Ready Designs

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Merry Christmas & Happy Holidays!

Ready Designs News

December 22nd, 2011

Christmas & Business Cards 2011

New full sized and mini business cards, as well as my holiday greeting cards. Merry, merry!

I buy all my promo paper products from Overnight Prints, because they do a super fantastic job with quality and customer service. They’re also very clear about upload procedures, and they have lots of good sales (and unlike Vista Prints, they don’t jack their prices up before discounting them to give the appearance of sales). Seriously, give them a try! :)

Deleting Blank Pages in LibreOffice and OpenOffice

Tutorials

May 11th, 2011

The word processors of both LibreOffice and OpenOffice free open-source office suites have an annoying habit of inserting blank pages in documents. These insidious pages won’t show until you go to print the document.

Libre- and OpenOffice do this because of their insistence upon interpreting every document as a “book”, with left and right pages. If you fiddle with the page numbering or page breaks, you may find yourself with blank pages inserted to “help” you keep your “book”‘s odd/even pages properly lined up.

Mostly what I print from word processors are contracts, memos, faxes, and letters, so the whole book format doesn’t matter to me and the blank pages are basically just a royal pain. After finagling around a bit trying to find out how to remove these blank pages based on where and how I add breaks and page numbering, I discovered the easy solution.

When you go to print your OpenOffice or LibreOffice document, go to the Open-/LibreOffice Writer tab and un-check the box to “print automatically inserted blank pages”. Done. You’ll see the page numbers below the preview on the left decrease accordingly.

Removing or Deleting Blank Pages from LibreOffice and OpenOffice

Displaying Custom WordPress Taxonomy List Items Without the Links

Tutorials

April 21st, 2011

Or: How to Strip <A> Tags From get_the_term_list

Okay, this one is a bit obscure and not terribly complex, but it took me a minute to solve, so here it is for the rest of the world.

I was working on a WordPress custom taxonomy as a way to store and display useful information about a post. Specifically, I was creating a “Venue” type to store nightclub names which could then be displayed easily throughout the theme’s code, as well as inserted via shortcode.

Creating the Custom Taxonomy

Creating the taxonomy itself wasn’t really that hard, and isn’t the main subject of this post, but for the sake of completeness, I’ll cover that briefly first.

function define_venue_taxonomy_cat() {
register_taxonomy('your-custom-taxonomy-name', 'page', array('hierarchical'=>true, 'label'=>'Taxo Name', 'query_var'=>true, 'rewrite'=>true) );
}

In the above code, I’m registering the taxonomy “your-custom-taxonomy-name” to attach to pages (as opposed to posts). I’m declaring it to be a hierarchical type, like WordPress’ native Categories, with the label “Taxo Name” showing up as the label above it in the admin. The “query_var” tells whether it should apply to custom post types, and “rewrite=>true” allows for pretty URLs such as “mysite.com/your-custom-taxonomy-name/item” instead of the default “mysite.com/?your-custom-taxonomy-name=item”.

This declaration in your functions.php file will register the taxonomy with the database and put a new meta box next to your pages.

For more info on custom taxonomies and how they work, check out custom taxonomies in the WordPress codex.

Outputting the Taxonomies Without Links

Now, I wanted to output the taxonomy info into the theme; i.e., I wanted the theme to display the name of the venue in various places. My only problem was that while the most obvious choice for this was WP function “get_the_term_list()“, it outputs the taxonomy terms as links, wrapped in <a> tags. After some mucking around, I discovered two possible solutions. Keep Reading

MIX11: Get Real! Sketch, Prototype, & Capture Great Ideas

Conferences

April 14th, 2011

For the final session of MIX11, none of the options are really my bag. I finally chose “Get Real! Sketch, Prototype & Capture Great Ideas” with Sara Summers, covering Expression Blend and Sketchflow. Follow along @ReadyDesignLive.

This session is now posted on Microsoft’s Channel 9:

 

Remember, since this is a liveblog, start from the bottom and read upwards.
Keep Reading

MIX11: CSS3 Takes on the World

Conferences

April 14th, 2011

Liveblog of “CSS3 Takes on the World” by Jonathan Snook. Follow along @readydesignlive.

This session is now posted on Microsoft’s Channel 9:

 

Since this is a liveblog, remember to start reading at the bottom of the page and work your way upwards.
Keep Reading

MIX11: Mind Bending UX – UX Lightning Sessions

Conferences

April 14th, 2011

“Mind Bending UX” Lightning session with Arturo Toledo, Sean Gerety, Rick Barraza, Robby Ingebretsen. Follow along @ReadyDesignLive.

The session is now posted on Microsoft’s Channel 9:

 

As this is a live-blog, please read from the bottom of the page, upwards.

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Happy Folks

    • Roxanne will grasp the bigger picture of any job and is one of those rare species that combines technical skill, creativity and functionality.

      Annelies Draaijer, Raglan Shire

    • Roxanne is an extremely talented programmer. She is able to take an extremely complex storyboard and turn it into a beautiful website. There is no project too big or too small that she can’t handle.

      Rachael Masek, UWF Webspinners

    • When a concern comes up that she knows about, she’s usually suggesting solutions before I even come to her to discuss the problem.

      William Kammer, BDI

    • [Roxanne] brings along creativity, pro-activeness, enthousiasm, a high level of skill and she will think outside of boxes. She’s also a quick learner and a very pleasant person to work with.

      Annelies Draaijer, Raglan Shire

    • Roxanne Rocks! Super quick turnaround, amazing communication and a pleasure to work with. She’s the best and I highly recommend her for your website/design needs

      Andrea Morelli, Impetuous Style

    • Roxanne shows her skills in social media everyday by managing numerous accounts and keeping them updated to
      attract traffic. She’s capable of creating an online presence and keeping it within the tone and attitude the
      company desires.

      William Kammer, BDI

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