blogging tips Archives - Page 6 of 8

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: Which VaultPress subscription do you recommend to backup my WordPress blog?

Posted on March 14, 2019

Question from James A.: I read your post about why you use VaultPress to back up your blogs and I’d like to give it a try.

I usually publish from 3 to 5 new posts every day, and my posts tend to be pretty in-depth. That means recreating them if they were to get lost would be both difficult and time-consuming.

As I understand it if I choose the cheapest plan then my blog would only be backed up once each day. What concerns me is losing any posts that were published since the last backup was created.

My question is which of their three subscription options should I choose? I don’t want to over-pay but I definitely want to protect my hard work.

Rick’s answer: [Read more…]

How to keep your WordPress blog free of broken links

Posted on October 28, 2018

Update: Unfortunately, it’s been discovered that the “Broken Link Checker” plugin mentioned in this post has a very serious security flaw and the plugin’s author has chosen not to fix it.

Therefore I can no long recommend the use of this plugin.

I now recommend using the web-based broken link checking tool on this page.

Note: The original post continues below…

Broken links are a blogger’s worst nightmare. In addition to providing your blog’s visitors with a poor user experience, they also give your blog a bad reputation with the major search engines, and your search rankings can suffer as a consequence.

Even worse, if you sell advertising on your blog, broken links also make your ad space less valuable.

Tracking down broken links used to involve a boatload of manual labor. We had to visit each page and post and click on all the links to see if they were still valid. But now a nifty WordPress plugin called Broken Link Checker makes it easy to find all the broken links on your entire blog without lifting a finger. [Read more…]

Q&A: How can I see only questions that haven’t been answered yet on Quora?

Posted on August 18, 2018

Question from Michael E.: I recently started answering questions on Quora to drive traffic to my blog, and I’m really happy with the amount of visitors it’s sending me so far.

I’ve noticed that when I’m the first person to answer a question my answer will often remain at the top after other people add their answers. That’s why I prefer answering questions that haven’t been answered yet.

Do you know of a way to get Quora to display just the questions that haven’t been answered yet?

Rick’s answer: [Read more…]

How to easily determine the numeric value of any color on the screen

Posted on July 29, 2018

If you engage in web design, graphic design, photography or any other endeavor requiring the use of colors, you probably need to determine the numeric value of various colors on a regular basis.

I used to use good ole trial and error in order to match the hex value of colors displayed on the screen as closely as possible, but I have long since found a fast and simple way to determine the exact numeric value of any color with just a few clicks of my mouse. [Read more…]