Blog
Moving Your WordPress Site
Changing web hosts? Restoring from a backup? Here are some items to check. Files FTP these folders to your new site: wp-content/plugins wp-content/themes wp-content/uploads Of course, you might choose instead to manually install the plugins and your theme. You might even load your images from a CDN and not need the uploads folder. But in general, these are what you will want to move. Database Backup Export your site database with PHPMyAdmin from the old site. Typically this is as easy as going into “PHPMyAdmin” (your web host should provide this tool in CPanel), clicking the export tab, then clicking the button. I do recommend checking the “drop...
Read MoreWhat Social Media Share Buttons Should I Use?
I’m sure that, when you read a blog post, you have often noticed buttons underneath the blog post (or sometimes on top or beside) saying things like “share and enjoy!” or “get social” or “pass it on” or “tell your friends” or something similar. They may provide convenient buttons to save you a click or two in sharing the link of that website to literally dozens of services. Facebook, Twitter, Google +1, Bebo, Digg, Del.ico.us, email, MySpace, StumbleUpon, Reddit, Orkut… the list goes on and on. Which ones do you really need? I’ve noticed that major social media gurus–those who seem to be the most...
Read MoreHow Do I Add Facebook, Twitter and Google +1 Buttons to my Site?
There are multiple ways to add those lovely little Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus One buttons to your blog posts so that viewers can use them to help promote you. If you’re wondering why only those three buttons, check out What Social Media Share Buttons Should I Use? The Manual Method Each service provides a tool to help you generate the exact code you need to add into the basic HTML of your site. Add a Google +1 Button (note that under “Advanced Options” you can choose to show or hide the count) Get Facebook Like Button Code (you may want to deselect the “Send Button,” choose either “button_count” or...
Read MoreHow to Add YouTube Thumbnails
There are numerous plugins to embed videos into your page, or you can get the HTML to embed a video directly from YouTube. And this can be quite useful, when you want to play a video in your page–typically when the page or post revolves around the video. However, there are times when you just want an image thumbnail linking to the video, instead of embedding the video directly. This can be for a number of reasons: you only want to use a small area for the video–large enough for a thumbnail, but too small to play the video you’re aware that your audience may be looking at your site from work, behind firewalls that may not let them view pages with...
Read MoreWhy is WordPress Closing My Paragraph Tags When It Shouldn’t?
Have you ever noticed your CSS acting strangely, and then discovered upon investigating that your paragraph tags did not seem to be acting correctly–that even though you properly close your paragraph tags, WordPress just closes your tags wherever it wants to? You can see this problem simply illustrated below. Here, in HTML mode I have entered a few lines of HTML. I have styled a p tag with a border, and included some words and an unordered list before closing the p tag. What you actually see is that the border only encloses one line. If you look at the HTML, you will see that there are several p tags opened and closed in the example below, instead of just the one...
Read MoreHow to Stop YouTube Videos From Hiding Behind Drop-Down Menus
The Problem: Iframes Don’t Like Z-Index I have since found an easier way to prevent IFrames from overlapping other content. Have you ever had this problem? Some element on your page—usually a drop-down menu, that covers areas when you hover over it that it normally would not—ends up appearing behind some other element stead of in front of it. Usually it is an iframe that pretentiously shoves its way in front of everything. Most commonly—at least in my case—this is because I am trying to embed a YouTube video. Ordinarily you would just use the z-index CSS property to move one element in front of another. However, iframes and object...
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