Rick's Daily Tips

Great news: Fixing ‘White Screen of Death’ fatal errors on your WordPress blog just got a lot easier!

Posted on May 7, 2019

If you’ve been blogging with WordPress for a while you’re probably well familiar with the infamous “White Screen of Death”.

If you haven’t encountered it yet, that’s the stark, panic inducing white error screen that WordPress displays when it encounters a fatal error with some component of your blog.

There are several reasons why you might see a white screen of death on your blog, but they’re usually the result of a serious problem affecting your blog’s theme, one of the installed plugins or the database.

Whatever the reason, it’s the last thing you want to see when you try to access your blog!

[Read more…]

Q&A: Why is Firefox still finding insecure content on my SSL encrypted WordPress blog?

Posted on May 2, 2019

Question from Patty J.: I recently found out about the free certificates from Let’s Encrypt. I asked my web host to install it for me so I can make my WordPress blog secure.

I installed the Really Simple SSL plugin and that took care of the redirects from http to https as well as most of the mixed content issues.

But Firefox is still blocking parts of my pages that it claims are still trying to load from insecure sources.

I’ve looked my pages over and I can’t find anything that appears to be loading from an insecure location. Everything on the page appears to be loading from URLs starting with https instead of http.

When I load the pages in Chrome it shows the green padlock with no warnings. It’s only Firefox that’s not cooperating.

I’m pulling my hair out here. How can I find out what Firefox is blocking for being insecure so I can fix it?

Rick’s answer: [Read more…]

Here’s a quick way to find out how your blog looks on different mobile devices

Posted on May 1, 2019

If you’re a blogger you’ve probably wondered how your blog looks on different mobile devices and at different screen resolutions.

If so, there’s an easy way to find out right now, in mere seconds. Simply type your blog’s URL into the search box at Sizzy!

Sizzy will automatically load your blog into ten different mobile templates so you can see exactly how your pages and posts will look on both iOS and Android devices and at various screen resolutions.

[Read more…]

How to quickly create a mini-collage of your favorite photos

Posted on April 30, 2019

Every now and then I have a need to combine two or more photos into a single image by arranging them side by side and/or over top of one another.

To get an idea of what I’m talking about, take a look at the image on the right.

It’s actually pretty easy to create a mini-collage like this with most popular image editing programs, but I’ve found a much easier and faster way to do it.

Just fire up your web browser and click over to the wonderful online Combine Images tool from the folks over at QuickPictureTools.com. [Read more…]

Amazon’s PartFinder tool will tell you if a computer part will work with your computer

Posted on April 29, 2019

(#ad)

By now you probably know that upgrading your computer’s RAM, adding a stand-alone graphics adapter or replacing the hard drive with an SSD can make it run faster and more smoothly.

But if you’ve ever actually shopped for computer parts you probably also know how difficult it can be to determine whether a given part is compatible with your particular computer.

All the info you need to make that determination is available on the Internet (and in many cases right in the product’s item description), but unless you’re very familiar with computer hardware it can be difficult to figure out which info is even relevant to the determination.

Well, Amazon has a handy tool that can help…

[Read more…]