Jerry Jones

Blog

  • Kirksville Family Acupuncture

    A local acupuncturist, Holly Arbuckle, just starte a business focusing on Kirksville acupuncture.  Focus for the project was to make Acupuncture seem normal in the midst of rural MO.  After some thought mapping, we went with a leaf for the logo based on the idea of the visible paths of the leaf veins.  Acupuncture is all about channels, or paths, and the leaf represented this without needing a yin and a yang on it 😉

    Next, the design of the website was to be airy, clean, and inviting.  Go check it out and book online with her if you’re in the area.

  • New Vision Optical

    New Vision Optical

    I took a few pictures of New Vision Optical’s great store because they’re supporting the FLATS project by donating a portion of their sales to help build the trail! Awesome! If every store in Kirksville followed their lead, we’d have the trail in no time. I’m sure New Vision Optical is the most unique optical store in the midwest.

  • Craigslist Nearby Cities Search Aggregator – Google Spreadsheet

    I made a spreadsheet in google that will take a search term and search it in all the nearby cities on craigslist and dynamically output all the results in the spreadsheet using importXML queries. You have to specify which three-letter category you want to search for. Like furniture (fua), cars by owner (cto), musical instruments (msg), etc. I’ve only tested it in some of the for sale categories.

    Here’s what you do:

    1. View the craigslist nearby cities search aggregator spreadsheet
    2. Make a copy of the spreadsheet (you have to be logged into your google account to do this (file > make a copy…))
    3. Open your spreadsheet copy in your google docs
    4. Edit the config options (the ones in light blue)
    5. View the listings on the “listings” sheet (results scroll horizontally)

    Spread the word by linking back to this page. Enjoy!

  • Ecommerce

    A friend in the SEO biz emailed me a pretty nice infographic on the effectiveness of different colors/sizes/text in increasing the holy conversion rate.

    Check it out, if you’re into that kinda thing.

  • jQuery to Display Dynamic Content Continuously After Page Load

    The title is a mouthful, but it’s true.  A client needed a timer from a WordPress plug-in to be displayed multiple times on a page, but the plug-in didn’t allow for multiple instances on the page.  I tried to do a few workarounds by hacking (or just trying to make it do things it wasn’t intended to do without actually changing its code) the functionality of the plug-in itself to no avail.  So I turned to what is increasingly solving my web dilemmas: jQuery.

    The code to dynamically get content from the page and output it wherever you want

    $(function() {
//Tells the code to run the code every 800 milliseconds.
	setInterval(function() {

//Tells where to place the content you're grabbing.  I'm putting
//each one in a div with the class "countdown-timer"
	$('div.countdown-timer').html(function() {

//Sets a variable called timeRemaining, which is equal to the html
//of the first paragraph.  So any content inside of the first 
//paragraph gets plugged into the div class "countdown-timer"
		  var timeRemaining = $('p:first').html();

//tells the variable timeRemaining to actually output
		  return timeRemaining;
		});
	}, 800);
});

    To get this to work for you:

    • Change ‘div.countdown-timer’ to wherever you want the content to output. I used a class element so I could output it lots of times on the page.
    • Change ‘p:first’ to wherever you want to be grabbing the content from. Mine just happened to be the first paragraph, so it was the easiest way for me to select it.
    • Add whatever you put for the ‘div.countdown-timer’ to your page. So, for me, I put

      wherever I want the content from ‘p:first’ to appear.

    Cheers!

  • CSS3 PIE

    Oh man. My life just got a little easier thanks to the folks over at CSS3 PIE.

    Now I don’t have to make three images, line them up with empty div>s and work out odd padding/width math just to get a rounded border and a drop shadow in IE 6-8. Thanks CSS3 PIE.

  • Linking Entire List Element

    I needed a solution for making an entire list element click-able, not just the anchor text.  At the site I made for the Kirksville Brewfest, the entire background color of the list element on the enter page/style changed color, making the user think they could click on it, but only the text was click-able.  The solution I used was to take the anchor text and make its background fill the entire space.  Kirksville brewfest list code:

    ul.styles li a:link,
ul.styles li a:visited {
color: #....;
display: block;
width: 100%;
height: 100%;
}


    Basically, the anchor text fills up the entire li element when there’s an anchor in the ul class “styles”.

    Rad.

  • How to Detect If There’s a Featured Image on a WordPress Page or Post

    I’m redesigning the website for a Mindfulness Practice Center in New Hampshire, Morning Sun Community, and ran into an issue where I didn’t want the Title on the WordPress page to show if there was a featured image. The layout looks cleaner without the title there (although they opted to have the title appear anyways). The php code I used checks for a header image, then if there is one, do nothing. If there isn’t one, throw the title of the post in there.

    <?php
	//Check if there is a header image
	if ( has_post_thumbnail( $post->ID ) ) { ?>
	<?php } else { ?>
		<h1 class="entry-title"><?php the_title(); ?></h1>
	<?php } ?>

    The code snippet is pretty useful anytime you want to check for a featured image and do something if there is/isn’t one.

    Have fun!

  • They won’t let us show it at the beach

    Oh they won’t let us show it at the beach

    no they won’t let us show it at the beach

    They think we’re gonna grab it if it gets within our reach

    And they won’t let us show it at the beach Shel Silverstein –

    Show it at the Beach

    We unexpectedly found ourselves with our two sons at the lake “beach” (a four foot strip of sand) with an assortment of 1-4 year old friends of ours.  There’s another group, a smallish family reunion, a stone’s throw away.  Oliver walks into the water til the water laps at his shorts.

    After a few quick whispers with Michelle, I say, “Take off your shorts, Oliver.  We don’t have a change of clothes for you.”

    Not one to turn down the offer, Big O exposes his striped undies and goes back into the water to play more.

    Five minutes later, the underwear is triumphantly removed and he splashes back into the water.  Naked boy run free.  Show it at the beach.  No one seems to mind.

    Oakley spews a breast milk tidal wave down my clothes and onto the beach, so I’m off to the vehicular transportation to grab a burp cloth (we really weren’t prepared to be at the beach).  The park is beautiful this time of year.  I laugh when I walk by the family reunion’s pavilion.

    When I get back, Michelle urgently takes the cloth from me, hands me Oliver’s shorts, and quickly says,  “Put these on Oliver.”

    I ask Oliver to get his shorts on after we walk to the grass so he can brush the sand off his wrinkled toes.  Being a four-year-old, this takes a minute to do, and Michelle, as forcefully as she can while still being nice, has asked me two more times to get his shorts on.  I knew something was up, and could make a few guesses.

    As we walk up the hill, Michelle says that someone from the family reunion group said they were going to call the cops if the kids didn’t put their clothes on.

    “Do you really think that’s alright to do?” he sneered. “I don’t know if it’s legal, but I can certainly find out for you.”

    I smile.

    “It’s kinda funny” I say, “That they would be giving you public etiquette lessons.”

    “Yeah, why?”

    “You’ll see.”

    We walk by the family reunion’s pavilion and Michelle, at that moment, perfectly fits the description of someone who would say, “I can’t believe the nerve…!”

    There, on the concrete slab of the pavilion, dwarfing the chalk drawings of flowers and animals, is a gigantic dick and balls, ejaculating onto a butt.

    We walk the rest of the way, eyes in our minds, smiling blankly as the sun sets over the lake.  Absurdity brings much pain and joy.