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Let the fun begin… Woke up early this morning and met up with my good friend Jim down at The Ohio State University Campus.  This year Wordcamp Columbus is located on campus at the Mendenhall Laboratory Building.  I happen to be sitting in room 100 as I type this post. I must give a shout [...]

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Why are we here? Ever since I started working on WordPress-Master.com, I wanted the site to offer helpful content to people seeking wordpress advice, training and tips.  I feel we are moving along nicely to towards that goal, but there are a few site choices that I believe are a barrier to learning and moving forward. [...]

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Post image for Thesis v1.7 is out! – New Features Inside!

I decided to be adventurous tonight and be one of the first folks to install the v1.7 release of Thesis by DIYthemes.  I’ve always been impressed by the code the team at DIY produce.  This new version will not disappoint.  Granularity of control seems to be the name of the game with this new release. [...]

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Want to add a Widget to your WordPress Blog?

March 11, 2010

One of my favorite features of Wordpress is the fact that it is so very customizable. And it’s so very easy to add in pieces that maintains a level of control over the site without having to manually change PHP or HTML files. You can access it all from within the back end of Wordpress. You can customize these pieces and this extra control with Widgets. I’m not going to go into to much detail here. If you’ve been using Wordpress for very long you know what Widgets are.

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htaccess Rules for WordPress Permalinks

February 24, 2010

I recently moved a website for a client from one hosting company to another hosting company. The entire blog was broken though. Every time I clicked a link or tried to visit a post it resulted in a “Page not Found”. From looking at the URL, it was obvious that it was using Permalinks. Since the site was failing to display these pages using permalinks, the problem was . . .

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Copying Content from Word into WordPress

February 23, 2010

I see this happen all the time with clients. The write up content in Word or Wordpad, and then later try to copy and paste into WordPress. The resulting mess usually confuses many. In fact even if there isn’t an obvious mess to the user, there is sometimes a very large behind the scenes mess. [...]

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Limit the Spam your Blog Attracts the Right Way

January 30, 2010
Akismet Configuration

The general theory is if you value your visitors communication then you should not make it harder for them to communicate in an attempt to block Spam. Instead there are many other ways to prevent it behind the scenes. CAPTCHA in my opinion is a last resort, but what other options are there? How can you effectively prevent idiots from spamming your contact forms and comment boxes?

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Does CAPTCHA Hurt Your Blog?

January 20, 2010

The main reason someone would consider using CAPTCHA on their blog to begin with is probably to try and prevent spammers. You open a website, and over time you’ll notice that as your site gets found online the spam starts flowing in. It’s a bitter sweet feeling. If the bots can find you, then people will start finding you, but you don’t really want the spam bots on your site.

Normally to alleviate the extra work of dealing with all the spam many will use a CAPTCHA image in their form to prevent these automated bots from posting. But if you have a website then I’m sure you’ve visited another website. Have you ever visited a site with CAPTCHA and had difficulty posting anything because you can’t read the letters?

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Moving your WordPress Site? Don’t forget hidden files.

January 14, 2010

After helping move a Wordpress Installation for someone today, we found the site not working. Specifically what appeared to be broken was the post and page links. The home page displayed just fine, but try to go any deeper than that and all you see is 404 errors. Turns out hidden files need to be moved also.

In Linux, any file that starts with a period is considered hidden. Most FTP clients have the default setting of not displaying hidden files. But you still can’t forget to move them if you are moving your website.

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Fix your WordPress 404 error page

December 28, 2009
Default Wordpress 404 Page

Previously I wrote a post about taking responsibility for your 404 errors. Today I want to spend a little bit of time going over what I’ve done to change my own 404 error page. Wordpress actually makes it very easy to program an improved 404 error page. Yoast.com had an interesting article on a few changes to make an attractive 404 page. I had a couple small issues with the code he shared but I still really liked the general idea. I made a few changes which seems to work better for me.

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