Blogging Tips Archives - Rick's Daily Tips

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

Posted on October 6, 2018

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…]

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

Posted on October 2, 2018

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, ony to be met with the same depressing result. The server had obviously gone belly-up at some point during the overnight hours. [Read more…]

Q&A: I installed a plugin and now my WordPress blog won’t load. How do I fix it?

Posted on September 30, 2018

Question from Cara G: I installed a plugin called WordPress Popular Posts and it killed my blog. Now my blog won’t load at all. All I get is an error message.

To make matters worse I can’t even get to the control panel to delete the plugin.

I’m in a panic here. How can I fix this?

Rick’s answer: This is a common issue, Cara. It happens often, and as you have discovered, when it happens it can cause one to panic.

Luckily, there’s a very easy fix for this issue. All you have to do is use an FTP utility to delete the problem plugin from your WordPress installation. Here’s how: [Read more…]

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

Posted on September 28, 2018

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…]

Q&A: What is a WordPress Child Theme, and do I need one for my blog?

Posted on September 26, 2018

Question from Anika G.: Hello Rick. I want to thank you for sharing all of these wonderful tips with us. You have helped so many people by answering their questions, and now I have a question of my own.

A few weeks ago I followed the steps listed in your post explaining how to build a WordPress blog and built one to showcase my photos.

I’m already hooked on WordPress and I’ve been reading everything I can find about it. But there’s something I’d like for you to clear up for me if you don’t mind.

I’ve been reading a couple of WordPress forums and I’ve read several posts where people talked about using “child themes”. I can’t figure out what they’re talking about and I was hoping you could tell me what child themes are? And do you think I need one for my photography blog?

Rick’s answer: [Read more…]