Why WooCommerce Tells Guests Their Carts Are Empty and Won’t Display Site-Wide Store Notice

If you have a WordPress site running WooCommerce, you may have wondered why an anonymous guest who adds items to his cart is told that the cart is empty even after having just added something to it. The site’s theme may even show some number of items in the cart in the page menu/header, but yet the cart page insists nothing is there. Meanwhile the “site-wide store notice text” that you can use to notify visitors of an important message also has disappeared for anonymous/Guest users. Both of these issues are caused by the same thing.  Read more →

Dynamically Assign a CSS Class to the Current Page

Have you ever wondered how to assign a CSS class to the hyperlink of the currently active/open page so that you can make it clear to visitors the page they’re on by looking at the links? This functionality usually comes built-in to menus in most themes (especially WordPress), but what if you want to manually add links to a page and have those custom-made hyperlinks do something when their specific page is open? Simple – just add some PHP code!  Read more →

Solutions for PDFs that Won’t Embed Fonts Correctly to Print at CreateSpace

I recently helped a new author self-publish her first novel, which went fine until we uploaded the manuscript to CreateSpace and printed a physical copy to take a look at. We used a number of fonts in the document, but one of them refused to embed, even though we’d told Microsoft Word to embed all fonts. In spite of this, the PDF looked fine in their on-line preview tool, and the digital proof they emailed us showed a document that looked ok too. Unfortunately, when we received the printed book, we discovered that any page containing the font in question was printed at about half the darkness as the other pages, and it seemed a little rougher and more pixelated too, especially on characters like em-dashes. (Even though the font was only one or two characters on an entire page of otherwise normal text!)  We had to fix this, but their tech support was utterly useless, so after some poking around and experimentation, we found the solution ourselves…  Read more →

How to Tweak the Touch Sensitivity of a Mouse Touchpad in Linux

Installing Linux is a great way to revive an old laptop computer that you thought was too old and slow to be worth keeping. The problem though is laptop manufacturers only create drivers & software to support the Windows operating system their machines were made for, so when you want to get things like a touchpad to work in Linux, you have to rely on the best guesses of the people who made the OS to get the settings right. Unfortunately, they often miss the mark.  Read more →

Target Firefox & IE10-11 with CSS Media Queries

I haven’t had a chance to post here much lately since I’ve been coding another web site with lots of bells & whistles in my free time. It’s always fun taking advantage of the latest CSS features by peppering sites with unexpected effects, but whenever you leave the normal world of everyday ho-hum computing and try to implement techniques not seen as often, you quickly discover why most people don’t bother trying to make this stuff work. Each browser has its own quirks for what CSS features it will implement fully or partially, and making matters worse, none of the major web browsers can agree on a standard way to do some pretty basic things like, you know, how to measure a pixel or render a font. Luckily, we can employ Media Queries in CSS to change settings for specific browsers, so that people with browsers that Just Work (Chrome) don’t have to miss out on cool effects that aren’t supported (or render differently) in the other browsers. Let’s stop coding to the least common denominator!  Read more →

Windows 10: Making Issues of Privacy vs. Functionality Harder to Ignore

Last month I got a bit worked up about people’s overly grateful reaction to Microsoft’s eagerness to get their new Windows 10 operating system onto as many computers as possible, even if it meant giving it away for free to millions of otherwise paying customers.  Since then, I’ve been happy to see a number of people raising the same concerns that I had about privacy and whether this is a step too far.

The pendulum of public opinion in some circles now seems to be predictably swinging into outrage mode that Microsoft would make “default” the settings that give them and their customers all kinds of personal data about us. Then others counter that Google and friends have been doing this for years – particularly if you use a typical smart phone. Of course this is true, but the removal of one more safe harbor for your personal data is still bad news.  Read more →