Consultation

Many powerful (and sometimes free) tools like WordPress, Facebook and Google Analytics are used by enterprises and entrepreneurs who benefit from a better online and real world presence. These systems can be cost effective alternatives to in-house solutions. From adding commerce to your web site to getting started with Twitter, we can help determine the scope of your project and provide the right solution for the task. At The Variables Company, we invested years to following emerging web trends and tools.

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to increase the usefulness of your web site while building your online profile.

24Jul 11

How to connect to a web server with FTP

Here is a basic tutorial on how to connect to a remote web server from your computer using an FTP client.

14Jul 11

Hiding keywords in HTML = bad practice

It is inadvisable to hide text on the HTML in the method previously used on aura.net. Google uses a clever algorithm and actually penalizes sites that try to trick it, placing keywords in hidden text is against search engine guidelines. A quick Google search for ‘hiding keywords in html’ will show many discussions regarding how Google ‘will get you’ and regards the practice as equivalent to ‘spamming’.

19Apr 11

Back-end for Front-Enders: XML to MySQL – insert and update

Freelancing can take a developer in many directions that they wouldn’t get to go in a specific company role. The three years that I spent in front-end development taught me a lot about jQuery, CSS and conditional PHP but it really even touch on handling data. The terms ‘sanitize’ and ‘data object’ are still new-ish [...]

24Jan 11

Captcha isn’t fool-proof

There are many methods available to help fight spam, however, none offer complete protection against manual labourers.

20Jan 11

Less Framework 3

Less Framework is a cross-device css grid system based on using inline media queries. The core idea is to first create a default layout normally, and then additional layouts using inline media queries. Any browsers incompatible with media queries will simply ignore the additional layouts, and will only use the default one. The additional layouts will inherit any [...]

18Jan 11

SeaDragon Deep Zooming image AJAX

Seadragon Ajax is a Deep Zoom viewing library implemented in pure JavaScript. It supports the same single image file format that Silverlight Deep Zoom uses, but does not support Deep Zoom Collections. http://seadragon.com/developer/ajax/

18Jan 11

concrete5

CMS made for Marketing but built for Geeks concrete5 is a content management system that is free and open source. http://www.concrete5.org/

21Nov 10

Drupal Development

Drupal is a powerful Content Management System. It is open-source and can be downloaded for free, with the support of a large free to use community of developers creating tools to extend and enhance the Drupal core. While it is sometimes to large of a program to recommend for every website, medium-to-large scale businesses looking [...]

21Nov 10

PHP mail script that looks good in Gmail, Outlook and iMail!

I spent a long time clumsily messing around with Php’s mail() function. After failing to figure out how to satisfy the header requirements to for HTML e-mails that looked good in Gmail, Outlook and iMail (rather… in every possible viewing scenario), I found Swiftmailer.

22May 10

WordPress 101 Package

WordPressWant to build a dynamic, database driven website from the ground up? Don’t know jack about coding?

The Variables Company has a great package to get new users established with WordPress. Get one-on-one instruction on how to set up and edit maintain a powerful and flexible website.