Tech Tips, Tricks and Tutorials
Question from Kevin A.: Hi Rick. First of all, I really love your blog. What a wonderful service you’re providing to those of us who struggle with technology!
I have a WordPress blog of my own and the sidebar widgets sort of run together because they all have a white background.
How can I give my own sidebar widgets a light gray background color like the widgets on your blog?
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
Question from Bobby: I need some fast help Rick. I updated a plugin on my WordPress blog and now none of the pages will load! This is NOT a good thing because I don’t make any money when my blog isn’t up.
When I visit the site all I get is a blank page with the words “500 Internal Server Error” on it. I can’t even log in to the dashboard to disable the bad plugin!
Do you know of any other way to clear this error message and get my blog back up? It’s been down for two whole days already! Please help me ASAP if you don’t mind!!
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
Have you ever noticed how Facebook and Google love to pull in the first few lines of text from your blog posts and use that text as the “snippets” they display to their users?
That’s not always a problem, but it can be a big one if the snippet contains text that doesn’t accurately describe the content of the post.
For example, if you always begin your blog posts with generic content such as an author bio, the first few lines of that bio will be displayed as the snippet in the Google search results and on Facebook for every post you write.
That means every post you publish will have the same snippet, and that snippet won’t do anything to accurately describe the content of the post and entice the reader to click the link and read the post on your blog.
Luckily, there’s an easy way to get both Facebook and Google to display your own custom snippet for every post you write on your WordPress blog. [Read more…]
Question from Seth P.: I have a WordPress blog that has several missing posts that I’ve deleted because they contained outdated information that was either incorrect or no longer relevant.
My blog now has lots of requests going to the 404 error page because those posts no longer exist.
I’d like to redirect all of those requests to my blog’s home page instead of displaying the 404 error page. How can I do that?
Ricks’s Answer: [Read more…]
Do you have a blog or other type of website that you’ve registered a domain name for?
If so, you need to know about a scam targeting domain owners that’s making the rounds yet again.
As you know, when you registered your site’s domain name you were required to supply your postal mailing address and email address as part of the registration process.
Both of those addresses are part of the official registration info that can be publicly accessed by anyone on the Internet by running a simple “Whois” query on your domain name.
Well, scammers are “scraping” the postal addresses and/or email addresses from the “Whois” info for every domain they can find and sending the domain owners realistic-looking, but scam invoices for renewing the domain.
There are several clues that can help you identify most paper domain renewal notices as nothing more than scams: [Read more…]
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