Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
Question from Seth P.: I have a WordPress blog that has several missing posts that I’ve deleted because they contained outdated information that was either incorrect or no longer relevant.
My blog now has lots of requests going to the 404 error page because those posts no longer exist.
I’d like to redirect all of those requests to my blog’s home page instead of displaying the 404 error page. How can I do that?
Ricks’s Answer: [Read more…]
One of the things that makes WordPress such a powerful blogging platform and CMS is the ease with which we can use widgets to do wonderful things with our sites.
We can easily give our widgets a title in order to help the reader better understand what they’re seeing at any given moment, but what if we don’t want a particular widget to have a title?
By default, we can leave the title field of a widget blank, however there will still be a blank space where the title would normally be. But we can use a nifty WordPress plugin called Remove Widget Titles to completely hide the “Title” field. Here’s how: [Read more…]
This is a heads-up to all my fellow bloggers…
If your blog is using the popular WordPress plugin Fast Secure Contact Form you need to remove it ASAP and use a different plugin to create your contact forms.
It really pains me to have to recommend this course of action because this has long been one of my favorite plugins. [Read more…]
Question from Chuck F.: Rick, I followed the instructions in your guide to creating a self-hosted WordPress blog and created my very first blog over the weekend. Everything went well with no problems whatsoever.
I was wondering though if there is a way to change the blog’s URL to include the www part? Right now my blog is at http://example.com and I want it to be http://www.example.com.
Rick’s answer: Hi Chuck! By default the WordPress installation script creates the blog URL without the www, but most bloggers prefer to have it included. Here’s how to add the www to your blog’s URL: [Read more…]
Question from Connie D: Hi Rick. I recently set up a WordPress blog using your excellent instructions. You made it so easy! Thank you very, very much!
I’m having one issue that’s driving me batty though. Every time someone leaves a comment on one of my posts I receive two identical emails letting me know about the comment. How can I make WordPress send me just one email?
Rick’s answer: Connie, when I first started blogging with WordPress I had the same problem, and it drove me batty too until I finally figured out what the problem was. The duplicate notification emails result from using two different email addresses when you post under a different user name than the one assigned to the primary Administrator account. Here’s how to fix it: [Read more…]