Tech Tips, Tricks and Tutorials
Are planning to create your own self-hosted blog?
If so, one of your most critical tasks will be choosing a great domain name that matches your blog’s niche, keywords and title.
Your blog’s URL needs to be short enough for readers to remember, yet long enough to provide at least a hint at what your blog’s posts will be about.
Back when I was in the planning stage of creating this blog, I wanted a domain that included three things: [Read more…]
In my opinion, WordPress is by far the best blogging platform out there.
Why? Because no other platform even comes close in terms of power, flexibility and ease of use.
There are tons of intuitive ways to do virtually anything in WordPress, but one useful task that isn’t all that intuitive is changing the order of one or more of your existing blog posts.
By default, posts are displayed in reverse chronological order (i.e. the newest post at the top of the first page), but you can easily force a specific post to be displayed anywhere in the list. [Read more…]
Note: The links in this post are affiliate links.
If you’ve been blogging for a while, you might have noticed that your blog’s page load times have increased over time as you added posts and started receiving ever more traffic to them.
Every active blog slows down over time as ever-increasing numbers of visitors put an ever-increasing load on your web server’s resources.
As more pages are loaded from your server its CPU must work harder and the RAM and disk I/O eventually get maxed out. This results in sluggish page loads, and during peak times your blog can even grind to a halt.
There are several things you can do to mitigate the problems you’ll almost certainly encounter as your blog grows in size and popularity. [Read more…]
Question from Brianna L.: I need your help, Rick. And I need it quick.
I woke up this morning to find several messages in my inbox telling me Google is reporting that my blog has been hacked.
I searched Google for my blog’s name and sure enough they’re showing this message with my site’s URLs in the search results:
“This site may be hacked.”
Then I checked my blog stats and found that the page views had dropped to almost nothing, literally overnight. They are usually in the thousands.
I carefully examined every page on my blog but I couldn’t find anything that resembles a hacked page.
After that I did a Google search and saw where someone was recommending a check for strange plugins that could be causing the problem. He said to look for plugins that I didn’t remember installing.
I checked the list of installed plugins but the only ones I found were the ones that I actually installed myself.
I have three questions for you: [Read more…]
Do you have a blog that’s powered by WordPress?
If so, you should know that you have a virtual target on your back.
More blogs run on WordPress than any other blogging platform, and that makes WordPress blogs a preferred target for the hackers of the world.
Unless you’ve taken steps to harden your blog against hacking attacks, it’s fairly easy for a skilled and determined hacker to either guess your WordPress login password or intercept it from the data stream that’s created when you log in to your WordPress Dashboard.
In other words, if you have a WordPress blog, it is constantly at risk of being hacked.
There are several things a hacker can do to damage your blog should he gain access to your WordPress password, but there’s a simple way to prevent him from altering your blog’s theme, plugins and critical blog-wide settings…
Always log in using an account that doesn’t have administrator privileges unless you need to do something that actually requires them!
In short, sign in with an Editor-level account every time you just need to write or edit a blog post.
This is what I recommend: [Read more…]
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