Yearly Archives: 2016

Task Management with Things – How to do To Do’s the right way

I have been using the handy little helper app Things for quite a while now, both on my Mac OS computer and on my iPhone to manage all the little things I need to do. First I was simply looking for an efficient way to organize tasks. Of course I also wanted to synchronize the tasks with my iPhone from the very beginning – so it had to be an app that had both: a desktop client and an iOS app. I was checking on different reviews of task management apps – Things caught my eye. So I invested a few Euro and a few moments later I downloaded and installed the program on MacBook and iPhone.

For a couple of years I used Things on a daily basis – and it was indeed quite useful indeed. I added To Do’s as I liked – and I got some things done. Things was helpful. But somehow I was always just a bit too lazy to go the extra mile and read the handbook – or at least some introduction. I found the program useful the way I used it – and the interface appeared to be very intuitive. So instead of using the software the way it was meant to be used, I used it the way I thought it was useful. And that was not actually not very effective.

How did I actually use it? Well – I basically only used it as a simple task list. For every new task / To Do I added a separate entry to the list – no matter if the thing I added was a simple task like “call the janitor” or a complex project like “Relaunch Website XY”.

To become a bit more effective in getting things done I actually added everything to the “Today” list. Good plan, I first hought. So I found myself with a looong list of things I had to get done – sometimes that list would consist of hundreds of different tasks. The task manager was close to being un-managable. Not very effective. Just writing down the words describing how I used to use the program actually kind of hurts today: Always! All the Tasks! In one list! No wonder that I never really felt satisfied with my results – I never really had the feeling that I got anything done. The list would just sit there and either be slightly longer, or slightly shorter. Finally I realized I had to change the way I used the program – change the way I managed my tasks.

When purchasing the program I already knew it was designed around the ideas of “Getting Things Done” – an action and time management method based and a book by David Allen. So I should actually get all the tasks out of my mind – out of my way. But instead I was facing a list that felt like a wall. I realized for too long time I was too lazy to work on a way of making things easier for me.

Finally I took the time to have a closer look at the various features built into Things. And finally I came to the conclusion: I had missed a sea of options that could have saved me a lot of time and stress in the past. So what did I change – did do I use Things today? Well – it’s not that complicated. I just use it as it is probably meant to be used.

Good for Productivy AND Motivation: How to use Things the right way

A project is a project – and not just a task

Every project can consist of many different that need to get done before a project is completed. In other words: in Things a project can have as many tasks as you like. Rule of thumb: every task that needs more than 20 minutes to complete could be / should be split into two tasks. Whether you follow this rule of thumb or not is up to you – but don’t try to stuff everything into one task. This way you will also build some kind of documentation of all the little things you actually needed to do to get the project completed. Very handy.

When all tasks are completed, the project can be closed – or marked as “done”. The project will then disappear from the project list – but it will still be available from the archives / logbook for later reference.

Work on continuing and/or recurring tasks inisde the “Area of Responsibility” list

For continuing and/or recurring tasks that may feel like projects, but actually are not projects, there is another section in Things: Area of Responsibility. An Area of Responsibility can be something like “Office” or Home” or “Car” or something the like. An Area of Responsibility can by nature not be “done” like a project. But you can add again as many tasks / to do’s as you like.

I have to admit it took me some time to understand the difference between a Project and an Area of Responsibility. Once you’re over that things (and Things) may become much easier to handle.

When to get things done? Today, Next, Scheduled, Someday…?

It is recommended to only add as many tasks to “today” that you actually can get done on that very day. But of course I still tend to add too many tasks to basically every single day, leaving behind a virsual trail of tasks that are constantly moved from one day to another.

However I also do manage to add tasks to either specific days / dates – or to the more blurry sections Next and Someday. All of those sections do make sense – and there is no need to fear you would lose your tasks somewhere in time and space. You’ll just have to click on the Project or the Area of Responsibility – and – voilà – all the tasks are listed.

I hope this short “review” may be helpful for somebody some day. I can just again recommend to actually use Things (or any other time / task management software) and start getting organized. It may help you in the long run. A lot.

How to fix Masonry Offset caused by Webfonts loading slow

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No doubt: the jquery plugin Masonry can be a nice website feature – if it works as intended. It can be a pain in the neck if it doesn’t. The most common problem with Masonry is probably slow loading images. This problem can be caused by either large, heavy images that need some time to load – or a slow internet connection on the client side. This problem is well known, well documented – and there is a fix for this: you just need to implement one additional script imagesLoaded that checks if the images are already loaded, or not.

The other not so common, not so well documented problem can arise from the use of Webfonts. The problem is not as obvious – but anyways annoying. Sometimes a single Masonry item is off the grid – depending on your layout you may not even see you have a problem in the first place. The offset may also only occur occasionally which makes it even more difficult to track.

What is causing the Masonry item offset?

All that Masonry does is basically measure the size of each item (or element or box) in the grid and then calculate its position according to the settings and preferences you defined. In most cases this works pretty smooth. But in case there are slow loading Webfonts used inside the grid items, Masonry may first calculate the positions wrongly. Or actually it is first calculating the positions correctly, but once the Webfonts are loaded, some text like a headline might be using less space. This may lead to line breaks disappearing after Masonry finished calculated all the positions – hence the offset.

So as I said before – the problem can be difficult to track. You may actually never see the problem, if all the wefonts used are already present in your browser’s cache. And even then it can happen that your texts are behaving nicely because there are no line breaks disappearing. But then someday you change one of the text or add a new one and all of a sudden the grid looks wonky.

The ‘bug’ is probably most obvious when you’re working with a couple of same height testboxes – and only one has a text that adds a single disappearing line break. A single textbox may then be positioned a few pixels lower than the others. Sometimes also the order of the items can get mixed. Elements that should align to the left are suddenly floating to the right side of the grid – an invisible element seems to be in the way. Sheer chaos breaks loose.

Anyways. Just like with slow loading images there is a fix / a script for slow loading Webfonts: webfontloader. The script was released by Google in cooperation with typekit and you are free to use it. You basically just have to load the script either through Google’s distribution platform, or install it locally on your webserver. Once the script is in position you will have to wrap some lines of Javascript around your Masonry code. This makes sure that Masonry is only fired when all the webfonts defined are present.

First make sure webfontloader / webfont.js is loaded:

<script type='text/javascript' src='http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/webfont/1/webfont.js'></script>

Then wrap your masonry code with the webfont load check:

// check if all webfonts have loaded
WebFont.load({
    custom: {
      families: ['RobotoCondensedRegular','RobotoCondensedItalic', 'RobotoCondensedBold' ]
    },
active: function() {

// check if all images have loaded
var $grid = $('.grid').imagesLoaded( function() {
// init Masonry
  $grid.masonry({
    // use outer width of grid-sizer for columnWidth
    columnWidth: '.grid-sizer',
    // do not use .grid-sizer in layout
    itemSelector: '.grid-item',
    originLeft: true,
    percentPosition: true
  });
});

}

});

Check the project page over at github for further details:
https://github.com/typekit/webfontloader

El Capitan: Illustrator CS5 crash on quit / eyedropper tool [fix]

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You probably found this article because you recently finally switched to El Capitan (Mac OS 10.11) just like I did – and now you find Illustrator CS5 crashing whenever you want to use the eyedropper tool or when you want to quit Illustrator. I know – this can be can be very annoying – I’ve been there. Done that. Fixed it. Yay!

The problem with Illustrator crashing on quit brings along another problem, which can be even more annoying than the actual crash on quit: the preferences are not saved. So each time you open up Illustrator, you’ll have to dig your way through the preferences panels. Not very practical – not very useful.

Both – the “crash on quit” problem and the “using the eyedropper tool” problem are actually rather easy to fix. You basically just have to rename two files – and that’s it. This includes some digging in the hidden Library folder – but in the end it’s not that difficult.

How to solve the crash on quit issue

First you need to quit Illustrator. Then you have to find the hidden Library folder and open it in Finder. There is actually two Library folders – one for the “Computer” and one for you. We’ll start with the one inside your user directory.

In the top menu bar (the one with the apple in the corner) go to “Go”. Push and hold the [alt] key and you should be able to see and choose the go-destination “Library”. Go there – and a folder should show up, featuring a lot of folders that you usually should not mess around with. Inside the Library folder go to “Application Support” > “Adobe” and open it. Inside that folder you should see a folder called “CS5ServiceManager”. This needs to be renamed to “CS5ServiceManager.bak”.

For the second file you need to go the the hard drive – or the folder called “Macintosh HD”. Inside that directory you should see a folder named “Library”. Inside the Library folder go again to “Application Support” > “Adobe” and open it. Inside that folder you should again see a folder called “CS5ServiceManager”. This also needs to be renamed to “CS5ServiceManager.bak”.

Once both files are renamed you should be ready to go. Open up Illustrator and check for yourself: is it still crashing when you either quit or use the eyedropper tool? I hope not.

PS: I just re-discovered the original post that helped me solve this issue:

Adobe Illustrator CS5 Crash on Exit Possible Fix

How to add a Caption to the Featured Image in WordPress

Featured Image Caption in WordPress - Pgoto/Screenshot: T.Bortels/cpu20.com

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With most themes WordPress makes it really easy to add a featured image to an article / a post or a page. But although the image caption is often added correctly to inline images, it is often missing from featured images. So how can you add a Caption to the Featured Image in WordPress easily? And why do you need a caption after all?

Missing captions don’t have to be a problem for most use cases. But if you are using you WordPress installation as a CMS for some type of a magazine style website, you might want to – or even have to add captions to all images shown on your website – for example to give credit to the source of the image, the agency, the photographer – and to mention the license of the image. Some licenses require that you mention the license and the name of the photographer together with a link to the origin of the image. Then you’ll even have to add a bit of HTML to the caption. And as so often with WordPress the good news is that this is very well achievable with only a few lines of code added to your template files.

How to add a Caption to the Featured Image

When you add an image to your article / post or page either by first uploading an image to the media library, or by selecting one from the media library, you can add a title, an alt text and a caption to that image. If you are like me you probably add those three little texts right when you upload an image.

First of all, remember to make the following adjustment inside your child theme. If you don’t use a child theme yet, now is the time. If you don’t know how to add a child theme to your WordPress installation you may first want to read this previous article: How to create a Child Theme for WordPress in Minutes.

In your template file (content.php or single.php or content-single.php or page.php etc) you would then need to find the section where the featured image is actually called. The respective code should be look similar to the following code:

<div class="entry-thumbnail">
    <?php the_post_thumbnail(''); ?> <!-- the featured image -->
</div>

Depending on the theme and/or template you might also find something like this:

<?php if ( ! post_password_required() && ! is_attachment() ) :
     the_post_thumbnail('large');
endif; ?>

Below the above code you would simply have to add the following:

<?php if ( $caption = get_post( get_post_thumbnail_id() )->post_excerpt ) : ?>
 <p class="caption"><?php echo $caption; ?></p>
 <?php endif; ?>

What the above code does is first check if you have a post thumbnail a.k.a. featured image at all – then also check if the image has a caption (“post_excerpt”). If both are TRUE a paragraph with the class “caption” is printed to the layout, echoing the actual caption.

You can then add appropriate styling to the caption to make it fit your theme design.

How to copy Apple Numbers Table to WordPress Editor

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Today I have a rather specific tutorial for you: how to copy a table from Apple Numbers to the text editor of your CMS – for example WordPress?

Basically you can add tables to any text editor – whatever CMS you are working with. Some have a table function already built in, some need an add-on or a plugin to handle tables – but as long as you can access the source code of the text editor (of the text inside the text editor) you can add tables.

Working with tables inside the text editor of your CMS is quite useful – but it does not necessarily let you copy a table from another application, such as Apple Numbers. Actually there is no straight forward way to copy a table from Apple Numbers – but still this would be quite useful from time to time.

You can actually copy numbers and cells from Apple Numbers to the WordPress text editor – but you will lose the table structure on the way anyways. And what does a table look like without the table structure? It’s just a pile of numbers. Not very pretty – and not very useful. So you will need a ‘bridge’ to actually also copy the table structure correctly.

Using Text Edit as a HTML-Bridge between Apple Numbers and WordPress

Virtually every Macintosh Computer comes with a copy of the handy little application Text Edit. It might look not that useful at first, but every now and then it can come quite handy. Using Text Edit you are only two steps away from copying your pretty tables into the text editor of WordPress – or whatever CMS you might be using.

First you will have to mark all the table cells that you want to copy. In most cases this will probably be the entire table. Then you simply copy the table cells / the table into a new Text Edit document – formatted text has to be active. Once the table looks ok you can go on to the next step – saving the new document in html format.

Saving the document will give you the option to save the document as a website “.html” – you should see a pulldown similar to the following:

Copy Apple Numbers Table HTML to WordPress CMS

This HTML document will then contain the HTML source code you need to display your table on a website. So in the next step yo will have to copy the table section to your text editor.

Copying the table source code without an HTML editor

The easiest way to do this would be to open the HTML document in an HTML editor. But it is also possible to copy the HTML code without an HTML editor at hand. You just need to open the file in a browser window either by dragging and dropping it into a new window, or opening it – keyboard shortcut cmd+o. Then you can look at the source code by using the keyboard shortcut cmd+u (Firefox) or cmd+alt+u (Safari).

Inside the source code you can use the mouse to mark everything from the first “<table…” tag through to the last closing “</table>” tag. Then copy cmd+c and paste cmd+v into the text view / source view of the text editor of your CMS.

Easy as 1-2-3, or is it? Well – at least it’s possible.
Any questions or suggestions? Please feel free to leave a comment below…

WordPress: edit Flexslider Interval “auto rotate” (Visual Composer Element)

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Very practical: many WordPress Premium Themes come loaded with lots of mighty plugins that you don’t have to pay extra for. But sometime adjusting these plugins can become a bit difficult – and suddenly you find yourself with little or no support.

If you buy for example a license for the popular Theme Stockholm, then the drag’n’drop editor Visual Composer and the slider plugins Revolution Slider and Flexslider and many others are included. So with little extra investment (mostly time) you can build pages with the visual page builder and even add sliders or slideshows to those pages – almost as easy as drag and drop.

But – oh no – the Flexslider interval (“auto rotate”) that is defining the timing when the images are changed offers only four steps. The pulldown menu, where you can actually set the interval, features only options for 3 seconds, 5 seconds, 10 seconds and 15 seconds. Alternatively you can disable the “auto rotate” option.

In most cases these 4+1 options would probably be sufficient – but sometimes it’s the little details that make all the difference. And when you’re used to coding your own settings in milli-second-steps, adjusting a slider through the Cisual Composer interface can be a bit frustrating, to say the least.

Wordpress Visual Composer Slider edit interval Helping a friend / colleague to set up a WordPress website, based on the Stockholm Theme + Visual Composer + Flexslider I recently had to find out that finding support for that kind of combination plugins can be a bit hard. First I turned to the Theme Developers – but they told me I should either contact the CV staff or try the API. Long story short: I didn’t get the support I needed. So I had to find my way through – which turned out to be easier than expected.

The slider is wrapped by a div that should look like this:

<div class="wpb_gallery_slides wpb_flexslider flexslider_fade flexslider" data-flex_fx="fade" data-interval="10">

If I choose “5 seconds”, the “data-interval” has a “5” – so I suppose the interval is actually defined by the number I see inside the “data-interval” and is then passed to the slider component.

So instead of hacking the interface of the Visual Composer, you can basically just switch to the source code view and make you adjustments right inside the shortcode / source code.

First you have to switch to the “Classic Mode” by clicking on the blue button above the editor. Then I would recommend to switch to the source code – although it is very wenn also possible to make the adjustments right in the classic editor window. But I prefer to make such adjustments where they belong – in the source code.

You will then probably see quite a number of different shortcodes, depending on the number of VC elements you already added to that page. You will have to look for a shortcode that looks like this:

[vc_gallery interval="10" images="22390,23006" img_size="full"]

Inside this shortcode you can set the parameter interval to whatever you prefer – for example 7 – so that the slideshow images would change every 7 seconds:

[vc_gallery interval="7" images="22390,23006" img_size="full"]

The Flexslider or actually the Visual Composer Interface for the Flexslider (as part of the Stockholm Theme) can not really handle this input – but the clideshow itself will anyways respect your input. If you later on decide to add or remove images from the slider, chances are that the interface will reset that option to 3 seconds. Then you’ll once again have to look up that piece of shortcode and add your prefered interval once again.

How to remove images from Google image search

How to get your picture off Google? Screenshot google image search – Photo / montage by T.Bortels/cpu20.com /

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It’s not easy to get your images listed on Google. But sometimes it’s even more important to know, how to remove images from Google. Why? Well – sometimes some of your pictures may be found by Google which were not meant to be found: private photos, test images, outdated pictures. Then you probably ask yourself, how to get your picture off Google? And how long will it take, until Google doesn’t show these images any more? Just recently I was asked to help in exact that type of scenario. Here is a simple guide that will show you, how we removed im

Why you would want to remove images from Google

This particular case was about a test page – a development environment, only used for testing colors, layout, ux details. The page was never meant to be found by Google – the images were never meant to be indexed. But the precautions were not really sufficient – the test page was just ‘hidden’ under a subdomain.

The URL of that subdomain was never submitted to any search engine, nor linked to from any other website. And you actually had to enter quite specific search terms if you wanted to find the test page and the dummy images – but you could actually find them – and that was not intended.

We never really figured out why the test page and the dummy images actually ended up being indexed by Google. but of course – they were indexed. My guess is that one of the plugins tried to do a good job – but in the end we will probably never really find out. Anyways. Things happen. Now we had to remove the images from Google – as quickly as possible.

Deleting images, reporting images – ask Google for removal

The fastest and at least to me also easiest way to get your images removed from Google image search goes like this: first you should delete the images off the web server – or at least you should block them in a way, that no search engine can ignore. Probably the most efficient blocking method would be to password protect the directory with a htaccess password protection.

Most hosting providers have a user interface in the administration area you could use to quickly block a directory. You could however also tweak the htaccess file you find in the root directory of your homepage. This way in less than a minute all images could be offline – quite handy if you are dealing with hundreds or even thousands of images.

If you don’t have FTP access and can not write or tweak a htaccess file you will probably have to delete the images through your CMS. But be aware that deleting them from the content area is not sufficient – in most cases the images would still be reachable in the image directory.

How to remove images from Google Index – screenshot of removal tool at google.com/webmasters/tools/removals

The second step is to report the images to Google – or actually to report that the images no longer exist and that they should be taken off the index. Google has put up a form where you can report images and URLs – but it can be a bit hard to find: Webmasters > Tools > Removal. You will need to login with a vaid webmasters account in order to use that form.

Basically only the person reporting the images has to be registered with Google’s webmasters program. The website, that contains the images you want to report, does not have to be registered prior to your removal request. All you have to do is first delete the images – or hide them behind a password protection. So from Google’s perspective you are basically helping them to remove invalid / outdated images from their index, improving the quality of Google’s search results. And basically every webmaster is welcome to do so, if he/she finds an outdated image in Google’s image search.

To actually report an image you have to first find the image in the image search results page and then right-click on it and copy the link URL. Then paste it in the URL removal form.

Here’s once again the direct link to the removal form: Webmasters > Tools > Removal.

How to remove images from Google Search that are on someone else’s website

Removing images from Google that are located on a different server, for example someone else’s website, or a webserver that you don’t have access to, is a totally different thing. It is by nature a bit more difficult, than removing your own images – but it is still very well possible.

First you should check Google’s Removal Policies. The most important part of the Removal Policies is probably this: “We also remove content in response to valid legal requests, such as copyright notifications that meet the requirements of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.” So if the image you want to remove from Google is covered in Google’s Removal Policies, go ahead and ask Google to remove the image from Google search results through this form. You will be guided through a few steps to clarify how / where the images can be found – and why you want it to be removed.

Since Google only shows what is already available online you should then also try to get in contact with the webmaster or technical support of the website where the image can actually be found and ask them to actually remove the image from the website.

How to: Google Image Search on iPhone

Dedicated Hosting: good reasons to rent a Server

Dedicated Web Hosting: Web Server alley at All-Inkl – Photo / Copyright: ALL-INKL.COM

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It’s not a secret: I do like Dedicated Hosting – and so we do rent a server – and not just server space. We have a so called Managed Server on which we run all our and our clients’ websites And we are very happy with it. because to me first of all renting a server means paying for stresslessness. Is that an actual word? Well – I hope you know, what I mean anyways.

Of course that server is not right here next to me in Berlin – instead it’s taken care of by the fine people of All-Inkl in Friedersdorf, Sachsen, Germany. We have been with All-Inkl for quite a few years now and we are still very pleased to be. First of all, this means less stress – or actually no stress for us, regarding the hosting details. Second we get good value for our money – and last but not least: everything is no fuss. It just works.

Why Dedicated Hosting? Because Web Design is bit like cooking

I’m not really a talented cook – or at least I’m not a very experienced cook. But I would still like to compare designing websites to preparing food. The quality and the taste of a good meal depends on different aspects: the ingredients are of course crutial, but so is the team, the environment where you are cooking – and the tools you have at your disposal.

When you’re preparing a meal, the kitchen and its appliances is usually your environment – the infrastructure of cooking. When designing and/or running a website, your infrastructure probably consists of at least a desk, a computer, some programs – and a Web Server.

Of course every cook can basically work in any kitchen – and every web designer could could basically work on any web server – as long as vertain conditions are met. But of course both cook and web designer feel most comfortable in their own environment, where they know how things work and where everything is. There’s no place like home.

Why should I rent a Web Server? Advantages of Dedicated Server Hosting

For our clients we are basically offering ‘everything’ you need to run a website. First of all we are of course designing and building websites – including a Content Management System that fits the clients needs. But ovr the years it has proven to be a good idea that we also can take care of much more: from researching and registering domain names to hosting – to support concerning email accounts, web statistic etc. – basically everything you need to actually run a website. Our clients can take care of their pressures content – we can take care of the technical details.

So basically – and technically we are Hosting Providers ourselves, while our core business remains designing and buildings websites. As designers we see ourselves as ‘problem solvers’ – service providers that take care of our clients needs.

For us Dedicated Hosting has quite a number of advantages. To sum it up very briefly: we know our Web Server – and our Web Server knows us.

Running a website on Shared Hosting or actually a Shared Server you would instead share one server with X neighbors – that means mostly websites you probably don’t know. One of your neighbors could run a script that would eat up the server’s processing power – another neighbor could run a website that would eat a lot of bandwidth – you just don’t know. Slow server response time? Try to find out, who is to blame, Sherlock!

I suppose such worst cases won’t actually matter, even if we had a shared server at All-Inkl since already the cheapest shared server account would only allow a maximum of 100 clients per server. but that’s still 99 neighbors. Anyways – I recently read that most of the hosting providers tend to stack their shared servers to the limit. Try a reverse IP-look-up and you’ll see, what I mean.

With Dedicated Hosting / a Managed Server you usually also gain a lot of freedom to configure things the way you want to – in ways that would never be possible on a Shared Server. You want to allocate more memory to a certain directory? No problem. Need a special PHP version? Got it.

Do you really need a Managed Server?

Of course not everybody needs a Managed Server – for most people / most websites that be probably a little over the top – and renting a Managed Server can also be a bit costly. The costs can easily add up and at the end of the year you’re facing a four digit invoice or the like.

But for us it was never the question if we could afford renting a Managed Server – the advantages clearly outweigh the odds / the costs. But it is a good feeling to have everything up and running – it is actually running very smoothly. As I said in the beginning: no fuss. Our server has more than enough space and processing power than currently needed – we are happy and content – and our clients (hopefully/probably) too.

So maybe Dedicated Hosting on a Managed Server is not something for everybody, unless you are running a resource-hungry monster of a website. But if you happen to be a web designer / web developer that love’s to take care of things, wants to be in control and prefers to cook in his/her own kitchen, then you should probably consider renting a web server for you and your clients. I personally can only recommend it.

How to check the execution time of a php script

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You have the feeling your website is slow? Some process is taking too long, something is not loading fast enough? Of course, there might be a script or maybe just a few lines of php slowing it down – but which part of the script is it? If you are witnessing for example speed problems with a WordPress Plugin, chances are that the plugin runs some loop inside a loop and/or maybe sending too many database queries. Reducing the number of database mySQL queries can dramatically speed up your page load time – but that will be subject of a different article. Anyways – all we need to know now is that there are ways to find out, which script or which plugin is executing slow – and how long it actually takes, to execute that particular piece of code.

Debugging or optimizing a script can be a time consuming task to do – so we’ll focus on those parts, that are the ‘most expensive’ ones – meaning the slowest ones. To find ‘time bandits’ inside your code all you basically have to do is start a timer before the suspicious script / plugin / module is executed – and then stop the timer once the script has done its job. And with PHP at hand it is not really complicated to measure the time that has past executing a piece of code – PHP code that is. Microtime to the rescue!

First you need to define a variable for the timer and start the timer before the script is executed like this:

$start_timer = microtime(true);

Then you stop the timer, after the script is executed like this:

$time_passed = microtime(true) - $start_timer;

You could then print the time that passed with a simple echo command:

echo("The script needed ".$time_passed." seconds to execute.");

If you want to round that number off to two positions behind the decimal point, you simply add the round command like this:

echo("The script needed ".round($time_passed, 2)." seconds to execute.");

So if you put everything together, it could look like this:

$start_timer = microtime(true);

// the suspicious code goes here
while … {

}

$time_passed = microtime(true) - $start_timer;

echo("The script needed ".round($time_passed, 2)." seconds to execute.");

PS: You may ask if speed optimization pays off? Is loading speed a SEO criteria? Is a slow loading website bad for SEO? And/or is a slow site bad for UX? All these questions can be answered YES. Good luck!

How to create a Child Theme for WordPress in Minutes

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When you are creating a WordPress website, I would recommend you create and install the appropriate WordPress Child Theme right from the start. There are of course lots of WordPress Themes you can use as they are – well designed, fully functioning. Many so called Premium Themes offer a broad variety of different options to adjust design details, use a different font, change the colors etc. – and also many free WordPress themes offer basic functionality to adjust the design of the website, to stand out. However, whatever theme you may be using, there is often the need to do some additional adjustments. And this is when a child theme comes handy.

The easiest way to adjust a theme would probably be to edit the different templates and stylesheets directly. But that would also be the dirtiest way of doing this. Always remember: never hack the core! The next update will come and then all your precious adjustments may be overwritten – gone – and you’ll have to start all over again.

So actually the easiest way to do some quick adjustments is to create a WordPress child theme and then apply all the necessary adjustments to the child theme only.

Create a WordPress Child Theme in minutes

A few years ago it was a bit complicated to create a child theme. Nowadays it’s really just a matter of minutes to have a functioning child theme at hand, letting you change and tweak and twist whatever design details you would want to adjust.

Basically you only need to create two files – and then you’re ready to apply your own css to the parent theme, without changing it. Enough introduction – let’s get started:

First you need to create a new directory inside the themes directory. This folder will then hold all files that your child theme will be working with. Best practice would be to name the folder according to your theme’s name – in this example the child theme will be called “My Theme” so we will name the folder “my-theme”.

1) Create the Child Theme Stylesheet style.css

Inside this new directory you will first have to create the main stylesheet for your child theme – the style.css. The following code is the minimal requirement for the child theme to work:

/*
 Theme Name:   My Theme
 Theme URI:    http://cpu20.com/my-theme/
 Description:  Twenty Fifteen Child Theme
 Author:       First_name Last_name
 Author URI:   http://cpu20.com
 Template:     twentyfifteen
 Version:      1.0.0
 License:      GNU General Public License v2 or later
 License URI:  http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html
 Tags:         light, dark, two-columns, right-sidebar, responsive-layout, accessibility-ready
 Text Domain:  my-theme
*/

What are all these details good for? Well – most of the details are not really necessary. But it’s considered good practice follow the standards and to provide at least basic information for whoever will have to look at the child theme in the future. Also these details will partly be visible in the WordPress Themes’ administration screen.

I usually name the child theme after the project or after the client, often followed by the year I created the child theme. Then everybody involved knows what the theme is about – and when it was created. Here’s some details about the the above theme info:

Theme Name is the actual name of the theme or child theme, as it is displayed in the admin area.
Theme URI is the web address where you could find further information about the theme.
Description should feature a short description about the theme – in this case it says that the theme is a child theme of the default WordPress theme twentyfifteen.
Author is of course the the author of the theme / child theme and the Author URI should point to a website where you could find further information about the theme’s author.
Template is the name of the theme directory of the Parent Themes that the Child Theme is referring to – so in this case it’s twentyfifteen.
Version is the version number of the theme.
under Licence and Licence URI you should find information about the license the theme is published under. In most cases this should be the GNU General Public License.
Tags let you describe the theme by tags / keywords. This can help to actually find the theme once it’s for example submitted to some larger theme directory.
Text Domain is important so that the theme becomes fully translatable. The text domain must not interfere with any other text domain used by other themes. Again using the theme’s name is good practice.

The first step towards our new WordPress Child Theme is made – now we need to connect both Parent Theme and Child Theme with each other. We will do that in the file functions.php…

2) Create the Child Theme Functions file functions.php

The second file we need to get out Child Theme running is the functions.php, that at least has to contain the code to properly connect the Child Theme with the Parent Theme. The child theme could actually run without it – but then it would be a theme – not a child theme – and no styles of the parent theme would be apllied to your website.

Here is the code:

<?php
function theme_enqueue_styles() {

    $parent_style = 'parent-style';

    wp_enqueue_style( $parent_style, get_template_directory_uri() . '/style.css' );
    wp_enqueue_style( 'child-style',
        get_stylesheet_directory_uri() . '/style.css',
        array( $parent_style )
    );
}
add_action( 'wp_enqueue_scripts', 'theme_enqueue_styles' );
?>

What this code does: first the Parent Theme’s Stylesheet is loaded, then the Stylesheet of the Child Themes is loaded. This first the ‘regular’ style expressions are applied to the templates – then these are either overridden, or additional styles are applied.

In the last step we have to actually activate the theme. If everythings is uploaded to the web server, you should be able to find the child theme under Appearance > Themes in the left side bar of your administration screen. Once activated, all styles should be applied to the website. Also all additional functions that you could add to functions.php should be applied.

You could of course still go a bit further. Basically you could every detail of your website – override every style your parent theme defines. You could however first add a screenshot of your website to the child theme’s folder. This is basically not necessary, but nice – it makes your child theme look more professional in the admin area. All you have to do is take a screenshot of your website, rename the file to “screenshot.png” and upload it to the child theme directory.