After publishing our tutorial on implementing dark mode at Mercury Photo Bureau, we saw an opportunity to improve the user experience by reducing dependencies and adding animation. We think the new solution is more semantic, too, so that's a win.The new code removes the Fontawesome dependency Read More
Implementing Dark Mode at Mercury Photo Bureau
Introduction I recently read Dave Rupert’s article "Sass vars, CSS vars, and semantic theme vars", in which the author makes that case that just because we have variables in CSS now doesn't mean SASS variables are dead. In the article, Rupert describes how he used both types of variables to Read More
Side Notes and Margin Notes in Tufte CSS: a WordPress Shortcode
Simplified Authoring for Tufte CSS Our sister site Mercury Photo Bureau uses side notes and margin notes in the style of Edward Tufte. The notes are styled using a bespoke adaptation of Tufte CSS. Because the code to display the notes accessibly is quite complicated, we use a shortcode to simplify Read More
Replacing WordPress Cron with PHP Cron on OpenLiteSpeed Server
We recently moved our websites from a Linux-Apache-MySQL-PHP (LAMP) server to individual OpenLiteSpeed servers. Hosting costs were one consideration, but it was mainly the performance boost that sold us on OpenLiteSpeed. One of the costs of moving is learning how to configure an unfamiliar server Read More
New Plugins: WP FOFT Loader & Five-Star Ratings Shortcode
Messenger Web Design is pleased to announce two new WordPress plugins: WP FOFT Loader & Five-Star Ratings Shortcode.WP FOFT Loader implements and automates Zach Leatherman’s “Critical FOFT with preload, with a polyfill fallback emulating font-display: optional” to optimize and speed Read More
WordPress: How to Add Search Speech Recognition
Overview I've had voice search capability on my photography website for several years. When I decided to revamp the website with a new Wordpress theme, I discovered that the HTML5 Web Speech API had changed and my old code no longer worked. A little research showed me the correct way to get Read More
Foiling Cryptomining Supply Chain Attack on Your WordPress Site
Security researcher Scott Helme recently discovered a new type of attack that could affect most of the world's websites. The cryptomining supply chain attack affected the UK Information Commissioner’s office, UK National Health Service websites, an Australian provincial government website, and many Read More
Writing & Formatting for the Web
How Users Read on the Web They don’t. People rarely read Web pages word by word; instead, they scan the page, picking out individual words and sentences. In research on how people read websites we found that 79 percent of our test users always scanned any new page they came across; only 16 Read More
Mercury Photo Bureau Theme Hacks
We’ve been concentrating on WordPress development lately, building a new site for an existing customer and designing a site for our sister company, Mercury Photo Bureau. Both sites are mobile friendly, with progressive enhancement for larger displays. Key to testing the layouts was the Responsive Read More
John Lennon Flickr Set
I just created a Flikr set of scans from some rare John Lennon ephemera; you can see them here. They include images of a postcard, petition, and the rarely seen backs of the inner sleeves from John & Yoko/Plastic Ono Band Some Time in New York City, Apple PCSP 716. Read More