Megan Jack.com: Web Design and that

Have you ever wanted an easier way to install Wordpress themes and pugins? If you have ssh access to your website you can install them directly on the sever with a few simple commands. No more downloading to your computer, extracting the zip file, and uploading again. This also works really well with Drupal Modules or any other script you need to download from another site.

(Unfortunately, most shared hosting accounts don’t have ssh access, but hopefully this will be useful for anyone on virtual hosts or dedicated servers who don’t already know how to do this!)

1. SSH into your website. Don’t know how? Try this:
   1. open a terminal
   2. type ssh username@yourwebsite.com
   3. agree to any host authenticity messages
   4. enter your password at the prompt
2. Navigate to your wp-content directory. Depending on your hosting setup the command will look something like this:cd httpdocs/wp-content/plugins/ or cd httpdocs/wp-content/themes/
3. Get the URL for the plugin or theme you want to download. The full url to the zip file. (This makes it really annoying when plugin developers hide the full url!)
4. Type in wget http://linkto.com/theplugin.zip
5. Wait for the plugin to download onto your server
6. Unzip the file by entering unzip theplugin.zip. If you have a .tar.gz file use tar xfc theplugin.tar.gz.

Done! Now you can go into your wordpress admin panel and activate the plugin or theme.

Most of my recent layouts have been em based. That means that they scale when the font size is adjusted. This approach seems to make more sense than simply allowing the text to resize while keeping the layout the same.

Well, browser manufacturers have caught on to this. Following in Opera’s footsteps, IE and Firefox are now implementing zoom as the default method of resizing text.

If this is the case, then do we still need to code layouts in ems or can we go back to using pixels? I’m currently coding a new layout for this site and I’ve decided to code it in pixels. It’s so much easier not to have to do grid calculation in ems and worry about what the current font size is. My grid unit is 24px. That’s it. Much better.

So, do you think it’s still worth it to code layouts in em’s? The non-zoom font resizing functions are still there. Will people prefer to use them over zooming?

One of the most popular posts on my blog is my guide to fixing the wordpress title tags. It’s enjoyed a great run so far, but as of today has become obsolete. Well, for myself anyway.

Via Wordpress SEO I discovered the HeadSpace plugin. HeadSpace allows you to specify a custom title format for all wordpress page types. It does lots of other cool stuff with metadata, like:

• auto-suggesting tags
• mass-editing metadata, including title, description, slugs (urls), and tags/keywords
• adding a custom title or description per post
• adding custom css of javascript files depending on the page type or on a per-post basis

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