Jon Henshaw » Web Development

How to Create an Email Signature in Apple Mac OS X Mail with Image Links

Jon Henshaw — Mon, 02 Aug 2010 23:36:23 +0000

For better or worse, Apple decided to make it difficult to create email signatures that can contain images with links. Personally, I prefer plain text email signatures – it annoys when I get messages with signature attachments, because I expect message attachments to be related to the message, not a useless signature.

But who cares about what I think!? You don’t want subjective commentary, you want action.

Creating a Rich Text Signature

It’s a strange process to make a rich text signature in Mail.app, but overall it’s quite simple.

Step 1: Create a New Message

The first step involves creating a new email message. Make sure you’re in Rich Text mode. If you’re not, you can change it from the menu.

Step 2: Drag Image to Message

In the New Message window, drag the image(s) that you want in your signature.

Step 3: Select Image and Add Link

After you add the image, click on it to select it, and then add the link via the menu.

Step 4: Select and Paste

Once you’ve finished adding your image(s) and making it linkable, select all (Command + A), and then copy (Command + C). Then go to Signatures in Preferences, and create a new signature. Finally, paste (Command + V) the content, and save the Signature.

It’s convoluted, but it’s by far the easiest way to make a rich text signature in Apple’s Mail app.

Version 2.0 of the Modest WordPress Theme

Jon Henshaw — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 04:51:19 +0000

I decided to totally revamp – actually, completely start over – my minimalist WordPress theme, Modest. Gone are the curves and the CSS3 experimentation. What’s new is an even more refined and minimalist layout.

I wanted each page to communicate its true purpose. That meant replacing the site name from the H1 heading element, and replacing it with the actual page or blog entry title. It doesn’t mean I got rid of the site name altogether on sub-pages. Instead, I relegated it to the top of the sidebar.

The HTML is maximumly optimized. The sidebar and navigation is now secondary to the content. Semantic elements, like header, footer, section, nav, and article, are also more properly implemented.

There are still key elements from the first version of the Modest WordPress theme that I kept. For example, the general layout is still the same, and the attention to forcing a minimal list of categories and pages remains (thanks to the fixed position used in the CSS).

The CSS is greatly reduced, and as always, I gave some attention to the print stylesheet.

Not Minimalist, Not Minimalist, Not Minimalist, Minimalist

Jon Henshaw — Fri, 07 May 2010 05:04:36 +0000

When you search, you don’t want to be distracted. You want to submit a query and hope you get some good answers. Minimalism can help you accomplish this. It can keep you from being distracted, and can quickly walk you through the process. There’s only one major search engine that’s doing it, Google.

Yahoo!, Not Minimalist

Bing, Not Minimalist

Ask.com, Not Minimalist

Google, Minimalist

IE8 Acid 3 Test FAIL

Jon Henshaw — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 22:38:23 +0000

When I say IE8 is not standards compliant, this is what I mean.

How to Enable GZIP Compression on Pair Networks

Jon Henshaw — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 03:08:34 +0000

There’s a lot of different methods for enabling GZIP compression on PHP. Unfortunately, most of the common methods did not work for me on Pair Networks. In particular, trying to enable it via .htaccess for my WordPress sites proved fruitless.

I finally found the solution for enabling GZIP compression on Pair. All I had to do was add one simple line of PHP code to the top of my header.php file in my WordPress theme.

After you add the code, use the HTTP Compression Test to make sure the GZIP compression is working. If you want more tips on how to speed up your site, check out my article on how to speed up your site for Google.

How to Get the WordPress "Upgrade Automatically" Feature to Work on Pair Networks

Jon Henshaw — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 16:52:07 +0000

Enable "Upgrade Automatically" in WordPress on Pair Networks

If you use the (best) Web hosting provider Pair, and you run WordPress, then you have undoubtedly found out that you can’t upgrade automatically new versions of WordPress or updates for your plugins. The reason for that is because by default, the System CGI: php-cgiwrap is not configured. Fortunately, it’s not too difficult to enable.

Enabling Automatic Upgrades on WordPress

To use PHP 5 with php-cgiwrap, you must first copy php5.cgi to your own Web directory’s (public_html) cgi-bin directory by SSH.

Step 1

Create the cgi-bin folder in your public_html folder, if it doesn’t exist already.

Step 2

Copy and paste in your terminal connection:
cp /usr/www/cgi-bin/php5.cgi ~/public_html/cgi-bin/

Step 3

Copy and paste in your terminal connection:
chmod 755 ~/public_html/cgi-bin/php5.cgi

Step 4

Add the following lines to your WordPress .htaccess file. Make sure you change [username] with your actual Pair account username (remove the brackets.)

Action application/x-pair-sphp5 /cgi-sys/php-cgiwrap/[username]/php5.cgi/
AddType application/x-pair-sphp5 .php

That’s it. Assuming you did it correctly, you’ll now be able to automatically upgrade WordPress and your plugins. If you need more details or help with this process, view Pair’s Knowledge Base article, “Authoring/Development – System CGI: php-cgiwrap.”