The next time you design your site you may want to consider not using an all white design. Why you may ask? Your monitor uses more energy to display an all white site compared to a dark or black site. In fact an all white page uses about 74 watts of power where an all black page uses only 59 watts.

 In the early days of the Internet there were tons of grey and black background sites but today the majority of the sites have lots and lots of white space.

So how much power could you save by switching to black?

Let’s use Google for example. They receive 200 million or more queries per day. If they were to switch to an all black design like in the picture they would 8.3 Megawatt-hours per day. An average household uses about 10,655 kilowatt-hours of electricity each year. Therefore,  the energy saved per day could power about as much electricity as 1850 to 2500 households use in a year. 

I found a new plugin while surfing that was created by Richard Miller. It is called What Would Seth Godin Do WordPress plugin.

Seth Godin is a marketing Guru and has written many great books. You can read our review of on of his books here.

The new plugin allows you to set  a cookie which will greet new members with a welcome message an urge them to join your RSS feed. You can set the message and number of times to show the message.

The plugin is very easy to use and I would suggest you give it a try.

With the move to BlueFur.com we took the time to update our Help Desk software to Kayako version 3. The new version has some features we know some customers have asked for.

Create Help Desk Login
Although you would think this would be a standard thing our old help desk required you to have some working email to submit a ticket so you can log back in and review your status. Our new help desk does not require that, you can register an account and then login to view the status of your account with out having an working email.

RSS Knowledgebase
You can subscribe to RSS in our knowledgebase. If you make use of Internet Explorer 7′s RSS reader or FireFox’s Sage then you can subscribe to the RSS feed from the knowledgebase and if any new articles, tutorials, videos or knowledge is added you will be updated by your RSS reader. The world is becoming more and more RSS ready so start using it now.

There are other small features which you may find useful like a better search and navigation. To test out the new help desk check it out here.

Okay so your starting to get users that are using Internet Explorer (IE) version 7. Guess what? They may have some problems with your site!

If you have not downloaded it you may want to and view your site using IE7 to be sure there are no issues.

We noticed some sites with issues and have a recommended fix using JavaScript. You can add this into JavaScript:

if (typeof document.body.style.maxHeight != “undefined”) {
  // IE 7, mozilla, safari, opera 9
} else {
  // IE6, older browsers
}

If you do install IE 7 note that it will remove IE6. You can install the IE6 standalone version here.

If  you use some type of form on your site that sends out an email you are most likely to get some type of malicious bot that finds it and tries to use it to send out spam. You can add a bit of PHP code to your script to prevent that.

<?php
if (!isset( $_SERVER['REQUEST_METHOD'] != “POST”) {
    exit(“<p>You did not press the submit button; this page should not be accessed directly.</p>”);
}
?>

This will check to see if the form was submitted from your own site and that the page was just not directly accessed. Place this code on the PHP page that your form submits to.

With the domain change to bluefur.com we took the time to update our blog to the newest version of WordPress 2.1.

The new version of WordPress has over 500 bug fixes from the previous version and is secure against some of the recent WordPress hacks that have been happening in the blog sphere.

The upgrade itself was very easy to do. If you have installed a previous version of WordPress through Fantastico you can upgrade it through the Fantastico link in your cPanel.

If you are like me and like to do thing by hand. This is how to do the upgrade using FTP:

1. First download the latest version here.
2. Login to your WordPress and disable each of your plugins one by one.
3. Unzip it to somewhere that is easy for you to remember like your Desktop.
4. Open your FTP program and rename your wordpress blog file to [foldername]backup.
5. Create a new folder with the previous foldername that you just renamed. So if yours was called blog and you renamed your old one blogbackup you should create a new one called blog.
6. Upload the files from the unziped file in step 2.
7. Copy the wp-config.php from your blogbackup folder to your blog folder.
8. Copy the wp-content and wp-images folders from your blogbackup folder to your blog folder.
9. Point your browser to your blog with /wp-admin/upgrade.php on the end.
10. Your site should work now and login to your wordpress and start up your plugins one by one. If you notice any errors from the plugins I would suggest reviewing if it is compatiable here.
11. Reset your theme if it is not showing in your presentation menu.

That should be it. Enjoy the new features of WordPress 2.1.

We have added some WordPress videos for those that would like to learn how to use WordPress more.