Safely Test-drive Themes on WordPress
While switching a theme in your WordPress blog, it’s quite obvious that you’ll put your blog down to maintenance, do all the back-stage work (widgets, tweaks) and finally activate the theme, so your visitors won’t notice your blog’s design being broken if they happen to visit right in the middle of your work. Though the new WordPress is equipped with Preview feature that lets you test-drive a theme, it’s not quite advanced (more…)
Tracking your Blog Visitors
So you have a blog with great content, optimized for search engines and ready to get exploding traffic? But how do you know which of your articles are most liked by your visitors, and how many unique visitors and impressions your blog gets daily? To track these, you’ll have to feed your blog with few lines of JavaScript; or if you find it hard, plugins are there for you. (more…)
Maintenance Splash Page [WordPress]
Though WordPress is the best for Blogging, it lacks few features by default. For instance, Joomla helps you show a Maintenance page with just few clicks, but WordPress doesn’t. Similarly, you can’t set ‘unpublished’ status to categories in WordPress if you temporarily want hide a category. Luckily WordPress’ repository has got over thousands of plugins that can tweak your blog to give it more of a professional CMS look.
Here, we’ll be using a plugin by name ‘Maintenance Mode’ which when activated from the backend, will show your visitors a custom splash-page, also letting them know when the site would be back from maintenance. (more…)
Eliminate Comment Spammers [WordPress]
If you are on Self-hosted WordPress, spam comments are very common. Though Akismet smartly filters out spam comments, if you prefer not to allow spammers from commenting, the best solution is to have a verification system similar to CAPTCHA, to verify if it’s a human or a spam-bot.
Related: Block Spammers from Visiting your Site/Blog
Instead of CAPTCHA, a simple solution would be a math-based verification wherein a commenter is asked only to answer simple math questions. (more…)
Block Spammers from Visiting your Site/Blog
Whether you are using WordPress, Joomla or any other CMSes (Content Management Systems) that involve comment system, you are prone to spam comments. For a spammer to post a spam comment, he/she should obviously visit your site first. This blog post will help you learn to block spammers from visiting your site based on their IP. This doesn’t mean that you’ll have no spam comments, but this could reduce the amount of spam comments, as spammers have the habit of re-posting the same comment. (more…)
Optimize your WordPress Database
WordPress, to give you a safe and a hassle-free environment, stores a lot of temporary information to its MySQL Database. Primary example would be Post Revisions. WordPress creates Post Revisions every time you edit a post (after publishing), even when a post is auto-saved! This appends the whole post content to the database, thus filling your database with temporary stuffs. You won’t be able to delete them either. But here’s WP-Optimize, a plugin by Ruhani Rabin that works like a charm. (more…)
Find out Broken Links in your WordPress Blog
For Blogs with a high quantity of articles, finding out broken links in posts require more man power. Obviously, no one has patience to do it too. A plugin by Janis Elsts named Broken Link Checker helps you automatically find broken links. The plugin also
- checks for broken links and 301/302 redirects
- checks your posts and pages for broken links (both internal and outbound links)
- checks for broken images
- strikes out broken links (editable via CSS)
- notifies you in the dashboard
Safely Migrating Permalinks [WordPress]
Changing Permalink Structure is not as easy as it looks. Simply changing the value in Settings->Permalinks will leave your Search Engine indexed pages/links with a 404/Not-Found error. Thus you may risk losing your valuable visitors, and your posts with the new permalink structure will not have the old Page Rank (PR). Here’s a tutorial that will help migrating permalinks without losing traffic nor Page Rank. (more…)
WordPress Upgrade Error
WordPress, by default, offers you an easy way to upgrade your WordPress Core by using the ‘Automatically Upgrade’ button that you can find in homepage/Dashboard of your administrator backend. When you use this Automatic Upgrade, you might often end up with a failed installation notice that reads “Could not copy file: /public_html/../wp-content/upgrade/core/wordpress/wp-comments-post.php” or a similar error notice with a text “Installation Failed!”. WordPress basically downloads the upgraded core from its server, unpacks it to the temporary ‘upgrade’ folder and then copies those stuff to the root directory where your WP Core resides. (more…)
WordPress : Track your RSS Readers
I recently blogged on a WordPress Plug-in, Tracked Tweets, that would automatically update your Twitter with your blog posts. And here comes yet another WordPress Plug-in from Jack McIntyre – Tracked RSS. (more…)
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