Mark Kindred's blog

Recently, I had a client ask me to upgrade an embedded Google map for their locations page. The map allows you to view their locations by category: Manufacturing, Corporate, Engineering, or Technical.

The problem was that some of the location markers were too close together. Two of their plants in Ohio are just down the road from each other, so trying to show those two location on the same map that shows facilities in Hawaii and Connecticut was nearly impossible. The two markers in Ohio are directly on top of each other.

At some point, you might find the need to rearrange or change the order of HTML unordered list items (<ul> <li>). There are a couple potential reasons: you might want to sort the list alphabetically, or, as in the case of a Drupal site we recently launched, you might need to turn an unordered list menu into columns.

Custom horizontal jQuery accordion menu

The products menu at ClarkDietrich.com is based on a custom-built horizontal accordion UI:

Have you ever wanted to know what CMS a web site is running? Typically, I would scan the source code looking for telltale signs. But I came a across a great web development tool today.

Wappalyzer is a Firefox extension that gives you quite a bit of info about a site – not just the CMS, but lots of other stuff like JavaScript frameworks, web server, and development language.

At some point, most developers have found that, despite their best efforts, one of their staging or develoment sites has been found by Google or other search engines. Usually, this is because we must make the work available for preview to the client before the site goes live to the world. Without careful planning, it can be tricky to show a staging site to a client, but not to Google. Do not assume that, because you haven't submitted a URL to search engines, they won't find your site. Take proactive measures to keep your dev and staging sites out of search engines.

If you've ever been confused by where Google derives the text for search results pages, you're not alone. I was surprised today to find my description in Google had recently changed.

The text "Offers web application development, content management..." is nowhere on my site.

Google uses a few different sources for the description snippets in search results:

One of the decisions we make when creating a hierarchical menu for a website is whether to create a "landing page" for each section. In other words, does each parent menu item have its own page?

There are three options. Each parent item can:

It's amazing how much time we need to spend tweaking all our development tools to keep them all playing together nicely. So when I find a problem that takes me a while to fix, I like to post it here in the hope that it will save someone else some time.

Such was the case today when I switched over to the latest version of Google Analytics. In-Page Analytics, one of my favorite tools in GA, stopped working on all my Drupal sites.

Here's the error message I got:

Problem loading In-Page Analytics

If you're like me, you probably find that Facebook changes so quickly that it's hard to keep up.  Sometimes, it seems something disappears for no reason.  And Facebook's user interface is often very confusing; finding the right control panel is daunting, to say the least.

Recently, I decided that I wanted to add some portfolio photos to my company's Facebook page.  That's easy enough... but for some reason, the Photos link was no longer in the menu in the left sidebar. 

Linking your social media platforms together can help you communicate more efficiently. One way to do this is to insert your blog feed into your Facebook business page (or "fan" page, as it used to be called).

If you use NetBeans IDE and Xdebug for PHP development, at some point, there's a chance you'll run into this.  Today, my debugger suddenly stopped working without warning.  A quick search at Stackoverflow confirms that lots of people have issues getting and keeping Netbeans and Xdebug talking.  I spent several hours trying to determine what caused this.