Simmons Consulting » Web Development

Why it costs so much

Toby Simmons — Tue, 14 Dec 2010 21:36:16 +0000

If a client asks “Why do you charge so much for X hours of work?” simply tell them “You are paying me for the X hours of work and the 35,000 hours it took to learn how to do your project in X hours.”

New website launched!

Toby Simmons — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 21:49:04 +0000

A large ecommerce project of mine recently launched. The site is called Ridge City Media and they offer disc repair services, for CDs, DVDs and game console discs. If you have scratched or unworking discs, CDs that skip or won’t play, check out their site for excellent disc repair.

Cindy Lou’s Books website

Toby Simmons — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 19:01:17 +0000

It’s been a long time since I have had a new site launch, but just recently I designed and launched a site for a friend who was opening a used bookstore in honor of his wife who recently died from ovarian cancer. The book store, in Mt. Juliet, Tennessee, is called Cindy Lou’s Used & Loved Books. You should go there and read about Cindy and what Mark is doing now.

Integrating WP in external PHP pages

Toby Simmons — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 16:00:11 +0000

I have several external pages that use the WP theme engine to wrap the content. I use the method found here, which worked great under WordPress 2.9.2. After upgrading to WP 3.0, these pages no longer worked as expected but instead generated 404s; it turns out the fix is rather simple.

The code to include the WP theme in external pages used to look like this:

< ?php

require('./wp-blog-header.php');
get_header();
?>
<h2>This is the external content.h2>
< ?php
get_sidebar();
get_footer();
?>

The newest version of WP merged the old WordPress Multi-User (WPMU) and the standalone version of WordPress. Since this merger, the new way to include WP in external pages is to change the require() statement to pull in wp-load.php (instead of wp-blog-header.php) like this:

< ?php

require('./wp-load.php');
get_header();
?>
<h2>This is the external content.h2>
< ?php
get_sidebar();
get_footer();
?>

Now your external pages work just like they used to! I found the answer on a BBPress forum post from nine months ago.

Facebook ads malware

Toby Simmons — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 00:44:22 +0000

Not sure what is going on with Facebook but I logged on this evening and within two clicks, received a scareware/malware-type popup message. It said something about “Hey your computer is infected, Do you want to scan it now?” This was a Javascript popup message with an “OK” and “Cancel” button. I clicked “Cancel” and immediately the browser window was covered up with a fake Windows dialog box showing a progress bar and a flashing “Scanning!” prompt. I closed the browser immediately and noticed the URL of the malicious page. It was from (DO NOT LOAD THIS WEBSITE)

http:// 217.23.5.205/ index.html

The IP address appears to be owned by an outfit in the Netherlands.

This page had some simple attempts at Javascript obfuscation but essentially it covered up the browser window with a

that looked like an Explorer window with infected files. Bear this in mind while browsing.

Google thinks I’m a robot?

Toby Simmons — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 20:26:55 +0000

So Google thinks I’m a robot? I was doing a fair amount of searching because I had a server down and needed to fix it, but seriously?

Facebook boom

Toby Simmons — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 21:00:12 +0000

Good grief. Seriously, is it just me? Is the whole Internet crashing? Google, YouTube and Facebook in the last week.

Youtube boom again?

Toby Simmons — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 19:30:38 +0000

Is it just me? Why oh why?

Youtube goes boom?

Toby Simmons — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 18:17:36 +0000

Well, I must say I’ve never seen this before when going to Youtube.

Google is sloooowwwwww

Toby Simmons — Thu, 14 May 2009 15:40:30 +0000

Dunno why but Google is just crawling today. Searches take a very long time to return, if at all. Sometimes only half the page loads, too.

Updated 2009-05-14 @ 2:41:15 pm: Yep, according to cnet, widespread outage.

Updated 2009-05-14 @ 10:02:40 pm: It’s really nice when a company owns up to their mistakes.