Search boxes: integral parts of many websites but often neglected in terms of markup and style. When considering both accessibility and semantics, marking up a a search box can be a little awkward depending on the look you are trying to achieve.
In this post I will suggest some methods of marking up your search boxes, and show a neat way of styling it using css and a few images.
The ‘Secure and accessible contact form for wordpress’ has been a huge success (over 10,000 downloads!), and due to this I have decided to repost the plugin (and also its less known multi-user sister version) to further increase the popularity of this awesome plugin for the wordpress blogging platform.
The Secure & accessible contact form is designed to make contacting you from your website easy, accessible, and secure. It will definitely deter spam emails from arriving in your mail box!
This post has now been replaced by an updated version which you can find here.
Created by Mike Cherim and I, this is a wordpress plugin that lets you have your own accessible, usable, spam-proof, secure, contact form on your wordpress blog!
I haven’t seen many contact form plugins for wordpress, but this is certainly one of the best, I can say that now. We hope you enjoy using this plugin, and that it saves you from lots of horrid spam.
Read more for more information, installation instructions, and of course, the download link!
Most sites on the web are coded using pixels for widths, which is acceptable, however these sites make it harder for users with poor eyesight to increase the text size whilst keeping the layout in place and usable.
That is where ems can help. This guide will explain ems, and show you how to convert a layout to utilize ems.
Access Keys have been around since HTML 4.0, and have many accessibility benefits, they are also part of the WCAG accessibility guidelines. However despite this they are uncommon, and fairly unknown; few
webmasters choose to incorporate them in their websites.
This article attempts to describe what access keys are, their benefits and implications, and practical uses of them in your web sites. Using access keys is easier than you may of thought!
Accessibility is often neglected on the www. Without considering this you can neglect the needs of some users, and even break the law. This article explains why accessibility is important, and what you can do to meet the accessibility guidelines set by the W3C.
I have just uploaded 1.1.7 of MiniCard here and to the WordPress theme directory. This updates includes:
Hope you like it, and don’t forget you can show your support by purchasing the premium pack from here.
It’s been about two weeks now since I made the transition from a shared reseller hosting account to a VPS (Virtual Private Server) account – impressions so far, excellent performance but fiddly to configure.
The reason I wanted to change from shared hosting was the fact the server was always being hacked (even though ALL my scripts were secure), there was frequent downtime, support blamed me for problems every time, and it was slow as hell.
Those used to a shared hosting environment would probably not know where to start when faced with configuring a VPS. Luckily, a lot of it was pre-configured when I received my account – certainly some of the major security holes were patched. I was not satisfied with those however. As a victim of hacking in the past (previous host swears it was not there fault, something I don’t believe) I took extra care to secure it as a much I could – configuring brute force detection, the firewall, installing mod security (excellent rules for that here: http://www.atomicorp.com/wiki/index.php/Atomic_ModSecurity_Rules) and going though multiple guides (like this one: http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=468168) with a fine-tooth comb.
The result? My pages are loading at least 6 times faster, I have had no down time (or at least have not noticed any), and I feel in control and happy. No longer am I at the mercy of shared hosts 
If your interested, I chose ServInt as my provider as they offered a great deal, as well as being a managed service (so I’m not on my own if I screw things up). I was tempted by the bells and whistles of Media Temple, but felt the ServInt service was better value.
Download Monitor has received some more love and has been updated. Here’s the change log from the new version:
If you have edited capabilities for download monitor user permissions, you’ll have to again sorry! This is because I named them too long. Also, you should check your forced downloads still work because there was a logic error meaning they may not have been forced after-all…
Enjoy.
Today I completed the update for the Wordpress Download Monitor Plugin – many tweaks, fixes, and features added. There were no changes to the database structure so people upgrading should be fine. Here is the list from the change log:
And yes, those category link bugs are fixed at long last, and you can edit category names finally. Phew!
