I installed Simple Lightbox on WPShout a few weeks ago, and it’s something I wish I’d done long before.

So you’ve just installed an SSL certificate on your site, and you’re getting mixed content warnings? Noticing Google fonts not embedding, JavaScript files not loading, images missing, and so on? Welcome to another entry in an ongoing topic: why putting a WordPress site under SSL is harder than it should be, and what to do about it—mixed content warning edition.

Color inspiration is a big, practical part of web design, and ColorHexa is the best tool for it I’ve seen in a bit.

I should spend more time talking to designers. An excellent designer I’m working with on a few projects noticed me Googling for a sample image to put into a new site design, and told me about Unsplash. It’s a major step up.

Here’s one of the coolest, and most literal, plugin ideas I’ve seen in a while. Admin Menu in Frontend is a new plugin that simply puts the left-side menu from the wp-admin area onto the frontend of your site when you’re logged-in, saving you lots of clicks.

What do you do when you need to downgrade WordPress to a previous version?

I’ve got a client who wants people to interact with his site without ever seeing a WordPress-admin-looking screen. The very simple solution is a well-built plugin called Theme My Login. It puts the login form at a page on the front-end of the site located at, by default, site.com/login/, the registration form at site.com/register/, and so on.

If there’s one thing nerds like, it’s Markdown, the simplified markup language that converts into HTML. It’s the difference between typing out, for example, <strong>something</strong> (HTML) and __something__ (Markdown)—a fair number of characters, especially over a lot of post authoring.

A big part of my job is “saving what my computer screen looks like,” also called screenshotting. Most of the time the “prt sc” button works fine, but on occasion I’ll want to screenshot something longer than the height of my computer screen itself, such as a long scrolling single-page site.

“What color is that?” You’ll be asking this question a lot if you’re a WordPress developer, or a four-year-old. If you happen to be a developer, you won’t have an all-knowing adult to answer you.