Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
If you write a blog, there’s a good chance that it was built using the awesome WordPress platform, and for good reason.
WordPress is the most popular blogging platform in the word thanks to its unique combination of power and simplicity.
Virtually all major web hosting companies support WordPress, and several of them now offer WordPress-optimized hosting plans that make creating, running and maintaining a WordPress blog simple, fast and easy. [Read more…]
If you’re a blogger and your blog hasn’t yet been secured with SSL/TLS encryption you need to get that done ASAP!
Back in December 2017 I wrote this post warning bloggers about the need to get their blogs encrypted before Google started actively penalizing non-secured sites.
Well, that day has come…
Google recently rolled out an update to their Chrome browser that causes it to now flag unencrypted pages as “Not Secure” right in the address bar!
Up until recently it was widely understood that only sites that collected credit card data or other sensitive visitor information really needed to be encrypted, but Google has changed that by deciding to clearly mark non-encrypted pages as “Not Secure”.
To show you what I’m talking about, I took a partial screenshot of a web page that I knew to be unencrypted at the time I began writing this post (the site has since been encrypted): [Read more…]
Question from Dan J.: Hi Rick. I recently made the switch from Blogger to my own self-hosted WordPress blog with the help of your step-by-step guide to installing WordPress. I can honestly say it’s the best move I’ve ever made.
I need your help with one issue though. I have a habit of changing my mind about the images I use with my posts, sometimes more than once. The unused images always pop up in the Media Library when I go back to choose an image for a post.
How can I remove the images that I don’t ever plan to use from the media library?
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]
If you’ve been blogging with WordPress for a while you’re probably well familiar with the infamous “White Screen of Death”.
If you haven’t encountered it yet, that’s the stark, panic inducing white error screen that WordPress displays when it encounters a fatal error with some component of your blog.
There are several reasons why you might see a white screen of death on your blog, but they’re usually the result of a serious problem affecting your blog’s theme, one of the installed plugins or the database.
Whatever the reason, it’s the last thing you want to see when you try to access your blog!
Question from Patty J.: I recently found out about the free certificates from Let’s Encrypt. I asked my web host to install it for me so I can make my WordPress blog secure.
I installed the Really Simple SSL plugin and that took care of the redirects from http to https as well as most of the mixed content issues.
But Firefox is still blocking parts of my pages that it claims are still trying to load from insecure sources.
I’ve looked my pages over and I can’t find anything that appears to be loading from an insecure location. Everything on the page appears to be loading from URLs starting with https instead of http.
When I load the pages in Chrome it shows the green padlock with no warnings. It’s only Firefox that’s not cooperating.
I’m pulling my hair out here. How can I find out what Firefox is blocking for being insecure so I can fix it?
Rick’s answer: [Read more…]