I was hunting down a solution today for a niggling issue I have with one of my WordPress sites. There’s always something to annoy you when you develop and run your own websites!
Anyways I came across this post and thought it was brilliant for when you’re setting up a new WordPress install. Continue reading
If you’re like me, I usually only worry about user interface plugins to enrich the customer experience. But as I have so many blogs now I find it useful to look for operational efficiency on the back end. So I was glad to find this post, again by the brilliant folks at ProBlogDesign. Continue reading
Hi folks
I can’t believe how easy a solution was available for this problem, and I fixed it myself after hours of searching!
I set up a new website using WordPress. No issue. Normally when I set one of these up I just use the blog posts as the first page and never have to to encounter this problem.
However, this time I wanted to set up a Static Page as my Home Page. No biggie – WordPress has that functionality right under the hood. Go to Settings/Reading/Front Page Displays and select “static page” then choose which page you want as your new ‘home’ or front page and where you want to refer to your blog posts. Easy as.
Trouble was when I did that I ended up with both two navigation menu items highlighted as the home page. Grrr. I figured this must be a common problem so searched .. and searched .. and searched for a solution. Nothing in the WP Documentation pages, nor much on the support pages and not much emanating from Google searches. Most solutions recommended fiddling with the code on various template pages (header.php, index.php etc). I didn’t want to mar my coding – I figured the people who created my template were far better coders than me and fully expected there was a softer solution.
Well, four hours later, it clicked with me. Want to know what I did?
Voila – you now have only one navigation item instead of 2!
Doh!!
Why was it that hard to work out and why didn’t that solution pop up before?
Go figure.
There are time online when you are not just a marketer but you become a tech-head too. Yesterday I mucked up my blog.
I had been using the Cutline theme by maestro Chris Pearson. It’s an older theme but I like it’s visual simplicity. I noticed in the Cutline Options sub-menu that you could create an Archives page easily.
I clicked the “enable archives page” in Cutline Options. Then I set up the archive page in the Pages submenu. Voila … I had an archives page.
Whoa!! Wait a minute. Now the Archives page is my default first page and I can’t figure out how to change it. I failed to notice the little extra text underneath the ‘enable’ button that said this would make the Archives page my First Page. So no matter what I did, the Archives page hijacked my site and I couldn’t get my site to show my posts as it did normally.
I unchecked the option, checked the WP Settings, reinstalled the theme, reinstalled wordpress and looked through the database and searched high and low for an answer on forums and the internet.
My first clue – even if I changed theme it still hijacked the first page as archives so the problem was no longer just theme related.
My second clue even overwriting the wordpress files did not resolve the problem so it wasn’t a wordpress issue.
Final clue – by deduction, the problem had to be in the database.
Ever tried looking for how to restore MySql? Lots of technical jargon and complicated and outdated instructions. Then, by chance I fell on this : http://www.tamba2.org.uk/wordpress/restore/
Really clear and fool-proof simple instructions for the layperson on how to restore a backup.
Lessons:
In the end I had to re-enter the latest posts I’d created and only lost a sidebar text content which I can easily reproduce so no big issue…. except for the 12 hours I lost trying to find a fix!! Next time I’ll get my web guru on the case so I can focus on more productive outcomes.
Wow.
There is a fairy-godmother after all, and her name is Vlad!
I have a growing list of WordPress websites and it has been getting tedious updating each one of them and monitoring them, even with using a password manager to automatically login.
Then along comes Vlad with a very cool tool.
ManageWP is both a plugin (which authorises the software to centralise your sites) and a dashboard which not only shows an at-a-glance status of your sites but also has increased functionality. You can do bulk updates and upgrades, bulk posts and pages, and other activities including automated backups of your entire site – outstanding safety feature.
And you never have to leave.
From within the dashboard you can then step into any of yoru sites and do the usual stuff.
This is a beta-model at the moment and so it’s use is temporarily free. Which is a good move on Vlad’s part because even after only 30 minutes playing with this, I’m sure most people will not want to go back to the manual method when he sets a price for it.
So head over to managewp.com and try it out for yourself – no affiliate links at all. Just passing on a tip – it works for me!
There are times when you just sit in front of your keyboard and wonder ‘What the heck am I going to write about today?!?!?!?”
Often we do that because we are looking for that one inspirational idea. Well, don’t wait for inspiration, that’s one of the causes of writer’s block (and empty blogs!)
If you have a product or business blog then you’ll have lots of ideas on what to write about … product reviews, new products or services, case studies, how to use your product or services and so on.
If you write a personal blog then you sometimes get stuck for ideas. WordPress are running a challenge in 2011 to encourage people to post more often. On their site they have some cool ideas and advice. Here are at least 14 things you can blog about:
http://dailypost.wordpress.com/2011-topic-list/
If you search through their blog posts, you’ll find a LOT more ideas to write about, like “describe what your laughter sounds like?
What I love about these ideas is that they require no preparation and some do test your thinking!
Ok, champ, so when iis your next blog post and how often will you post?
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