Long time, no write, eh? The Monk has been busy!

In fact, that’s exactly what I want to talk to you about. No, not the “busy” part, the “Monk” part.

You see, I got out of spiritual healing work for a number of reasons, one of the biggies being that I didn’t like the feeling of charging for spiritually specific work (intuitive work, healing work, business work… sure. No problem. But teaching it? Just didn’t feel right.).

But even though I transitioned to full-time web design, I was still running everything out of MonkAtWork.com, and that just kinda bugged me. I would’ve preferred to have a different home for the web work, and leave the spiritual stuff here.

At the same time, as I worked with a number of clients, I began to realize a few things about the way my clients and I were approaching the design process, including what made a big difference in people’s success levels with their new sites (and, of course, what didn’t). I wanted to rectify those pitfalls, make it better/cheaper/faster/easier for folks, and do it in a way that really played to my strengths, and the strengths of WordPress (my platform of choice).

Long story short: I have a new home for my “web design” services, and it’s going to blow your doors off. Enter: Bright Coconut.

What’s the big diff?

(more…)

Recently on Smashing Magazine, there was a fantastic article by Jean-Baptiste Jung of Cats Who Code, called 10 Killer WordPress Hacks. Now, many times when you see a title like that, you probably do the same thing I do: yawn. Because you know as well as I do that out of those 10, only two or three are probably going to be any good.

Au contraire this time, my friends. Jean-Baptiste rocked the house with this one. I was already using one of his tricks, I immediately put three of them into practice while reading the article, and two more are on my to-do list now done. It only took me about ten minutes, tops.

But I’m a code-happy kinda guy.

I realize that what I can do in three minutes might take you thirty, at least, just because you’re doing other things during your day besides coding, and I, on the other hand, do a lot of it.

So, because Twitter and blogging are getting to be so much more widespread these days, I thought I’d break down “Tip #5: Create a ‘Send to Twitter’ Button” for you, in case you’ve got a more complicated installation than just adding a link. If your theme uses images along with your links, as one of my client’s sites does, then just adding the code is going to break your visual layout, and make you look like a hack.

We can’t let that happen now, can we?
(more…)