Add an extra sidebar to any WP theme

Jai Verma has written out a very easy to follow tutorial on adding an extra sidebar to any WP theme.
Some people have a gift when it comes to explaining how to do something. Loads of people have written WP tutorials but seem to bury you in terminology so that very few could follow without being smart enough to have written the tutorial themselves. And in which case they wouldn’t need any help,would they?
Check it out.Easy to do and a heck of a lot less painful than cooking a 12 pound turkey in a Showtime Rotisserie oven. But that is another story.
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Overpriced Hosts

Want to hear the sad history of my dad’s Website?

We all make mistakes and the biggest one was the choice of Purehost.
Oh wait-my dad never actually chose Purehost.
That’s right-he was automatically switched to them when his Dell- provided- with -computer- purchase- free site was bought by Purehost. All customers unlucky enough to have a Dell hosted Website found themselves being told that their once free site would now cost 200 bucks a year. It was like it or eff off and get your own host.

My dad paid up. And he stayed and stayed. His site made no money yet he paid money he couldn’t afford for it. My dad isn’t the type to throw good money away after bad but in this case he has. For YEARS. I think since 1998 if you can believe it.

Maybe it was the fearful “early days” of the web that froze my dad into this very bad situation. Whatever it was I was too busy working in retail after getting a useless education in fine art to know about or care. Jump 12 years ahead
Continue reading Overpriced Hosts

More product images per product for Zen Cart

It took me a while but I figured out zen cart’s way of dealing with product images. It’s all about how you name the first product image you upload.

Add your product and make all the necessary adjustments to the product features.Then when it comes to uploading the initial image name it like this:

product.jpg. Then with filezilla or whatever ftp you use load up your additional images:

product1.jpg

product2.jpg

product3.jpg

Simple,right?

Except when I went to the help pages on the zen cart website no one explained it like that!

I was adding images by ftp not knowing why they wouldn’t show up on the product page and then trying out all different combos of names or directories. Nothing helped. Until I loaded a new product and accidentally did it right. Because if you upload product1.jpg as your first product image- loading product2.jpg, product.jpg and product3.jpg will result in no extra images showing up.

Some of the zen cart help articles tell you that zen cart will display on the product page any image that has a similar name as the first image you uploaded in the actual description of the product. I didn’t find this to be true. I also didn’t find the use of the extension_LRG or _MD to do anything either. It also didn’t seem to matter to what directory I uploaded the product images. If the product images weren’t uploaded in the right sequence with the right name-the extra images wouldn’t be displayed.

Hope this helps someone else.

How do you get paid?

I have difficulty pricing my work. If you have worked out a price for what you charge and for what kind of web design work-I’d love to hear it.

I really love this work and I would and have done it for free. But money coming in is a good thing and keeps my cell phone on so I actually have to charge.

I kind of freeze up when people ask me what my rates are. I don’t want to say a price that might be too high but I don’t want to quote too low and end up doing a ton of work for free because I said it would be that much and I have to stick with that price.

I work around it by asking what they were thinking of spending. This is not a good method but I am not established enoguh to say thiat is my price take it or leave it.Which is what the more hardcore web designers seem to say over and over.They have other customers lined up around the block and can afford to turn people away. Or they just enjoy being arrogant. I do not.