Blogging Tips Archives - Page 24 of 36

ATTN Bloggers: Contextual ads service Chitika has shut down

Posted on April 18, 2019

If you’re a blogger, you’re probably familiar with Chitika.

If you aren’t familiar with them, they’re very similar to Google’s popular Adsense contextual ad service.

In fact, Chitika is where many bloggers who were turned down for admission to the Adsense program (or got booted from it) ended up turning to earn revenue from their blogs.

Although Chitika never really gained a lot of traction against the ultra-popular Adsense, they did serve as a vital source of income for quite a few bloggers who were unable to take advantage of the Adsense program for whatever reason.

If you currently have Chitika ads running on your blog(s), I have some bad news for you: The service has been shut down, effective immediately.

[Read more…]

How to enable Two-Factor Authentication on your WordPress.com account

Posted on April 15, 2019

By now you probably know how important it is to enable Two-Factor Authentication on all of your online accounts.

In a nutshell, enabling Two-Factor Authentication on an account adds an extra level of security to that account’s login process.

And with all the hacking and scamming going on in the world today you really do need that extra level of protection on each and every one of your online accounts!

Here’s a general overview of how this powerful security measure works to protect an account from hackers: [Read more…]

Q&A: Which VaultPress subscription do you recommend to backup my WordPress blog?

Posted on March 14, 2019

Question from James A.: I read your post about why you use VaultPress to back up your blogs and I’d like to give it a try.

I usually publish from 3 to 5 new posts every day, and my posts tend to be pretty in-depth. That means recreating them if they were to get lost would be both difficult and time-consuming.

As I understand it if I choose the cheapest plan then my blog would only be backed up once each day. What concerns me is losing any posts that were published since the last backup was created.

My question is which of their three subscription options should I choose? I don’t want to over-pay but I definitely want to protect my hard work.

Rick’s answer: [Read more…]

Q&A: How can I give my blog’s sidebar widgets a background color in WordPress?

Posted on February 11, 2019

Question from Kevin A.: Hi Rick. First of all, I really love your blog. What a wonderful service you’re providing to those of us who struggle with technology!

I have a WordPress blog of my own and the sidebar widgets sort of run together because they all have a white background.

How can I give my own sidebar widgets a light gray background color like the widgets on your blog?

Rick’s answer: [Read more…]

Have a WordPress blog? If so, you need to update your server to PHP 7 before January 1!

Posted on December 27, 2018

If you’re a blogger there’s a good chance that your blog is powered by WordPress.

If it is, I recommend that you check the version of PHP that’s currently active on your web server. If it’s running a version that’s lower than 7 you really need to update it to at least PHP 7.0 before the end of December.

If you’re unfamiliar with PHP, that’s the web programming language that the WordPress core files are written in. In other words, PHP is the engine that powers your WordPress blog.

As with virtually everything else that’s related to WordPress, older versions of PHP will eventually be retired and stop receiving security updates. And that’s about to happen with PHP on December 31, 2018.

[Read more…]