In remembrance of those who died serving this country.

Emergencies will, of course, be handled. And, if you happen to see anything from us, you can blame the “catch-up fairies!”

Have a great Memorial Day!

As a webdesigner, I deal with fonts a lot. Fonts are fun, but they can also drive me nuts! It was fun to see where some of the names of the fonts we still use today came from. I hope you enjoy the video as much as I did.

From the Affiliate Marketing Glossary. Republished with permission of Website Magazine.

Modern Tribe has announced that they are increasing the prices of their plugins by 20% in June. This is not a cause for panic as their prices will still be very reasonable, in my opinion. Read their blog post for more information.

As you’ll see in the Modern Tribe blog post, they are about to release version 3.0. Anyone with a valid license (not expired) is eligible for the upgrade from the current 2.x version to 3.0 at no extra charge.

Have you been considering adding a calendar to your WordPress powered website or blog?

Contact us now to get that project scheduled and have the license purchased before the end of May. It will save you a few bucks.

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Like High Aspirations, Inc. on Facebook

Your website is linked to Facebook via your personal or business Facebook account. Changing that password and forgetting to let us know what it is, means your blog posts will no longer be published on Facebook.

For example, my contact page is titled “Contact Information for High Aspirations, Inc.” which makes it very clear exactly what a visitor can expect to find on that page of my site.

High Aspirations, Inc. includes page titles when designing and maintaining a website, but clients should check them and let us know if they’d like any updates.

Websites and pages that haven’t been updated in months or years may need a new title as search engine optimization methods have changed!

Making sure your pages titles tell visitors what they can expect to find there is an easy search engine optimization task!

From the WordPress Codex: Glossary. Republished because WordPress believes in the GNU General Public License.

Tech Talk, powered by WordPress

The deciding factors…

• It just keeps getting bigger and bigger as they add more and more modules.
• The modules are auto-activated.
• Deactivating modules is not a quick click and done process.
• When they added their Jetpack Comments module, it installed, auto-activated, and took over all the comment features on the blog even those controlled by other comment plugins I had installed on client websites.
• It requires an account at WordPress.com which in and of itself is not a big deal, but it also requires a constant connection to WordPress.com.

A little history and more deciding factors…

I first installed the Jetpack WordPress plugin sometime in 2011. It wasn’t brand new at the time, but it wasn’t old either if you know what I mean. It only had a few modules (features), maybe seven or eight. I installed it to replace a sharing plugin that had started to displease me and because the stats plugin we had been using was now part of Jetpack. Out of those seven or eight modules, I used two. Updates were released and more modules added and then I was using maybe three or four modules. Two years later and I’m still only using three or four modules, half of which I could do without. So are my clients. Jetpack has just continued to get bigger and bigger. They are up to twenty-five modules now.

After all the trouble I had upgrading websites in February, I haven’t updated Jetpack since. See my “WordPress Jetpack Plugin Version 2.1.2 Upgrade Woes” post for a reminder. An un-updated plugin is a security risk so research and discussion was done and a decision has been made.

Jetpack’s bloat and ‘I want to run everything’ mentality are not right for High Aspirations, Inc. and it needs to go.

Jetpack’s modules that will be replaced are:

• WordPress.com Stats will be replaced with Google Analyticator which will connect WordPress blogs with Google Analytics. This is more powerful and useful, in my opinion, and will still display a summary of stats within the WordPress Dashboard. The downside to this replacement is that the existing Jetpack stats will be lost as there is no way to archive or save them.
• Sharing will be replaced with ShareThis which doesn’t just contain social sharing links, but also its own stats on what is the most shared content on your site and on what social networks.

I will review each client’s website and make sure that they are using just these two modules and if there is anything else being used that cannot be lived without, I will attempt to find a replacement. All clients will be given advance notice of this replacement and will have the option to opt-out. If I have to continue to maintain Jetpack on a client’s website then I will, but the client will need to understand that this plugin will be costing them more money as it takes more time to maintain.

Since Jetpack has this nasty habit of sucking up other plugins and then stopping development on that stand-alone plugin or causing such a drop in usage of a plugin with the same features that they stop development too, there is a chance that we will have to go back to Jetpack in the future simply because what we want to do or a client’s website needs no longer exists outside of Jetpack. I hope that doesn’t become the case and if it does one day, then I hope that Jetpack starts to listen to the WordPress community and goes back to being a plugin that offers very cool features and not the monstrosity it has become.

Thanks for listening to my long-winded rant and explanation. I thought it was important for all my clients to understand exactly why this decision was made.