theme mockup
- Explanation and use of various WordPress template tags
- Breaking up mockup to various template files
- Understanding template files for use with static pages
- Creation of a Magazine format WordPress theme
- Debugging and troubleshooting best practices
- All files (JPG, HTML, CSS, PHP) included
View a partial third lesson (.pdf) to give you an idea of how topics are covered.
Intermediate WordPress: ($5) One lesson on learning more useful plugins that can be used with your blog.
- Speed up your blog’s performance
- Help you get more traffic
- Give better search results
- Display multiple posts more efficiently
- Add a forum to your site
When Do the Courses Start?
You can start the class anytime you want since after you sign up, I will send you all the materials for class (lessons in PDF format). When you have any questions about the material you can just send me an email.
Lorelle VanFossen is considered one of top experts on blogging and WordPress in the world and can be regularly seen keynoting at large blogger conferences such as WordCamp and SOBcon.
Lorelle was kind enough to give me some of her time to answer a few questions on blogging, analytics and the WordPress community.
read more…
I created a beginner JavaScript class called JavaScript: The Basics at LVS Online.com.
This 6-week class will teach the students the basics of programming in general as well as the core concepts of using JavaScript. This will also prepare students to take my JavaScript: Unobtrusive Programming class. JavaScript’s popularity is still on the rise and this is a great way to get some experience on programming and understand what cool things you can do with this language.
The class is only $30 and there are no other materials or software needed.
Topics Covered:
Week 1: Components of JavaScript and ECMAScript
Week 2: Data types, Arrays, and Conditional Statements: If..else, and switch
Week 3: Writing Loops, Functions and Understanding Variable Scope
Week 4: JavaScript Native Objects: Math, Date, Array and String
Week 5: Browser Objects (Location, Screen, Forms, Images) and DOM Overview
Week 6: Script Review and Common Troubleshooting
To give you an idea of how each lesson looks, here is the first lesson (.pdf).
When Does Class Start?
The class runs five times a year for six weeks in January, March, May, August and October. To learn more view the course description page and contact me to find out the exact date on when you can register.
Christian Heilmann is an author of books such as Beginning JavaScript with DOM Scripting and Ajax: From Novice to Professional and Web Development Solutions: Ajax, APIs, Libraries, and Hosted Services Made Easy, speaks all around world as an International Developer Evangelist for Yahoo!, and is an all around Web guru.
Christian was nice enough to give me some of his time to answer questions about the future of the web, accessibility, conferences and of course JavaScript.
read more…
A while ago, I wrote a post on how to create a JavaScript Style Switcher, but recently I found the need to create a PHP based one. There are many ways to do this in PHP using sessions, arrays, cookies, etc. I created one that only takes a few lines of code and is super easy to implement.
This PHP Style Switcher can be done in two easy steps.
Step One: Setting styles
The first step is to create a new file on your server named switcher.php and paste the following code into it:
<?php
/* expire in 1 year */
setcookie("sitestyle", $_GET['set'], time()+31536000);
header("Location: $HTTP_REFERER");
?>When it’s queried, this file will write a cookie for the user detailing which site style to use. The cookie is set to expire in one year, and then the script sends the user back to the referring page. All of this happens behind the scenes, so the user will never really “see” switcher.php in action.
Telling switcher.php which site style to use is an equally simple matter. You can query it using conventional HREF links in text, images, or even flash
<a href="switcher.php?set=red">change to RED style!</a>
Step Two: Detecting styles
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen"
title="User Defined Style"' href="<?php echo
(!$_COOKIE["sitestyle"])
?'default':$_COOKIE["sitestyle"]
?>.css" />
This tiny script detects which style is in the user’s cookies and prints out the result. If the user doesn’t have cookies enabled, or just hasn’t chosen a site style for themselves yet, the script will default to “default.css”.
So there you have it. A cross-browser, backwards-compatible, forwards-compatible, standards-compliant style sheet switcher in just five lines of code. It’s fast, straightforward, and universally accessible because there’s no processing done on the client side.
Here is the code (.zip) as well for you to review.
I created a second ASP.NET online class called Intermediate Web Development with ASP.NET at LVS Online.com.
This 6-week class will continue from my Beginning Web Development with ASP.NET class and focus more on ‘real-world’ ASP.NET programming topics. Since the first class focused on getting you up to speed on how ASP.NET works and the C# programming language, this intermediate class lets you take those skills in developing ASP.NET web sites.
The class is only $30 and there are no other materials or software needed.
Topics Covered:
Week 1: Master Page Basics
Week 2: Creating an ASP.NET Website from and HTML/CSS Design
Week 3: View State, Query String, Cookies, and Session State
Week 4: OOP: Building Your Own Objects
Week 5: Creating Your Own Controls: User Controls
Week 6: Error Handling
Extra: Website Navigation: Building a SiteMap
To give you an idea of how each lesson looks, here is the first lesson (.pdf).
When Does Class Start?
The class runs five times a year for six weeks in January, March, May, August and October. To learn more view the course description page and contact me to find out the exact date on when you can register.
On a previous post I talked about the basics of XML so I thought I’d show some examples of how to incorporate XML with Flash.
Since XML is primarily used to store and transfer data, it makes for a nice flexible way to store data that Flash applications can use. Since it’s external to your SWF file, it can be easily updated. So whether your Flash application pulls in data for a News Reader or a Slide Show or Music Juke Box, any change will be dynamic and ready to go.
These examples use ActionScript 3.0, which allows for easier manipulation of XML data compared to previous versions of AS. I broke up the three examples into three parts so you can see the evolution of each example and can follow it better with a gradual change in the AS code (saved as Flash CS3).
read more…
With the recent release of Flash CS4, I’d thought I’d cover some of the highlights of the new features.
Interface
The user interface has been overhauled to match all of the adobe creative suite tools. It may take some users a little while to get used to it, but it seems to be for the better.
Tweening Engine
The timeline’s tweening engine now supports object-based animation with motion tweening. What this means is that you do not have to create a new keyframe, modify your symbol then create the motion tween (“Create Classic Tween”).
All you have to do now is create your symbol and then add a motion tween to that object. The containing layer becomes a “tween layer” which has a unique layer icon and ending keyframe (diamond). The motion tween includes a motion guide giving you full control of the animation itself (even with the free transform tool).
Motion Editor
The Motion Editor gives you a graph of all the properties of your object (symbol). This allows for a great overview of your animation properties (rotation, easing, etc) and allows for fine-tune control. A neat feature is the added options of Easing for each of the animation properties.
read more…
Last month, Sitepoint.com was giving away its great CSS book: The Art & Science of CSS in PDF format. It covers topics such as headings, images, backgrounds, navigation, forms, rounded corners, and tables.
Here is a copy (.pdf) if you didn’t get yours.
We all want or pages to load as fast as possible. But when we develop our site, time constraints may prevent us from properly designing it for speed. Here are a few tips that should help:
1. Lay out your pages with CSS, not tables
2. Don’t use images to display text
3. Call up decorative images through CSS
4. Use contextual selectors
5. Use shorthand CSS properties
6. Minimize white space, line returns and comment tags
7. Use relative call-ups
8. Remove unnecessary META tags and META content
9. Put CSS and JavaScript into external documents
10. Use / at the end of directory links
For a more detailed explanantion read over this article (.pdf).
