If you are doing an automatic upgrade with WordPress and the only thing you see where your site should be is the message, "Briefly Unavailable for Scheduled Maintenance. Check Back in a Minute.", your upgrade failed. I have seen this message before and knew what to do, but it just happened during an upgrade to WordPress 3.5.1 so I thought I would let others know about the … [Read more...]
Simple WordPress Hack Reveals Admin Login Names
One of the first security rules when configuring WordPress is to never use the default administrator name, 'admin'. Always change it to something that you can remember, but is hard for someone else to figure out. When you use the default name, a hacker who wants to try to break into your WordPress administration area has half of what he needs to get in. The other half is the … [Read more...]
Problems With Tech Support at Hosting Companies
It seems to be getting harder to find a hosting company with very good tech support. For business web site hosting, the company needs to have techs on duty 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. The techs also need to be experienced. While most of the larger hosting companies do provide 24/7 support, we are seeing a decline in the quality of the services provided by some hosts. … [Read more...]
A Fix for Duplicate Form Submissions with Contact Form 7
A WordPress web site client recently raised an issue about an intermittent problem with duplicate form submissions with forms generated using the Contact Form 7 plugin. We did some research and found what appears to be a solution. Multiple from submissions are usually generated by users who become impatient if they do not see a confirmation message immediately after … [Read more...]
Chinese Spam Comment Network Hitting WordPress Sites
Tech-Evangelist was a recent victim of a comment spam attack that originated from a wide range of Chinese IP addresses. This is a malicious attack that can temporarily disable web sites and servers. Here is what we saw and what we did to fight off the attacks. The attacks started to come in waves once or twice per day for about an hour in duration. This was clearly a … [Read more...]
Automating a WordPress Copyright Notice
Automating the copyright notice on a web site with a dynamic date is easy to do with PHP. We do this on every site that we develop, including WordPress sites. Why would you want to automate the copyright date? You do not really have to update the date, but when I go to a site and see a copyright notice that was last updated in 2003, it tends to make me think that the site … [Read more...]
Uploading and Inserting Images in WordPress, Step By Step
The image upload and insert feature has been around since WordPress 2.5, but remains very confusing for many users. In this tutorial we show you how to use this feature to upload and insert images directly into your Pages and Posts. Part of the problem with understanding this feature is that the WordPress team set up a few default settings that are incorrect, so you need to … [Read more...]
How To Disable and Remove the WordPress Shortlink
We recently noticed an issue where Yahoo indexed several pages from one of our WordPress sites using the WordPress shortlink, rather than the permalink. Here is the method for resolving this issue. For those who do not know what a shortlink looks like, it is a line of code that is added to the head section of the HTML code for a WordPress post or page. It looks like this: … [Read more...]
Moving a WordPress Blog To a New Hosting Company – WXR Method
Moving a WordPress blog to a new hosting company is not difficult if you follow these steps. The WXR method requires minimal technical skills. You just need basic skills using an FTP utility to download and upload files and directories. The first time someone moves a web site to a new hosting company can be a scary experience, but sometimes it is necessary due to problems … [Read more...]
A Useful Error 404 Page for WordPress
No matter how meticulous you are, error 404s (page not found) will occur with almost every web site. This is a simple method for producing a more useful error 404 page for your WordPress blog. An error 404 occurs whenever a page or other web resource is requested and that item is not found. Error 404s result from pages that are removed, a change in a URL structure for a … [Read more...]