BlogCrafted

Tutorial Triplicate — Handling Permalink Changes and 301 Redirects

BlogCrafted Staff — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 10:00:35 +0000

If you’ve been thinking about changing the permalink structure on your blog or already changed it and are trying to figure out what to do with your internal links, then this trio of pages I just created will help you out.

First, a tutorial on using the Redirection plugin to remove dates from incoming links. Not only do you want people clicking on the links to be able to find your site, you want your posts to rank like they did before. This method uses a 301 redirection to pass on the link juice and the visitors.

Second, a tutorial on removing the dates from your internal links. Though the redirection you’ve already set up is enough, having your links to yourself look right isn’t a bad idea. It also means that if the Redirection plugin breaks or you turn it off, your internal links still work

And third, for people who’ve just migrated over from Blogger, a tutorial on removing the .html from Blogger permalinks and otherwise straightening them out. If you also want to remove the dates, do this before doing the other two.

Happy regexing!

Find LunarPages MySQL Database IP Address

BlogCrafted Staff — Tue, 16 Feb 2010 10:00:24 +0000

Most shared hosting services store your files and databases on a the same server with the same IP address. However, LunarPages has recently stopped that practice and keeps some people’s databases on different servers with different IP address. This makes it more difficult to install Wordpress on LunarPages.

If you’re a LunarPages customer and trying to figure out what the IP address of your databases is, it’s very likely NOT the same as the IP address of your Lunar Pages Control Panel (LPCP).

How to Find Your MySQL Database IP Address on LunarPages

Go to the main page of your LPCP and scroll down to databases.
Click on PhpMyAdmin (sailboat icon on the right side).
It may ask you to fill in your login information again, do so.
Now you’re in phpMyAdmin for your hosting. Though the url in your address bar still has the same IP address as your LPCP, the very top of the page will say Server: 229.237.233.32 (only your IP address).

Here’s a screenshot of what this looked like for one client, but with most of the IP address blacked out for privacy:

It’s at the very top of the page, a little bit left of center. You’ll see that it probably shares many of the same digits as your LPCP IP address, but it’s got a few different ones too. If it’s identical, then your database & files are on the same server.

You can use this IP address it fill in the DB_HOST field in a wp-config.php file for Wordpress (replacing localhost) or wherever else you need the IP of your MySQL databases on LunarPages.

DIY Themes Server Certificate Expired

BlogCrafted Staff — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 00:04:51 +0000

In the last week, a rash of expired certificates has struck the Thesis-using/Thesis-promoting community. Find out why, how to fix it, and how to continue promoting Thesis without these error messages.

I noticed the first one 5 days ago. As I was visiting a friend’s site, this error message jumped out at me:

Because it’s not the best screen grab, I transcribed it. It reads:

diythemes.com:443 uses an invalid security certificate

The certificate expired on 1/15/2010 3:55 PM.

(Error code: sec_error_expired_certificate)

This could be a problem with the server’s configuration or it could be someone trying to impersonate the server.

If you you have connected to this server successfully in the past the error may be temporary and you can try again later.

I was surprised, but I recognized DIY Themes as being the Thesis theme site he was running and knew it was safe to keep browsing his site. Further investigation and discussions brought to light the fact that he was running the DIY Themes Thesis affiliate program.

Brian Clark had recently announced on Copyblogger that the Thesis affiliate program was moving to ShareASale. DIY Themes promised that the old links would still work for another 60 days, after which you had to be on the new affiliate program. Yet somehow, the people running DIY Themes had let their security certificate expire and it was throwing errors on every site using DIY Themes affiliate code!

How to Fix the DIY Themes Expired Certificate Error

Step 1. Take down all Thesis ads on your site. Text links (unless you’re using redirects you’ve created), banner ads, everything. Check individual posts too.

Why take it all down first? Because this error is the kind of thing that scares away readers. And it’s not good advertising for the product when your readers are getting warnings about it.

Step 2. Go to ShareASale and sign up. Then sign up for the Thesis affiliate program.

Step 3. Replace the banners and links using the code from ShareASale. If you’re feeling nervous, consider uploading all banner ads to your site and linking to them on your site. You can use a plugin like GoCodes to create a simple redirect for links. Of course, the ShareASale code isn’t throwing errors, but these tools give you more control over the ads on your site.

I’m very surprised that as of the time I’m writing this, January 25th, the certificate has been expired for 10 days and has been throwing these errors for at least 5 (when I first noticed) and the DIY Themes crew hasn’t renewed it yet. I hope it’ll be fixed soon, but since the program is ending you might as well sign up with the new place.

Edited to add: Brian Clark noted below that the problem had been addressed over the weekend. I still saw it on at least one site this morning, but perhaps the change is taking effect. If you’re seeing it on your site still, consider contacting DIY themes…or just follow the instructions, since you’ll need to do that anyway.

Getting DIY Themes to Refund You for Thesis

BlogCrafted Staff — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 10:00:11 +0000

There’s no question that the Thesis theme for Wordpress is very powerful. It’s got a lot of good code and a number of customization options which help you make it more your own. But it’s got flaws as well and it’s not the best match for a lot of people. One thing that comes to mind is the inability to easily insert a header image, at least not without adding a plugin.

I don’t believe Thesis should be marketed as great for beginners with no coding experience unless those beginners are either willing to hire a blog consultant or to deal with a fairly generic-looking theme.

So what do you do if you bought Thesis, gave it your best shot, and need a refund? DIY Themes promises a refund within 30 days if you’re not satisfied with your purchase of Thesis.

Instructions for Requesting a Refund from DIY Themes

To request a refund, send an email to diythemes@baagagmail.com, with the subject “Refund Request”. Please include the following information with your request:

Your name
The email address associated with your PayPal account
The date of purchase
Your DIYthemes member name

If You Still Want to Give Thesis a Shot

One of the best things created by the Thesis user community is Rick Beckman’s Thesis Open Hooks plugin. It gave you back-end CSS/PHP editing abilities before Thesis finally integrated them and, most importantly, it has blocks where you can input code for various Thesis hooks instead of setting them up with PHP.

If you’re not quite ready to give up on Thesis, try checking it out (also available from the Wordpress Codex for installation from within your site’s back-end).

There’s a lot of great stuff you can do with Thesis. But if it’s not the theme for you, don’t be shy in asking for a refund.

Obviously, from my lukewarm review of Thesis for beginners (unless they want to pay more for customization, in which case get in touch ), I’m not a representative of DIY Themes. The refund information comes from the DIY Themes forum, but is not easy to find. Maybe it’s not well-publicized because there’s no affiliate program for refunds. My thought is if you’re going to pay that much, it should be something you’re using and if you can’t use, return.

How to Handle Comment Spam Akismet Doesn’t Catch

BlogCrafted Staff — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 20:57:20 +0000

Recently, a number spam bots have been managing to get past Akismet to leave nonsensical comments with no actual link. Instead the link has read http://link with no .com. It seems likely that these bots are attempting to get these fake comments accepted on blogs so that when the same bots leave comments with links, they’ll be 2nd time commenters. People have reported a great deal of frustration at having these comments show up and sit on their blogs until they get a chance to mark as spam.

Here’s how you can either send these comments to your moderation queue or even send them directly to your spam. If you are reasonably certain that no one else will be leaving a valid comment on your site with http://link, then you might as well sent it to spam. If you’re worried that a real comment might left with http://link in the link, field, then there’s a way to sent it to moderation instead.

Sending These Spam http://link Comments to Spam

There’s a manual way to send these comments to spam, at least until Akismet picks up on them.

1. Navigate to Settings -> Discussion.

2. Scroll down to Comment Blacklist. You’ll see a box that looks like the one below (click image to enlarge). Enter http://link and save (bottom of the page). This way, any comment that leaves http://link as its link will get sent straight to your spam area, it won’t show up in your comments and you won’t even have to moderate it.

Sending These Spam http://link Comments to Your Moderation Queue

Using this method will mean you still have to moderate the comments, but they won’t show up on your posts.

1. Navigate to Settings -> Discussion.

2. Scroll down to Comment Moderation. You’ll see a box that looks like the one below (click image to enlarge). Enter http://link and save (bottom of the page). This way, any comment that leaves http://link as its link will get sent straight to your spam area, it won’t show up in your comments and you won’t even have to moderate it.

Using This Method on Other Spam

Most Wordpress users rely on spam killing plugins to keep unwanted comments off our blog. But sometimes the plugins aren’t smart enough or haven’t yet adapted. You can use this method for all kinds of things.

Got regular commenter who always needs comments edited or at least looked over before they’re posted? If they always use the same e-mail address, just put it in the Moderation or Blacklist box, depending on the approach you want to take.

Got an unwelcome commenter from a particular IP address? Put the IP address in there. (Won’t stop them commenting from different IPs.)

Got a commenter who always uses the same offensive terms, such as “whore”? Put them in there.

These fields are a great way to either keep a tighter rein on your blog’s comments by moderating certain kinds or to set and forget and send some comments to spam every time.

Tutorial: Adding Gravatars to Cutline Themes

BlogCrafted Staff — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 11:00:11 +0000

Note, I have since transitioned to Thesis, but the tutorial still works great for Cutline.

Despite the growing internet presence of Chris Pearson’s Thesis, his older themes still remain popular, including the Cutline theme which I’ve modified for this blog.

I recently decided to add gravatars to my theme, so I launched a search for anyone’s tips on best positioning of the gravatar code within Cutline. Since I didn’t find anything, I did it on my own–but I thought I’d share with you exactly which code to put where to get gravatars on Cutline positioned like mine. As a bonus, a small section at the bottom shows you how to create a add a custom default gravatar for your site. You’ll see that commenters without gravatars get a ghosted black-and-white BC avatar.

Inserting Gravatar Code into Cutline Comments

1. Inserting the code into comments.php.

a) Navigate to Theme Editor and open comments.php.

b) Scroll down to

c) Insert

<?php if(function_exists('get_avatar')) { echo get_avatar($comment, '50'); } ?>

directly before

d) The result should look like: &amp;lt;?php if(function_exists(‘get_avatar’)) { echo get_avatar($comment, ‘50′); } ?&amp;gt;

e) Save.

(Note, if you want your gravatars to be bigger or smaller, change the ‘50′ to ‘40′ or ‘60′ or whatever size you want.)

2. Styling the avatars in style.css or custom.css.

a) If you’re playing by the Cutline rules and have made all your changes in the custom.css stylesheet (or haven’t yet made any changes), open custom.css. If you’ve already hacked style.css to shreds anyway, open style.css.

b) If you’re in custom.css, insert the following line:

.custom #comments .avatar { float: left; margin: 0 4px 0 4px; padding: 4px; border: 1px #ccc solid; }

If you’re in style.css, insert the following line:

#comments .avatar { float: left; margin: 0 4px 0 4px; padding: 4px; border: 1px #ccc solid; }

c) Save.

This will style your gravatars with 4 pixels of padding on either side, then a 1px light-gray border, then a left/right margin to set them off. They’ll sit on the top left of your comments and the comment will wrap around them.

3. Turning on Gravatars.

Now your theme is set up for gravatars, but they may not be turned on. Navigate to Settings -> Discussion and enable gravatars, select the highest rating you’ll display, and choose a backup. Save those settings and watch the gravatars show up in your comments section.

Adding a Unique Default Gravatar

Now that your site has gravatars, you’ll find out just how many of your commenters don’t have them. You can select a mystery man, the gravatar logo, a blank space, or some randomly-generated icons to fill the space. Or you can create a special gravatar for your site. For example, I took the BlogCrafted gravatar, turned it black-and-white, and ghosted it. It shows up when people leave comments and aren’t signed up with gravatars, that’s what shows up for them.

Turns out that adding a gravatar that’s unique to your site isn’t hard at all. First you have to come up with a default avatar. In my example, it’s saved as defaultgravatar.jpg. If you use a different filename, be sure to change that in the code.

Upload the gravatar to the images folder of your theme directory (in Cutline, it’s called “images,” if your theme is different, please modify the code below to reflect its image folder name).

Then back in the Theme Editor area, navigate to functions.php (called Theme Functions). Directly under the:

if ( function_exists('register_sidebars') )
    register_sidebars(2);

paste:

add_filter( 'avatar_defaults', 'newgravatar' );  

function newgravatar ($avatar_defaults) {
$myavatar = get_bloginfo('template_directory') . '/images/defaultgravatar.jpg';
$avatar_defaults[$myavatar] = &amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;Unique Default Gravatar&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;quot;;
return $avatar_defaults;
}

The only things you might want to change in this code are:

1) make sure the image location /images/defaultgravatar.jpg is the same as your image’s location. In this case, it’s in the images folder of your theme and called defaultgravatar.jpg. Make changes as appropriate.

2) “Unique Default Gravatar” can be changed to whatever you want to call it.Don’t delete the quotation marks or the semi-colon that comes after.

Otherwise, unless you know PHP, you don’t want to mess with this.

Turn it on. Now go to Settings -> Discussion. The new gravatar should appear in the list of default options. Select it, save, and voila! (if you’re using a caching plugin, you may have to clear it for this to take effect.)

Now there’s only one thing left to do–enjoy your blog’s new gravatars.

A special thanks to the helpful Build Internet article I found on changing default gravatars. Check it if you’d like to know how the code works and see images of what it’ll look like once you’ve done it.

Registering Domains Away from Your Host

BlogCrafted Staff — Fri, 10 Apr 2009 11:00:45 +0000

One of the most convenient ways to register domains is through your host. That way, you have everything in one place. They may even give you a free domain for signing up.

But there are some definite advantages to keeping your domain registration separate from your host–somewhere like GoDaddy. If you end up having irreconcilable differences with your webhost, you may end up temporarily locked out of your account, as Cath Lawson did.

That’s unconscionable behavior on Bluehost’s part, but it does happen. In the event that you need to make a speedy exit and and a clean break from your host, it’s much easier if you don’t have to worry about your domains being registered there.

For example, Cath Lawson was locked out of her account for several days due to high traffic and poor service. If her domain had been registered through GoDaddy and she had backup files, she might have been able to restore her site within a matter of hours.

How?

First, she would have to buy hosting elsewhere–either at another shared host like LunarPages or at somewhere more expensive (and hopefully more stable) like Media Temple, or even through the Lunar Pages virtual server plan (ok, maybe not).

Once she was able to login to her new hosting site (it can take a little while to hear back), she could upload her Wordpress files, create a database and import her old one, edit wp-config.php to reflect the new database information, and then switch the domain nameservers (DNS) at GoDaddy. As soon as the DNS propogated across the internet, her site would once again be available.

Of course, most of us don’t deal with quite that level of drama from our webhosts. Nevertheless, when the time comes to make a change from one host to another, it’s simply more convenient not to have to move the domain’s registration.

If you left because of poor customer service (even if it wasn’t as bad as what Cath went through) then it’s one less thing you have to take care of before you make a clean break. It’s one less stressor. If you chose to move because your site’s needs are expanding or you found a better deal, it makes the move easier and cleaner. There are no complicated codes to enter and no complicated processes. You simply change the DNS settings where your domain is registered and voila.

How do you handle your domain’s registration? I started out registering through my host, but now I register elsewhere.

When Your Wordpress Blog Goes Blank – Possible Fix

BlogCrafted Staff — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 11:00:28 +0000

One of the many services I offer is migrating Wordpress blogs from one host to another. If you’re attempting to migrate your own blog, here’s one important tip: deactivate your caching plugin before you migrate (usually wp-cache or wp-super-cache).

You don’t have to deactivate any other plugins, if you’re migrating your entire database then it’ll automatically reactivate what you were using before. But caching plugins do not play well with blog moves.

If, once you’ve moved the site, all you see is a blank page—not an error page, your site is just a blank page with nothing on it—then check your wp-config file for the following line or something like it:

define('WP_CACHE', true); //Added by WP-Cache Manager

You can either disable the line by putting a “#” in front of it like so:

#define('WP_CACHE', true); //Added by WP-Cache Manager

or you can delete the entire line and trust the caching program to add it back in once you reactivate.

I encountered this issue on Media Temple. I don’t know if that’s because MT is a bit different or if I’ve always turned off the caching plugin before. It was quite easy to fix, but a real pain to catch.

So if your Wordpress blog is showing nothing but blank pages check your wp-config file–it may be an easier fix than you expected. (Also, check to make sure your new host doesn’t have an index.html file in your blog’s main directory. All you want is index.php and index.php.wpau.bak, index.html will keep the front page of your blog from showing up).

How to do a Thorough Backup of Your Wordpress Blog

BlogCrafted Staff — Mon, 12 Jan 2009 08:00:04 +0000

CathLawson, one of my favorite bloggers, recently experienced every blogger’s worst nightmare. Her host shut down her account and turned off her site. The site took 3 days to come back up.

I think this was shocking behavior on the host’s part, as there should have been ways that they could have let her easily access her files and database without keeping her blog live.

But the sad thing is that not all hosts will give you warning or let you get at your files (right away, anyway). So it’s important to have good backups. This way, if something happens to your blog, you’ll be able to restore without depending on hosts.

So, here’s how to run a thorough backup of your Wordpress installation:

Your Wordpress installation has two key components, the database and the files. The database stores all your settings and your content posts/comments/categories/blogroll/active plugins/active theme/widgets/etc. The files include the actual Wordpress schema that makes the site display…from the key Wordpress files to things like your plugin & theme files.

Backing Up Your Wordpress Database

This is the most critical part of your backup process. You can always re-add plugins that weren’t in your last file backup, make the same theme changes again (though always backup major theme overhauls) or use a different theme, and you don’t even have to worry about the core Wordpress components (they only change between upgrades, and you can always re-upgrade, or they’re available at Wordpress.org). As long as you have one file backup, you’ve got a starting point.

But if you don’t have a very recent backup of your database, you’ve lost every post you’ve written, every comment you’ve received, and every setting you’ve changed in the interim.

For backing up your Wordpress database, I recommend installing the Wordpress DB-Backup plugin. Once you’ve activate it, download a copy right away and then configure it for daily backups…unless you blog infrequently, in which case weekly might do as well. Err on the side of backing up. I save the last several backups, just to be safe.

Make sure that the backups you’re receiving have actual content. I’d suggest using a trial installation of WinRAR to unzip them. This should produce ordinary .sql files, which will look funny if you open them in plain Notepad (though Notepad++ displays them great!), but you can at least see that there’s content.

If you’d like an extra backup, periodically use the built-in Wordpress export feature (now found in Tools, post 2.7). It doesn’t have nearly as much detail as a database backup, but this .xml file will have your posts, comments, and a number of other important pieces of information. If you have trouble restoring from the database, you’ll still be able to restore from the .xml file.

Backing Up Your Wordpress Files

In theory, you could restore your Wordpress installation without a file backup, but why would you want to? Having the files right there makes the entire process much easier.

There are two ways to back up your files.

1) Consider using the Blog Traffic Exchange Wordpress Backup plugin. It backs up your themes, plugins, and uploads directories.

You can opt to have the plugin e-mail you backups periodically or backup from your site’s back-end. If the backups are too large, you may have to do it on your site because the .zip files can’t be sent through e-mail.

2) You can download all your site files (which means that you can just upload them again and import your database if you need to restore). I suggest using an FTP client such as Filezilla. Your host should have given you FTP login information.

When accessing your site via FTP, you can just download your site’s entire “root” directory, if that’s an option. In the image below, the “” contains ALL the site’s Wordpress files, theme files, plugin files, and uploads (whether to the “uploads” folder, another img folder, or anywhere else). Click for a larger view:

Or you can download ALL the directories and files inside your site’s root folder. That includes wp-admin, wp-content, wp-includes, as well as all the .php files and whatnot. If doing it this way, create a special folder on your computer to serve as a root directory of sorts.

Restoring from a Backup

That’s an article for another day. Until that day comes, there are other websites which have information about restoring Wordpress from backups. And if you have the files and database backup, any blog professional should be able to restore your Wordpress installation to your website or transfer it to another host’s website with little difficulty.

Tutorial on Using Fantastico to Install Wordpress

BlogCrafted Staff — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 15:30:58 +0000

My newest tutorial is on using Fantastico to install a Wordpress blog. I’ve used images from my LunarPages account, but one beauty of Fantastico is that it’s basically the same on any of the hosting systems which offer it.

Fantastico is so simple that it doesn’t even need a tutorial. But if you’ve never used it before and are nervous, you can see how it works, step-by-step.

Once you know what you’re doing, actually using Fantastico to install Wordpress is a matter of one or two minutes. So if you’ve nervous about setting up Wordpress with Fantastico, check out the tutorial!