Sprout New Media

WordPress 3.3 Is Out: Here’s What’s New

Lisa — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 15:44:58 +0000

WordPress 3.3 was released yesterday, and I thought I’d take a minute to point out what’s new. There are some really great improvements and it’s already faster and easier to use. Here are the highlights: Media File Type Detection You used to have to tell WordPress what format you were uploading. Now instead of clicking [...]

Thoughts On Taming the Email Monster

Lisa — Tue, 15 Nov 2011 15:29:19 +0000

As I write this, my email is down. I use Google to manage my mail (because they’re…um…dependable…usually…), and when I logged in this morning I got a message that there was some sort of error with my email storage (!), and that they’re fixing it – but that it could take up to 48 hours [...]

How to Use Akismet to Protect Your Contact Form

Lisa — Wed, 19 Oct 2011 21:42:14 +0000

Spammers often use contact forms as a way to spam your email. It’s easy to prevent that using the Contact Form 7 and Akismet plugins – Contact Form 7 is a simple, free plugin for creating forms, and Akismet is already installed in WordPress by default Here’s how to use Akismet to protect your Contact [...]

Three Easy Ways to Protect Your Blog from Spam

Lisa — Tue, 18 Oct 2011 13:32:23 +0000

I love getting comments on my blog, but managing them can be a pain. A friend called me recently saying, “Lisa, help me! Help! My blog is full of spam!” Sure enough, she had about 2 dozen comments on one of her blog posts, and every single one of them was spam. She didn’t know [...]

Are you a spectator or a participant?

Lisa — Wed, 12 Oct 2011 10:00:37 +0000

Today I looked at the calendar and realized that we’re almost halfway through October, which means there are only two months left in the year. Um, hello! Where did all that time go? Unfortunately, time doesn’t stop and wait for us to catch up. (Believe me, there are days when I wish I had a [...]

How to Redirect a Domain

Lisa — Thu, 06 Oct 2011 15:01:28 +0000

Hey there! Last night in our WordPress Without Overwhelm class, this question came up: What do you do if you have more than one domain name for your website? This person has multiple domains registered, and she wants them all to go to the same place. For example, you might have registered http://yourname.com and http://your-name.com. [...]

Three Years Ago I Walked Away

Lisa — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 13:48:46 +0000

As we prepare to turn the page on the calendar to October, I’m reminded once again of a very important date. I wrote about it last year, but hey, it’s a new year, and it’s worth celebrating again. Three years ago, my little business was born. The day I walked away from my day job [...]

How to Choose and Register a Domain Name

Lisa — Thu, 29 Sep 2011 10:30:20 +0000

Now that you know a little bit about web hosting, I want to talk about domain names. Remember how we talked about URLs, and using your own domain name? Well, now we’re going to talk about how to actually get a domain name. How to choose a domain name Your domain name can be anything [...]

Shared? VPS? Dedicated? How to Choose Web Hosting

Lisa — Tue, 27 Sep 2011 11:00:31 +0000

In an earlier post I explained the difference between WordPress.com and WordPress.org. I mentioned that for WordPress.org you would need to get your own hosting, and that has prompted some questions from my readers. So here’s what web hosting is: In order to have a self-hosted website, like with WordPress.org, you’ll need to set up [...]

Fall Foliage Color Inspiration

Lisa — Mon, 26 Sep 2011 11:00:06 +0000