Rick's Daily Tips

Tech Tips, Tricks and Tutorials

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Speed up your blog and make it more secure by using a CDN

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cloudflare-logoIf 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…]

7 essential plugins that every WordPress blog should be using

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If you have a blog that’s powered by WordPress you probably already know that plugins make it easy to add new features and capabilities to your blog.

But with thousands of WordPress plugins to choose from, how do you know which ones you really need?

Well, I’m going to try to shed some light on which plugins you need to install on your blog, and which ones you should avoid.

First, let me explain which plugins you need to avoid, because that’s the really easy part…  [Read more…]

Review: CSS Hero – Easily customize your WordPress blog even if you’re clueless about working with CSS

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Do you have a blog that’s powered by WordPress?

If so, you probably know that WordPress is the most powerful and most customizable blogging platform there is.

By selecting a quality theme and customizing it to your liking you can give your blog its own distinctive look and feel – in other words, give it its own personality.

The thing is, to really customize all the various aspects of your blog’s theme you’ll need to make changes to its style.css file.

In a nutshell, the style.css file contains the Cascading Style Sheet (aka CSS) code that controls virtually every aspect of how your blog will look and respond to visitors when they arrive at one of the pages on your blog.

The following short snippet from this blog’s style.css file will give you an idea of what I’m talking about:  [Read more…]

How to get Google and Facebook to display a custom snippet for your blog posts in WordPress

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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…]

Scam alert: Beware fake “Domain Name Renewal” notices

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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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