Blogging Tips Archives - Page 2 of 30

How to quickly deactivate all plugins at once when you can’t log into your WordPress blog’s Dashboard

Posted on November 19, 2019

In my opinion, WordPress is the most powerful blogging platform out there. And truth be told, it’s also one of the easiest to use.

There are times however when something goes wrong and your blog stops working.

If you’re new to WordPress it can be quite frightening the first time you see the “white screen of death” – the stark, solid white error page that WordPress displays when it encounters what it deems to be a catastrophic error.

I know how easy it is to panic when your blog won’t load, and that dreadful feeling is even more intense when you can’t even log into your WordPress Dashboard.

There are a number of things to check when troubleshooting “white screen” issues, but the first thing I always do when I don’t have a clue what’s causing an issue is to deactivate all the plugins at once to see if the problem goes away. [Read more…]

Blogging tip: How to quickly find out if one of your images is being used on another website

Posted on November 15, 2019

Are you a blogger who takes your own photos or creates your own graphics for use in your blog posts?

If so, you’re probably concerned about other bloggers or webmasters stealing your images and using them on their own blogs or websites.

Well, it just so happens that Google has a very handy tool that you can use to quickly check to see if your image(s) have been used on another site.

[Read more…]

Q&A: Why is there no padlock in the address bar when I visit my secure blog with Chrome?

Posted on November 7, 2019

Question from Carol: I have a blog and my web host recently installed a free Let’s Encrypt security certificate on it for me.

I can now access the blog with https: in the URL instead of http: but when I view a page in Chrome it doesn’t display the little padlock that indicates that the site is secure.

When I click on the little “circled i” for information it gives me this message:

“Your connection to this site is not fully secure.“

I sent my web host a message a couple of days ago and another one last night asking what the problem could be but so far I haven’t heard back from them.

Do you have any idea what could be causing Chrome to not display the padlock and give me this message instead?

Rick’s answer: [Read more…]

ATTN Bloggers: You need to stop using the ‘Broken Link Checker’ plugin on your WordPress blog immediately!

Posted on November 5, 2019

If you’re a blogger you probably know how important it is to keep your blog free of broken links.

And if you do, there’s a good chance that you have a plugin titled “Broken Link Checker” installed on your WordPress blog.

If so, you need to remove it right away!

It’s recently been discovered that this plugin is compromised by an extremely dangerous XSS (Cross Site Scripting) vulnerability.

I won’t go into the details of this critical security flaw here, but if you’re interested in why it’s do dangerous you can get all the info right here.

For now, suffice it to say that having this plugin installed leaves your blog wide open to hackers.

[Read more…]

Q&A: Someone is publishing their own posts on my blog without my permission. How can I stop it?

Posted on November 4, 2019

Question from Melvin: I have a “health and wellness” blog that I’ve been writing for over four years now. It runs on WordPress.

I write several new posts each week and the blog now has over a thousand posts on it.

About a month ago I paid a guy to make some updates to the blog to make it more attractive and add a couple of new features that I’d seen on other blogs.

With my permission he ended up changing the blog to a new theme (Divi) and added several new plugins.

He gave me a great deal (only charged me $50 to make the changes) and I really love the way the blog looks now.

But here’s the thing. After he finished installing the updates new posts started appearing on the blog that I didn’t write or publish. They just appear from out of the blue.

[Read more…]