Year: 2018

ZAFFIRO Lapel Microphone comparison B074SF96X9 vs B0765NGK4N

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In this episode I’m taking a look at two lapel microphones by ZAFFIRO. They’re both called “Lavalier Lapel Microphone”, and the description is more or less identical on both items – yet there are significant differences between these products.

I bought both of them back in March 2018, and given the sound quality and amount of accessories you get, for less than $20 each, these mics are good bargains for casual users. But no matter how detailed (or vague) their shop descriptions are, and no matter how hip the people in those pictures look, you can only really judge a microphone by what it sounds like.

In this review I’ll tell you all that I’ve learnt in my six months with the ZAFFIRO lapel mics.

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Podcast: Download (Duration: 21:14 — 19.5MB)

How to bring back the date on Sticky Posts in TwentyThirteen

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By default, the TwentyThirteen theme suppresses the date byline when a post is marked as Sticky (in which case, it’ll always be displayed at the top of the posts list).

That’s usually great, because Sticky Posts are often timeless announcements, and the fact that they’re a year or two out of date doesn’t look as handsome as if the date byline would simply be removed. I like this as a default behaviour.

Here’s what a default sticky post looks like, without the date displayed:

But of course, every now and again you may want to break the rules and shake up the whole universe. I did this on my iOS Dev Diary recently, where an announcement post would have been very helpful with the date displayed (I didn’t intent to keep it there for long).

So how do we bring back the date on Sticky Posts in TwentyThirteen? Let’s find out!

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How to bring back the Author Byline in TwentyThirteen

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I could have sworn that when I started using Automattic’s TwentyThirteen theme over five years ago, it displayed an Author Byline in the meta description. That’s the text right underneath the title of a post, the same line that displays the post date, categories and tags.

I remember this because there were many an instance on which I had to hide that Author Byline, because on single author websites, crediting yourself over and over again just leads to a cluttered reading experience. Furthermore, if you have several tags and categories to display, the meta line can easily run over into a second line, adding to more clutter than we want to see.

Turns out that over time, the WordPress team have had a lot of feedback about the Author Byline, and it turns out that nine times out of ten, people just didn’t want to see it. So they decided to invisibilise it by default.

Thanks to David Greene and P. Chandra for bringing this to my attention.

Let’s take a look at two options that can bring it back in TwentyThirteen.

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How to fix the Disappearing Mobile Header in TwentyThirteen

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I’ve recently changed themes on this site, from my own development of P2 Categories to Automattic’s TwentyThirteen. P2 Categories was not mobile friendly by default, and TwentyThirteen gives all my major notebook sites a cohesive look, making maintenance easier for me.

One thing I’ve noticed about TwentyThirteen is a small bug that’s been discussed several times around the web: when no header text elements are shown (under Appearance – Customise – Site Identity), a graphical header image disappears on mobile devices. Or more accurately, when the screen width changes to anything below 767 pixels.

If a site title and description are shown, the bug does not present itself, and instead the theme resizes the header image as well as the text without issues. That’s the behaviour I’m experiencing on both my 3D Dev Diary and my iOS Dev Diary.

I did some digging and found a suitable solution for this problem. Let me share it with you here.

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How to build an Amazon link efficiently

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When you want to share a product on Amazon with someone else, the easiest thing to do is to copy whatever is in the browser bar at the time and paste that elsewhere. While this works, it’s not an efficient way to link to a product.

The URL is often extremely long and contains additional parameters that tell Amazon’s systems either how the product was found or referred, or what else to display on the current product page. Most of that additional information makes the URL longer than it needs to be.

In this article I’ll show you how to build a short and efficient link without additional parameters, such as tracking information.

All we really need is the regional Amazon domain and the ASIN of the product and add these two together, separated by the letters “dp”.

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WordPress 5.0 and Gutenberg: What does this mean for you

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In this episode I’m explaining the implications of the new default text editor in WordPress 5.0. It’s called Gutenberg, named after the man who invented the printing press (and hence revolutionised how printed books were duplicated and distributed at the time). I’ll also show you how to test drive the Gutenberg editor in WordPress 4.9 … Read more