Hey Folks!

Just a real quick one today, but still pretty useful. I’ve had a few people ask me about this problem so I thought i’d pop a super-fast tutorial together and then people can access it whenever they need it.

On WordPress 2011 theme when you create a single post, you’ll notice that by default it comes up with just one column and without a sidebar. Now, this is fine if you haven’t got useful stuff (or ads, affiliate deals etc) to show people on the sidebar. However, if you’re getting a lot of traffic to some specific single posts, it would be a great idea to let those visitors know about the rest of your content.

Here’s how to add a sidebar to the 2011 WordPress Theme

1. In the Theme Editor (Dashboard > Appearence > Editor), go to single.php and add the following:

<?php get_sidebar(); ?>

In a new line just above the footer code at the bottom of the file:

<?php get_footer(); ?>

Next, go to functions.php (Theme Functions) and find the following at the bottom of the file:

add_filter( 'body_class', 'twentyeleven_body_classes' );

Comment it out (by adding 2 forward slashes // at the beginning of the line) and it will force WordPress to stop differentiating between normal and single post pages.

Simple stuff, but useful nonetheless… Have a great day all!

Hey Folks!

When editing your pages, posts and even categories, sometimes WordPress can add a number to the end of the permalink to avoid duplicate URLs.

This sounds like it should be great and a useful tool but sometimes when you are trying to replace “sample” it can rename it “sample-2″ and can get a little stressful.

Here’s a nice and easy way to fully delete the old page without having to go into the database / PHPadmin etc (there’s no need:))
It’s similar to clearing a cache so you can add a new page with the original permalink and without a -2 or -3 after the postname.
Here’s the step by step:

1. Delete your page
2. Click Dashboard > Pages (Not “Add New”)
3. You will see above the page list the following: All, Published, Drafts, Trash
4. Click on “Trash” and select the pages that you want to delete permanently.
5. Click “Bulk Actions > Delete Permanently”
6. Then Recreate your page (by going to “Pages > Add New”) and the permalink should be fine and without a dash or number after the postname.

If this has helped, please leave a comment, Like or Tweet to show some love. Thanks!!

Broken links are one of the worst things your website can contain. When your site is full of broken links, your visitors will view you as unprofessional and quickly leave your website in favor of another one whenever they encounter a broken link. Since it is so hard to get people to visit your website in the first place, you want to do everything you can to keep them on your site. Fixing any and all broken links immediately is a great way to accomplish this goal.

Checking for broken links is also important for your website’s SEO. When a search engine crawler comes across a broken link on your website, it will be unable to move to another page on your site and index the rest of your content. This can leave you with unindexed content, which will limit your exposure in the search engines. Also, you do not want a search engine to serve up a URL that does not exist in their search results as no one will be able to visit your website when searching for that particular term.

 Tools For Checking Broken Links

There are several tools that you can use to help you check your website for broken links. Rather than spending your time manually checking all of the links on your site, it is recommended to use one of these tools to help speed up the process.

 W3C Link Checker – This particular tool checks your links for a variety of issues including whether or not the link is broken. The W3C Link Checker is a good tool you can use to make sure your website is functioning properly.

 Free Link Checker – Free Link Checker is another tool that helps you check for broken internal and external links within your blog. A nice feature associated with this tool is the ability to check image links as well to ensure all of your images are rendering properly.

 LinkTiger – LinkTiger may be the most robust link checking tool of the bunch. This particular tool allows you to check up to one hundred links per week for free. Once a broken link is found, LinkTiger will send you an email alert so you are the first to know about the broken link.

 Google WebMaster Tools

Another good tool to have in your arsenal to fight against broken links is a Google WebMaster Tools account. By setting up a WebMaster Tools account for your website, you will be given further data you use to help run your site. One of the nice features of this tool is letting you know the Google search engine spider finds errors with your site, including broken links. Through your WebMaster Tools account, you can request a broken link be removed from the search engine results if it had been indexed by Google and no longer exists on your website. This will prevent people from visiting broken links on your website from Google’s search results.

 Plugin For WordPress

If you are using WordPress as your content management system, you can use a plugin to manage your broken links. The plugin named Broken Link Checker is one of the better plugins you can use to address this problem with your blog. This particular plugin will check for links that do not work, missing images and redirect. If the plugin happens to find any issues with your site, it will send you an email notification, allowing you to quickly address the issue.

Another nice feature of the Broken Link Checker plugin is being able to update links from within the plugin itself. There is no need to go through every page of your website and update all of the links manually.

Having broken links on your website makes your website appear unprofessional as well as hurts your rankings in the search engines. Utilizing a series of link checker tools and updating any errors in your Google WebMaster Tools account will allow your website to proceed without any broken links.

Richard H. is trying to optimize the loading times of a site for a NYC law firm Samuelson Hause & Samuelson. Curious as it is, release versions of popular CMS programs can still be optimized.

Hey Folks!

Have you ever had days when your computer is just ridiculously slow and typing a short paragraph takes you several minutes instead of seconds?

Whether it’s Facebook, Google, the Address Bar, a Blog Post or even Notepad that you’re typing into, the letters show up half a second to 3 seconds later and it takes you an absolute AGE to get anything written. Sometimes the cursor will skip to the middle of the last sentence and it’ll look like gobbledygook (Is that how it’s spelt?;)).

Well I had this problem today and figured “If i’m having this issue, odds on others are having it too” – So I popped over to Google and had a little search.

JEEZ!! There’s a TON of folk having this keyboard lag problem and hundreds of forum threads and blog posts that give you possibilities of what may be wrong with your Laptop or PC. However, most of these places only give you a snippet of what to look for when you’re trying to fix that slow typing problem.

So, I decided to tie them all together and give you the definitive fixes to get your computer back to it’s normal speed.

I’m going to be using Mozilla Firefox for this example, but the workarounds are pretty similar in IE / Chrome / Safari etc.

OK Step 1,

DISABLE All Add-Ons, Personas & Extensions

Disabling an add-on will turn it off without removing it:

1. At the top of the Firefox window, click on the Firefox button (Tools menu in Windows XP), and then click Add-ons. The Add-ons Manager tab will open.
2. In the Add-ons Manager tab, select the Extensions or Appearance or Plugins panel.
3. Select the add-on you wish to disable
4. Click the Disable button.
5. Click Restart now if it pops up. Your tabs will be saved and restored after the restart.

(To re-enable the add-on, find it in the list of Add-ons and click Enable, then restart Firefox.)

Easy enough to Google Instructions for Safari / Opera / Chrome / IE

Still Having Problems? No Worries… on to STEP 2

Uninstalling Recent Java Updates

Keeping old and unsupported versions of Java on your system presents a serious security risk plus can bloat and slow down your computer.
Uninstalling older versions of Java from your system ensures that Java applications will run with the most up-to-date security and performance improvements on your system.

Here’s how:

Remove older versions of Java in the same way as you would remove any other software from your Windows computer.

Windows 7 and Vista – Uninstall Programs

1. Click Start
2. Select Control Panel
3. Select Programs
4. Click Programs and Features
5. Select the program you want to uninstall by clicking on it, and then click the Uninstall button.

You may need administrator privileges to remove programs.

Windows XP – Uninstall Programs

1. Click Start
2. Select Control Panel
3. Click the Add/Remove Programs control panel icon
4. The Add/Remove control panel displays a list of software on your system, including any Java software products that are on your computer. Select any that you want to uninstall by clicking on it, and then click the Remove button.

NB: Older versions of Java may appear in the program list as J2SE Runtime Environment or Java 2 Runtime Environment.

After this, do a System Reboot. See you in 5:)

Most of you will now find that your typing speed is back to normal. However, if the first 2 speps didn’t cure your slow typing lag, then it looks like you’ve got some serious proccesses running in the background that are bloating your system causing it to dramatically slow down and this can easily be addressed in Step 3.

Disabling Startup Programs Using MSCONFIG

Most people know that the more programs you have running on your computer at any one time, the more likely it is that your computer will either run slowly or even crash. What most people don’t know is that every time you boot your computer a whole load of “hidden” programs load in the background. Some of these hidden programs are essential, but most aren’t. Turning off some of these hidden programs using MSCONFIG can significantly increase your computer’s performance and reliability.

To access MSCONFIG in Windows 7 click “Start” and type “MSCONFIG” (without the speech marks)

In Windows XP click “Start” > “Run” and type “MSCONFIG” (without the speech marks)

You should now have the MSCONFIG box up on screen: Click the “Startup” Tab

When your computer starts up, it will automatically load up a ton of programs that you don’t need but will run in the background, clogging up and slowing down your machine. For example, on my setup Quicktime by Apple is set to run even when i’m not using it – That’s silly, so i’ve disabled it. Simple:)

NB: Only untick programs that you recognise as some of them will be neccessary for Windows to run smoothly. If you’re not sure about a program either google “Is it safe for me to disable *program name*” or check out http://www.pacs-portal.co.uk/startup_search.php which has a huge list of which programs are safe to disable or not!!

Once you have ticked / unticked your startup programs, hit “apply”, “OK” and then reboot.

By using the above methods i’ve sped up my machine considerably and it’s faster now than when I got it out of the box.

Have a great day folks and if you found this post useful spread the love with either a comment, like or share etc. Cheers!!

Well, not really a battle – 2 totally different animals, but here’s something that happened to me this evening while transferring an Actinic online store on to my Hostgator servers (and by the amount of forum posts on the subject, it’s happened to a LOT of other folks too).

Unfortunately no-one seemed to come up with a solution. UNTIL NOW that is.

Here’s the thing:

I run a great slogan t-shirt company http://www.timebombtshirts.com (don’t look at it people – it’s RUDE!;)) and migrated it to hostgator – no problem it seemed. Then on testing, when I clicked “Checkout Now” button the following error appeared:

Forbidden

You don't have permission to access /cgi-bin/os000001.pl on this server.

Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an

ErrorDocument to handle the request.

EEK!

I’ve been on to live chat support with Hostgator for the last 1/2 an hour and finally found the answer. Instead of me going through each step (checking paths to cgi-bin / perl / waiting for nameservers to fully propagate etc…) I thought i’d just give you the transcript which you are free to copy, paste and send to hostgator (or your particular hosting company) which should get you a super-speedy response and a working website in a matter of a few minutes…

[Initial Question]: Hi, I am having an issue when clicking “Checkout Now” on timebombtshirts.com – The following error appears:Forbidden You don’t have permission to access /cgi-bin/os000001.pl on this server. Additionally, a 404 Not Found error was encountered while trying to use an ErrorDocument to handle the request. Possibly a perl script or permissions error?
(2:18 pm) [System] Customer has entered chat and is waiting for an agent.
(2:21 pm) [Ehsan M.] Welcome to HostGator.com Live Chat. My name is Ehsan, and I will be happy to assist you with your inquiry.
(2:22 pm) [Ehsan M.] Hello, how are you doing today?
(2:24 pm) [Richie]: Hi Ehsan, all good thanks:) – permissions are ok on cgi-bin… path to perl and cgi are all correct – bit stumped as to what the problem is.
(2:27 pm) [Ehsan M.] Sure no problem. To further examine this issue I do need to verify you
(2:27 pm) [Ehsan M.] For security purposes, I will need to verify your identity by having you provide your account’s billing credentials in the popup that will soon follow this message. I apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.
(2:27 pm) [AccountVerifyRequest]: {“requestedBy”:”******”}
(2:30 pm) [AccountVerifyAttempt]: {“clientId”:”1*******”,”

How To Change The WordPress Login Image

Hey Folks, I’ve been commissioned by a client to build a membership site within a main blog and what better way than to use WordPress with a membership site plugin (I’m using Membership Premium from the guys at http://premium.wpmudev.org/)

The thing is, my client wanted a specific logo on the wordpress login screen and until the “Login Logo” guys came along there was no easy way of doing this.

Thankfully they created an awesome wordpress plugin which you can download for free below.

It’s extremely useful if you have either a membership or any type of multi-user site (OR, if you just want your login screen to look cool – ha!)

Description:
This plugin allows you to customize the logo on the WordPress login screen. There is zero configuration. You just drop the logo file into your WordPress content directory, named login-logo.png and this plugin takes over.

Note that you should use a transparent background on the PNG image, crop it tightly (no padding pixels) and use a width of exactly 312 pixels for best results. Wider images will be downscaled in modern browsers, but it isn’t recommended to rely on that.

Installation:

• Click here to install and activate.
• Create a PNG image with a transparent background, tightly cropped, with a recommended width of 312 pixels.
• Upload the PNG image to your WordPress content directory (/wp-content/, by default), and name the file login-logo.png.
• If you have a multisite install with more than one network, you can also use login-logo-network-{NETWORK ID}.png to assign a different login logo to each network.
• If you have a multisite install, you can also use login-logo-site-{$blog_id}.png to assign a different login logo to each site.
• Done! The login screen will now use your logo.

Screenshot:

FAQs:

Hey Folks, Here’s a quick step-by-step tutorial for you on setting up useful tabs on the new facebook business pages timeline. This has increased traffic to my site by around 80% so far, but if you have a lot of Facebook traffic, it will make a massive difference.

I’m going to use a page on Free Guitar Lessons that i’ve had kicking around for a while not doing much so let’s set it up for this training.

OK, If you have a business page set up, go directly to step 5. If not, let’s get cracking…

Step 1. Log in to your personal facebook account and browse to https://www.facebook.com/pages/create.php

Step 2. Choose “Brand or Product” > “Website“. Enter your brand’s name and check facebook T&C’s > “Get Started”

Step 3. “Upload Image” Minimum dimensions 180px x 180px (Although FB resizes to 160px OR 125px depending on the day of the week;))

Step 4.  Enter Basic Info (Tip: Enter site address – this will be at the top of your page eg. http://jamorama.learnguitar21minutes.com/ <– FREE Guitar Lessons. You want to make it easy for users to get to your offer / website)

Now you’re set up with a Business page, let’s add some “Call to action” Tabs.

Step 5. In the top box, type Static HTML and click on “Static HTML: iframe tabs” See “Image 2″ below.

Image 2

Step 6. Click “Add Static HTML to a Page” and select your appropriate business page.

You will now see the tab has been added to the header of your site. Now we need to go in and edit this tab.

Step 7. Click the downward arrow to the right then hover over your Static HTML tab and click “Edit Settings” (Image 3)

Image 3

Step 8. Here you can change the name of your tab (keyword friendly please:)) plus upload a call to action graphic eg. FREE EBOOK etc. Dimensions 111px x 74px

OK, now we’ve set up the tab, we’ve got to go into the code and point people to our offer / website.

Step 9.  On your page, Click on your tab and you will see 2 HTML boxes where you can post your opt-in forms, graphics etc. I’m going to show you how to redirect this page to go directly to your site.

Step 10. Enter the following code in the top HTML box:

<a href="http://www.your-site-address.com" target="_blank">CLICK HERE</a> For Your Site
<meta http-equiv="REFRESH" content="0;url=http://www.your-site-address.com">

Click Save. (Don’t worry about the bottom HTML box – Not neccessary for this exercise)

This will redirect the user to your site within the Facebook look and feel, giving the user a seamless browsing experience in as few clicks as possible.

NB. Another thing to bear in mind: The last photo you upload to facebook will always appear in the first tab (photos). I’ve uploaded a right-facing arrow to make sure they know where to click (again tab dimensions should be 111px x 74px).

Good luck folks and drop me a comment / like / share if you found this useful.

Hey Folks!

I’ve been using Popup Domination 2.0 for a while now on a few of my blogs and it has increased the opt-ins dramatically. Last week while updating these to WordPress 3.3 it caused me a bit of a problem and a bit of a headache with Version 2.0 taking the site down and coming up with the following error:

Fatal error: Call to undefined function is_rtl() in /public_html/wp-includes/general-template.php

Easy fix is to go into your FTP and rename the Plugin – However, you lose the plugin. Not Good.

Now, if you’ve already bought Pop up Domination 2.0 and you want to tweak the code to make it work with WP 3.3 read on… OR if you want to do what the developers advise you to do and buy the new retail version of Popup Domination 3.0 at full price, you can do that too – totally up to you:)

By the way, If you haven’t got this Plugin yet – Just buy it, it’s the fastest way to get subscribers on your list, it looks great and it integrates seamlessly with Aweber, Mailchimp, Get Response etc.

OK, Ready for a bit of code cracking? Let’s go.

You can either do this in your cPanel / FTP or even simpler through your WordPress dashboard – let me show you both ways:

In FTP / cPanel navigate to WP-Content > Plugins > Popup-Domination > popup-domination.php (this is the file we’re going to edit)

In Dashboard navigate to Dashboard > Plugins > Editor > Popup Domination (top right dropdown & select) > popup-domination.php (this is the file we’re going to edit)

OK, now were in there search for the following code:

wp_admin_css( 'theme-editor' );

and simply replace it with:

// wp_admin_css( 'theme-editor' );

Yep, that’s it, comment it out:) and hit “update” – you should find this works like a dream.

Have a great day folks!

OK this drove me NUTS! and searching online it’s driving a lot of other people nuts too, so here’s the answer:)

Now, I’m a big fan of WooThemes and Plugins (In fact, You’re looking at Woo’s Canvas right now) – They probably have the slickest looking themes on the market today and 99.99% of the time they’re just plug-and-play and everything works like a dream.

However, today I ran into an issue using the Daisy Theme (Not Woo BTW) with the WooCommerce Shopping Cart Plugin. My thumbnail images were being used as main images and stretched too large giving a blurry effect to all the products. Not Good.

After a good few hours of firebugging and code searching, here’s how to sort out your image blurring problems in woocommerce (I’m using it with the Daisy theme at http://www.popemusic.co.uk)

*************************************************
in wp-content/plugins/woocommerce/assets/css/woocommerce.css

change…

img{border:1px solid #ddd;background:#f5f5f5;padding:6px;display:block;width:100%;height:auto;}

to…

img{border:1px solid #ddd;background:#f5f5f5;padding:6px;display:block;float:right;}

*************************************************

In fact, if you go to wp-content/themes/(your theme)/css/ and edit the css files replacing all the {width:100%;height:auto;} with just { } …

To read more, click the Tweet or Google +1 Button below.

Thanks for clicking folks!!

...The above code hack will sort out all the image resizing / blurring issues and problems you’ve had with the WooCommerce Theme

If you want me to have a look at your site if you're still having problems, drop me a comment below with your URL and i'll have a peek at the code.

NB: Now, i’m not saying this this is the cleanest code hack ever, but it works like a charm and hey, whatever works right?

PLUS! Make sure you’ve sized your images correctly beforehand.

This may well work with other themes, but it is untested… and ALWAYS back up before making any changes.

If it works for you and you’d like to say thanks, show some love with a comment or a Like/Share

Thanks folks and good luck!