How to find your photo uploads with the CForms Wordpress Plugin

I love the cforms plugin by Delicious Days just as much as the next Wordpress devotee, but there are a few things that (like too many WP plugins) are just left up to the user to figure out. After a client requested a form that let a user upload a photo to their website, I thought; "No sweat, there's a field to add an upload box." Half true. There is an option for a file upload box when you add a new field to your form, but there's some configuring that needs to be done on top of that. When you have a form with a file upload box created, there will be a File Uploads dropdown menu added to the settings menu below the forms in the cforms "Form Settings" dashboard. I've configured it like so:


I changed the absolute path to read:
/home/topdirectory/public_html/yourwebsite.com/wp-content/uploads

and the relative path to say:
/wp-content/uploads

Then, it's important to specify the maximum file number in kilobytes or the upload won't work. I said 400 here.

But, when I checked the form that was sent as a test run, no photo was there! Where do the pictures actually go??

Turns out, they go to your uploads folder in your wp-content directory. So, if you know you have a form submittal with a photo, go to this url:

http://yourwebsite.com/wp-content/uploads/

and you will see a listing of the photos as files.



Another tip: If you don't want your form to display the "Cforms by Delicious Days" underneath, go to Cforms>Style and in the stylesheet you've chosen for your form, go to where it has the classes for ".linklove" and set it to display:none;

How to find your photo uploads with the CForms Wordpress Plugin

What I'm loving right now...

1: Hiking through Steer Swamp after the rain.


2: The new season of "The Marvelous Misadventures of Flapjack" on the Cartoon Network.


3: The Shock Doctrine by Naomi Klein. Official Jennsweb Decree: Anyone in political discourse caught longing for/invoking "the good old days" as a call to arms against the new administration shall be locked in a room until they have read the entire book.

4: "Victoria" by The Kinks. (see #3)


5: Cupcakes. They're kinda like rabbits. They seem to multiply when you're not looking and disappear as soon as you get near them.

Thanks Neat-O-Rama!

What I'm loving right now...

Site Love: Sticker Mule.com

Stickermule.com I love the way this site is laid out. It's so clean, yet colorful and you can tell in the half-second it takes to read the site title what it's about. Check out their blog too. The flickr badge is "TD4". Just the "visual caffeine" I need for a case of the Mondays.

Site Love: Sticker Mule.com

A Guide to Filtering Facebook Friends

Think about it, does your mom's ex-hairdresser's cousin's lifecoach need to know everything about you? Besides, what if you are sitting across from them right now in a job interview? Then read and bookmark this helpful guide from the NYT to sorting out your friends on a need-to-know basis on Facebook.

A Guide to Filtering Facebook Friends

Not Your Mama's Fiber Optic Lamp

Any real '80s refugee has a suppressed memory or two involving Spencer's Gifts. My favorite obsession, which continued into early college trips to Boston's Chinatown, was the fiber optic flower lamp which would incandence into a revolving rainbow of hues over and over. These lamps are like the futuristic projections of a bygone era.

(plus, how can I resist passing on two of the best urls I've seen all month?)

Not Your Mama's Fiber Optic Lamp

Rebirth of the Cool

I don't know why this title jumped into my head. I've always associated with some half-remembered/half-imagined photo of Miles Davis. Plus, I found some interesting results when I searched the title one of which you can see here. (bonus points if you can actually navigate this site)

Anyway, I've been busy, really busy, but still kind of freaked out when I saw the date of my last post on this blog. Around mid-March, I started to really experience the trickle-down effect of the current economic cluster-F*%k and every day became a dogged hustle for new business. I learned a lot and have tried to keep a positive spin on things. Clients dropped off the radar due to being downsized, others became so pre-occupied with trying to keep their business afloat that they didn't respond to emails asking for feedback on projects. What's a good way to cope with MIA clients? Keep trying to contact them. I kind of feel like a cyber-stalker sometimes, but it's worth it when someone compliments you on being proactive.

What work I did get tended to be labor-intensive and a real exercise in customer service. An email at 6am frantically asking for help in figuring out a webmail dilemma? I'm on it! Wordpress-based site that needed to have 8 mini-sites all utilizing the same stylesheet? No problem, just let me brew another pot of coffee.

So why go back to this now? I guess the main reason is that I felt like I was starting to get stale. Even when the client is a company that makes low-impact stress gaskets for the aluminum packaging industry, I hate to feel like I'm just "phoning it in". Of course, surfing around the web for the latest design news is easy, but unfortunately I suffer from a deep-seated uncertainty of the line between "inspired by" and "slavish ripoff". So, I have been trying to turn away from the monitor and find inspiration elsewhere.

Unfortunately, when I did turn away, what I saw was a big alcove crammed with all kinds of clutter: programming books, cd-holders, project notebooks, binders full of downloaded articles and about 20 different varieties of kids' art supplies. The visual impact was one of messy, paint-splattered, stuff-I-wish-I-had-time-for, chaos.



So, after a week of 14-16 hour workdays, my husband knew it his turn to occupy Chloe for a few hours before mommy started buying Vicodin by the metric ton. I took a good long look at the disaster area and started to do triage. What was going to stay? What needed to be easily accessible? What was unused and creating clutter? I waded in. There was a deep bookshelf that held all my design books, cds and notes. That could go up to Chloe's room to hold toys and games and the contents could go in the shelves on top of the fishtank. The only problem was that removing the shelf exposed a big gap between the tank shelf and the wall that had been hiding 4 boxes of boxing videos (I'm not kidding). Luckily, I had some composite boards from an old enlarger stand that had been dis-assembled and between the boxes and one of the sides, I was able to create a little shelf-table that fit perfectly under the tank and could function as a holder for paint supplies and play-do. I pulled a couple of baskets of toys from upstairs to fill up the gaps and there it was, a bright corner for my daughter to play in that could also hold some non-essentials without clutter!

Rebirth of the Cool

The Vintage Web

Big up to Jim Champoux for recommending this island of misfit web sites!

The Vintage Web

Wordpress Chicklet Hack!

My latest client wanted to have some RSS feed buttons in a sidebar of their company blog. Turns out, chicklets come in all shapes and sizes and they wanted everything to line up in a nice little grid. What to do?


Step 1. Get your chicklets

I found two good places to get feed chicklets. The client had a Feedburner account, so I signed in, and went to the feed I wanted to connect the chicklets to and then clicked on Publicize > Chicklet Chooser. Then, it was simply a matter of selecting the Feed Reader icons that I wanted to use and copying and pasting the code into a text file.

Another method for grabbing chicklets is to try Top Rank's chicklet chooser service. It offers a slightly different range of chicklets and helps you cover the bases.

Step 2. Put the chicklets on your blog.

The Wordpress blog I was working with had a widgetized right sidebar so I took all the various chicklet code snippets and added them into a widget, then wrapped them in a Div entitled "Chicklets". (Jenn Tip: Tables only work in certain browsers, Safari freaks out over tables and CSS mixing)



Then, since the chicklets were going to be in 2 columns, I created two divs inside the first one. Chickletsleft and Chickletsright. Then, it was simply a matter of assigning floats, widths and text-align.




Step 3. Customize your chicklets

Take a look at your blog and see how the chicklets look. Most chicklets are 16-17 pixels high, but the width can vary by 10 pixels or more. If you look at the code for each chicklet you will notice that some actually contain the image dimensions in the img src tag and you can change the width there. This works if you are only shortening it by about 3 pixels or so. Some chicklet code snippets only give you the image and no way to manipulate the size. Never fear, you can substitute your own custom-sized chicklet! Simply take a screenshot of the chicklet you need to resize and then create a new file in your image-editing program that is the "standard" size you want. In my case, 90 by 17 pixels worked. Then, copy and paste the screenshot of the chicklet into the new image file and save it. Now, you can modify it to your heart's content and then upload the optimized jpg, gif or png to your web site's images folder.

Step 4. Upload your custom chicklet

Using your FTP program, upload the image to your website in the images directory. If you have lots of images, you may find it worth your while to create a sub-directory called Chicklets.

Step 5. Customize your code snippet.

Now, all you need to do is replace the current img src file path with one that points to the custom chicklet image on your server.

For example:
img src="http://buttons.googlesyndication.com/fusion/add.gif"
would become:
img src="http://jennmearswebdesign.com/wp-content/themes/anubis folder/images/chicklets/googlebutton.gif"


There you go. Pixel-precision control over your chicklets!

(if only the rest of my job were this easy)

Wordpress Chicklet Hack!

Blogger Tools On Mashable

Mashable has a really useful post about 25 Great Blogger Widgets. Stay tuned to see some of them showing up here soon!

Blogger Tools On Mashable

Tips For Using Adsense With A Blogger Account

1: If you have already signed up for an Adsense Publisher ID #, then you can place ads on your Blogger posts without having to go through your Google Adsense manager. (Blogger will not display code generated via your Adsense account manager.)

2: Some forms of Adsense code will only show up on individual post pages and not your home page. For example: on my blog, the horizontal banner ads show up between the posts on the home page and underneath individual posts but the sidebar ads only show up on an individual post page.

3: It's best to try and use color schemes that blend in with your blog's colors. Ads with starkly contrasting colors tend to be too jarring to the reader and makes it seem like you are trying to force them into noticing it.

4: If you get stuck on an issue with Adsense, don't get discouraged by the brevity of Google's help section. Google your issue and something is sure to pop up.

Tips For Using Adsense With A Blogger Account

Are They Kidding?

So apparently, Bomoms, Boston.com's blog for moms, posted an article called "Does Facebook Make You a Bad Mom?" Talk about a great way to build comment traffic! Suggest to any mother that she may be ignoring her children for 2 seconds while she does something that doesn't revolve 100% around them and sit back and watch the she-wolf come out.

Are They Kidding?