Wordpress
Retrofitting Your Theme For The New Custom Menu Feature
The new Worpdress 3.0 feature that adds custom menu’s is a great add-on to an already amazing piece of software. Previously, if you wanted specific items to appear in a specific order, you had to add plugins, edit theme files, update exclude lists and basically jump through a bunch of hoops.
No more. Say hello to More >
Upgrade From Wordpress.com To Self Hosted Wordpress.org
Many first time bloggers start out on Wordpress.com, only to discover they are limited in options, plugins, advertising and flexibility. When that happens, it’s time to step up your game and go with a mature blogging platform. I highly recommend Wordpress.org – the self-hosted option of the popular blogging software.
With the self hosted option, you More >
Fix The Wordpress Blank Page Error
So, has this happened to you? You install a new upgrade or plugin, and suddenly, various places within your dashboard no longer work? You happily click the Dashboard | Posts | Edit link to be greeted by a stark white and completely empty page.
I know. Me too.
And like you, I started Googling the answer, only to find there were dozens of “solutions” out there, and not one of them helped me. I will, for the sake of consolidating the answers into one convenient place, assemble those other solutions as well, but here is what worked for me.
18 Wordpress Plugins I Can Not Live Without
I have been promising a list of my personal *must have* plugins that I install on any new blog. Today, that promise is kept.
These are the plugins I install on every blog I create, regardless of niche or specialty. There are a few that I add to certain types of blogs that will won’t be discussed, but you can get more information on these in my book, the Ultimate Guide To Wordpress Plugins.
They are listed alphabetically, not in the order of installation.
Each of these plugins play nice with all the plugins listed here. No animals were harmed during the making of this list.
Your Blog Is At War, Help Defend It
Yep, you heard me right. Spammers, hackers, trogans and viruses… it’s a jungle out there. And your blog is a sitting duck.
I have a series of suggestions I will be making over the upcoming days to help you defend this valuable asset in your online marketing arsenal, so stayed tuned. And if you haven’t grabbed the RSS feed yet, this might be a good time…
Customize Tag Cloud Appearance To Help Visitors Find Your Content
I know you thought you’d never hear me say this, but a plugin isn’t always the best way to handle a small change in your Wordpress Theme. Especially since each plugin adds it’s own load time to the overall page load time. Fast = visitors stay longer.
Come on, we are a generation of short-attention spanned humans, struggling to assimilate the thousands of bits of information that flow like a river into our awareness. The longer a page takes to load, the less inclined we are to look at other content on a site. One slow page, especially the main page, and most folks will pack up their little red wagon and move on.
A Custom 404 Page : An Opportunity To Impress* Your Visitors
(* By impress, I mean engage, wow and help your visitors)
When something goes wrong on your site, your visitors will land on a 404 page, or to their way of thinking, the Twilight Zone.
Most standard Wordpress blogs come handily equipped with a 404 Page. The problem is it is absolutely worthless for helping your visitor get back on track.
There could be a variety of reasons they landed there:
3 Ways To A Faster Page Load
Its true. Fancy blogs look good, but they take time to load on your visitors browser, and that can cost you. If it takes too long to load, that little voice in their head says “All the pages will take this long, do I really want to click the next link?”
At that point, you have lost them…many for good.
Although I have no hard numbers to back up this statement, I figure you have about 8 seconds. If they aren’t seeing real content delivered in 8 seconds, they are
22 Things You Should Do After Installing Wordpress
I know the list sounds long, but trust me, do these things right after installing your new Wordpress blog, and you will start to see immediate traffic, it won’t take as much work to manage your blog, and your visitors will love it!
Little Tweaks With A Big Impact
First and foremost are those little annoying tweaks, More >
Can Your Site Survive A Digg?
Most bloggers blog away, and slowly — over time — build up their readership. They are rocking along on a hosting company pretty much like everyone else’s and not giving much thought to bandwidth or page views.
Oh sure, we all want more, I mean who doesn’t want more page views? But what happens to your site if suddenly, with no warning — 30 thousand people show up? It can happen if you land on the front page of Digg. That’s right… just one great blog post that goes viral, and they could literally be beating down your virtual door.
Technical Difficulties? Yep, Even Geeks Have Them
In fact, we probably have them more often since we tend to *boldly go where no man has gone before*.
This week has been a week of just such difficulties. Some were self-induced (and therefore I have no one to blame, throw sticks at or give the evil eye), and some were brought on by outside influences. (Dare I say *hacker*?)
So, my apologies.. on the eve (so to speak) of a major launch, my site is in the toilet. If you visited and got a perfectly white page and nothing else, don’t worry, it’s not you. You have stepped off into the…
Upgrading to Wordpress 2.7
For those of you have followed my directions on a few of the plugins like Ohz Admin Panel or some of the commenting plugins, this upgrade will require a bit of extra work for you.
The new Wordpress contains some of these same features built right in. If you have also installed
Is Your Blog Vulnerable To Attack?
A few days ago, I was working on one of my blogs, and I happen to notice that the .htaccess file was larger than I remembered. I am talking about file size here . Yeah, I know. It’s not the kind of thing most people notice, but I kinda have a thing for numbers. More >
