I tried to help a co-worker with a professional blog for a TV channel yesterday and ran into some weird issues. We host the blog on a Windows 2008 server with IIS and Plesk. The WordPress install from within the Plesk worked fine but ours did not. The “white screen of death” on the install screen was perplexing (more on that at the bottom of this article), but every time he tried to either upgrade WordPress or install or upgrade a plugin or theme, he would receive warnings or failures stating that WordPress was unable to find the wp-content directory. This warning can take various forms but circle around the fact that WordPress did not find the right directory in the expected place. The obvious and painless solution is to upload the files directly to the server using FTP and then control the blog from within wp-admin. In this case, […]
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‘HOW-TO’ Category
The one thing that most of us WordPress self installers have in common is that we’re using a web host of some kind whether it be shared hosting, VPS, or a dedicated server. Web hosting is one of those industries that has a very low entry barrier thanks to reselling. This enables fly by night shops to open up as a web hosting company only to disappear a few months later. This doesn’t happen in all cases as reselling provides a great opportunity to learn a thing or two but I’ve since lost my trust in resellers. Choosing a web host is probably the most important decision you make as everything rests on their shoulders for your web site to stay online. Without further adieu, here is a list of questions and things to consider when choosing a web host. Note: This mini guide is mainly geared towards shared hosting. […]
[Continue Reading...]WordPress 2.6 introduced a post revisions feature, which automatically saves a draft as you begin to write a post or page and saves a revision for each change made afterwards. That’s right, every time you make even the slightest alteration to a post or page, a new revision is saved. Now don’t get me wrong, this is an incredibly useful feature, especially if you accidentally cut half of your post during a late night edit or lose power while composing your latest masterpiece, but these revisions can slowly build up in your database. If it’s been a few days since you’ve last edited your blog, chances are that you don’t need to keep any revisions around, and they’re probably just siting in your database taking up space and growing cobwebs. To remove all of your revisions safely without harming your published posts and pages, backup your database, then use either […]
[Continue Reading...]There are many gallery plugins out there for WordPress, but did you know that WordPress has had its own gallery system since the release of version 2.5 over two years ago? To get started with a native WordPress gallery, you’ll need to create or edit the post or page that you want the gallery to appear in and then click the “Add an Image” button. You can use this to upload all of your images at full size and WordPress will automatically generate the various sizes (including thumbnails) for you. Now, it’s important to note that once you add an image via this method while writing or editing a post or page, it will be assigned to that specific post or page, which is how WordPress keeps track of the gallery’s content. Once you have uploaded all the desired images, click the “Add an Image” button again, select the “Gallery” tab, […]
[Continue Reading...]You can’t be too careful these days. You’ve put a lot of work into your blog, and it would be a shame to see it lost forever just because you accidentally deleted something you shouldn’t have, it was hacked, or your server had a catastrophic meltdown. There are many ways to backup WordPress, so I’m just going to cover some of the easiest and most complete methods. First of all, your files are easy to backup. Since WordPress can be downloaded at any time, you only need to worry about files that you’ve customized or uploaded, which should leave only your wp-config.php file and everything under the /wp-content/ directory. You can easily backup these files by accessing your server via FTP or SFTP and downloading them. Now for the database, which includes all of your content and settings. Just like almost everything in life, there’s the easy way and the […]
[Continue Reading...]Would you like to provide 4 million users with an easy way to save information about your website? Chances are that you have heard of Evernote, the on-the-cloud note-taking application available on multiple platforms. One of the newest features announced by the Evernote team is Evernote Site Memory. Here is what Site Memory does for your website: Allows visitors to save posts from your site – When you add the Site Memory button to your site, visitors can automatically save posts, pages, and content defined by you to their Evernote your visitors can save posts and pages to Evernote as clips. You have total control of what Evernote saves, the save location of the clip, and how the clips are tagged. Easy Access to Favorites – When visitors return to your website and click on the Site Memory button they are presented with everything that they have ever clipped from […]
[Continue Reading...]You may be wondering why anyone would want to do this. Think about it, you probably have hundreds of articles that you wrote years ago and when those same articles appear on Google search engine results, the dates appear next to the description. You might think that this is great, users searching the web should be able to see when an article originally published, but research shows that users discriminate against older content just because it is old. An article that may be valuable despite its age would be subject to a user completely ignoring it and would click on the newer article, just because it was newer. As you can see in the image above, the search results page lists the post date for the article followed by the description. Do not confuse the intent here, if you are running a news site or writing about topics whose value […]
[Continue Reading...]I’m sure you’ve all heard about the new Twitter button, which finally provides an official way to share links to Twitter and display the number times each link has been shared, but how do you go about adding it to WordPress? If you love messing with your theme, you can use the official Twitter button generator to generate just a few lines of HTML code that can be inserted into your theme templates, but why not use a plugin to simplify the whole process? I highly recommend Simple Twitter Connect. This plugin, or rather series of plugins, will provide a simple yet customizable way to automatically add the new Twitter button to your posts and pages. You’ll also enjoy a wealth of additional features, including the ability to automatically tweet your posts while publishing, display a list of followers, use your Twitter credentials to login to the admin panel, and […]
[Continue Reading...]WordPress 3.0 Walkthrough: Multsite Multisite is the most talked about new feature in WordPress 3.0 – the WordPress team has folded the functionality of WordPress Multiuser into the main WordPress project. So how do you use it? This tutorial assumes your are comfortable using FTP clients such as Filezilla and doing basic edits of WordPress files. 1. Download WordPress 3.0 release candidate. You can find it here. 2. Edit wp-config in your favorite text editor and add the following line: define(‘WP_ALLOW_MULTISITE’, true); (I’d suggest adding it just above the line “// ** MySQL settings – You can get this info from your web host ** //”) 3. Install WordPress normally NOTE: If you’ve already installed WordPress 3.0, just edit wp-config and add that line of code, there’s no need to re-install. 4. Under Tools on the sidebar, you’ll now have an “Network” option. Click it. 5. Here you’ll setup your […]
[Continue Reading...]About the Author
- Mark Ghosh
An avid fan of business, education, technology and finance. I lead a lean, highly focussed and capable team of Java Back End developers and Front End developers through a maze of complex software wizardry to fulfill the web maintenance needs of a large chemical manufacturer. As per Myers-Briggs Personality Types, I am an ESTJ. I pride in a project completed on time and according to plan. My hobbies include all kinds of technology, anything that I can taste and anything that goes fast or flies in the air. I like to read business books and comics in my spare time.
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