Bookmarks – Page 4 – Customer Servant Consultancy

Bookmarked The Mailto Link Generator by Michael Mckeever (Mailto Link Generator)

Mailto link code and markup generator with subject, body, cc and bcc. Quickly and easily generate code for those annoying mailto links.

Clickable email addresses which allow your site’s visitors to send you email, (otherwise known as mailto links), can be quite handy, and they’re easy to generate if you type HTML as if it’s your first spoken language. If you don’t do that, they can seem like the hardest thing to create, and you have a couple of options for creating them: Google what you need and then save that information in a place you’ll hopefully remember, or just use this mailto link generator. Simply fill out the form appropriately, generate the HTML you need, and copy and paste. Note that if you’re doing this using a WordPress installation, you’ll want to switch your editor to the code view if you’re using the Classic Editor, or use the custom HTML block if you’re using the editor as of WordPress 5.0. You can also insert your generated mailto links in the custom HTML widget for use in any widgetized area your theme provides. See this post for a complete guide to WordPress widgets, which includes a section on the custom HTML widget.

Bookmarked Static Indieweb pt2: Using Webmentions by Max Böck (Max Böck – Frontend Web Developer)

How to pull interactions from social media platforms like Twitter back to your own site, using Webmentions, webmention.io and Bridgy.

Syndicating your content to social networks is all well and good, but the real fun happens when you can bring back the reactions from those social networks to your own site and display them all regardless of which site or network they come from. If your site is static, you’ll need to employ a couple of third-party services to accomplish this, whereas with WordPress or Drupal you’ll need to install some plugins. Even if you’re not a developer, the fact that you can pull in reactions to your content from all over the web is a beautiful thing to behold. And I’m looking forward to the time when most domains on the web support both syndication out and bringing reactions back in. Neither of these takes much effort, and they’re taking less and less. There’s not a lot of cost to implementing these things either anymore, and if we can get to a point where everyone who’s now using social media as their primary platform has their own domain and their own website and is able to syndicate out and bring reactions back in, then all the data currently being sucked up by the large social media platforms no longer is as plentiful, and therefore loses its value. This will, however, take work on the part of all of us, whether that’s building solutions for otheres to use or helping others use those solutions.

Bookmarked Static Indieweb pt1: Syndicating Content by Max Böck (Max Böck – Frontend Web Developer)

How to automatically publish content from a static site on Twitter, using Eleventy and Netlify’s lambda functions.

This tutorial on implementing syndication on static sites should be useful for those who don’t want to use something like WordPress or another database-driven content management system to power their site. As much as some of us would like silos like Twitter or Facebook to disappear, for most people they’re currently necessary, (the network effect), and so syndication is something that has to be part of the mix. And the more you can automate, the better.

Bookmarked Convert PNG to JPG (PNG to JPG)

Convert your images from PNG to JPG online and for free, applying proper compression methods.

The Problem

By default, WordPress supports png files to its media library. However, some hosts, (including mine), will block some filetypes for security reasons. In my case, one of the off-limits filetypes is png (image) files. You can change this by either employing the appropriate filter through code in either your theme’s functions.php file or a custom functionality plugin, as long as your host is not already using the appropriate filter to block said filetypes. I don’t plan on spending my afternoon trying to guess the priority I need to use to try to get around this. You can allow any filetype to be uploaded through WordPress’s wp-config.php file. If your host is blocking certain filetypes from being uploaded for whatever reason, they will likely not appreciate your using the wp-config constant, because when I say allow all filetypes, I really do mean allow all filetypes, or at least all filetypes supported by your web server software, which is quite an extensive list and really could introduce some security issues due to the way WordPress handles attachments: They’re a post type. Since I find myself in a situation where I need to upload a png file to my site for use as a featured image for a post, I needed a solution that was none of these and that was also accessible to a screen reader user.

The Solution

Dealing with images is difficult when you can’t see them. Converting between image formats without compromising the quality of the original image is also difficult. If you’re sighted, you’d probably open the original file in your favorite image manipulation software, tweek compression rates and other stuff, and then re-save in the format you need. Most image manipulation software is inaccessible however, and so this method is off limits. So, I needed to find a tool I could use.

PNG2JPG meets all my requirements, and it might meet yours as well. It has a very simple interface, including a traditional browse button for uploading files, and it will handle all the background compression for you and return a jpg file which perserves the quality of the image. You can then upload the returned file because it’s likely your host isn’t blocking jpg files since that’s the most common image format and they’d likely lose customers hand over fist, even if they could claim a security reason for blocking that format.

If you find yourself in the same position I did, this tool should hopefully save you a lot of time, at least if you’re converting png files to jpg and you don’t feel like pinging a sighted person who’s good with images and has the right kind of software. Enjoy, and I hope you find it useful.

Bookmarked The WordPress Twenty Sixteen theme: Good, Bad or Ugly? – A Bright Clear Web (A Bright Clear Web)

My review of Twenty Sixteen, the new theme from the WordPress team. Learn about its features, its pros and cons and who it's best suited for.

This is a really good post to use as a guide if you’re a blind person trying to work with the Twentysixteen WordPress default theme. It walks through the different steps you can take to customize the theme for your site, without using code. It also gives some detail about the various color schemes that come packaged with the theme.