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Q&A: How can I delete unused images in WordPress?

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wordpress-logoQuestion from Dan J.:  Hi Rick. I recently made the switch from Blogger to my own self-hosted WordPress blog with the help of your step-by-step guide to installing WordPress. I can honestly say it’s the best move I’ve ever made.

I need your help with one issue though. I have a habit of changing my mind about the images I use with my posts, sometimes more than once. The unused images always pop up in the Media Library when I go back to choose an image for a post.

How can I remove the images that I don’t ever plan to use from the media library?

Rick’s answer:  [Read more…]

6 reasons why you should keep your blog as simple as possible

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Like many new bloggers I wanted my first blog to look amazing and have tons of bells and whistles.

For example, I installed a fancy slider that would display an image and snippet from a post, then fade out after a few seconds and “tease” the next post.

That was just the start of my fascination with plugins and other add-ons.

Before long my newly-created blog was as “busy” as a honeybee in a clover field – and I don’t mean “busy” as in having lots of visitors.

After a while I began to notice some things. Even though they received hardly any “traffic” to speak of, my blog posts and pages were very slow to load. Even worse, they would freeze up and fail to load at all on occasion.

Luckily, I learned early on that bells and whistles are better suited to a model railroad than a blog.

Pages filled with flashing banners, autorun videos, jam-packed sidebars and other distractions can be pretty tempting as eye candy, but they usually perform poorly compared to their more simple and leaner competitors.

That’s why I recommend keeping your blog’s “features” to the bare minimum. Here are a few things to consider when building and maintaining a blog:  [Read more…]

UptimeRobot will send you an email and/or text message when your blog goes down

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One of a blogger’s worst nightmares is having a busy blog go down and stay down for several hours. That happened to me a while back with this very blog.

I woke up one morning and discovered that RicksDailyTips.com wouldn’t load in my browser. It was completely “dead in the water” as the old saying goes.

I tried loading a couple of other blogs that reside on the same server, only to be met with the same depressing result. The server had obviously gone belly-up at some point during the overnight hours. [Read more…]

How to password-protect a blog post or page in WordPress (or even hide it completely)

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If you write a WordPress blog you probably want your posts and pages to be read by as many people as possible. After all, the entire reason for blogging is to share information with others.

But that being said, there might be times when you would like to make a certain post or page available only to a select group of people.

The purpose of this post is to explain how to limit who is allowed to view a post or page that you don’t want to make available to the general public.

There are two ways to limit who can see a given post or page on a WordPress blog, and both methods are very easy to implement:  [Read more…]

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