Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
If you engage in web design, graphic design, photography or any other endeavor requiring the use of colors, you probably need to determine the numeric value of various colors on a regular basis.
I used to use good ole trial and error in order to match the hex value of colors displayed on the screen as closely as possible, but I have long since found a fast and simple way to determine the exact numeric value of any color with just a few clicks of my mouse. [Read more…]
Question from Seth P.: I have a WordPress blog that has several missing posts that I’ve deleted because they contained outdated information that was either incorrect or no longer relevant.
My blog now has lots of requests going to the 404 error page because those posts no longer exist.
I’d like to redirect all of those requests to my blog’s home page instead of displaying the 404 error page. How can I do that?
Ricks’s Answer: [Read more…]
Many aspiring bloggers opt to set up their first blog using a hosted blogging platform like WordPress.com or Blogger due to their utter simplicity.
In my opinion, there is absolutely nothing wrong with that since that approach allows them to get their blogs up and running in as little as 3 minutes!
But what often happens for many recreational bloggers is they eventually realize that blogging can be more than a simple pastime. The problem is their hosted blogging platform of choice offers very little flexibility in the ways they can manage their blog and earn money from it.
If you happen to be one of those bloggers who dreams of taking your blog to the next level, the solution is obvious: Move your blog onto your own self-hosted WordPress blog! [Read more…]
If you use the popular goo.gl URL shortener service from Google you’ll need to start using Bit.ly, Ow.ly or some other service to shorten (and optionally track) your URLs.
Google has just announced in a blog post that they’re planning to stop supporting the goo.gl service and transition existing users to their Firebase Dynamic Links service, starting this month.
As explained in their blog post, Google will be executing the transition in phases depending on the whether a user is new to goo.gl or already an existing user. [Read more…]
Is your blog encrypted with an SSL/TLS certificate? If it isn’t, it really needs to be, and quick!
But that’s a story for another day. This post is a warning about the security certificate that you could be using on your blog right now.
Google has announced that their Chrome browser will soon stop trusting certificates issued by Symantec and several Symantec-owned companies (Thawte, VeriSign, Equifax, GeoTrust, and RapidSSL).
In a nutshell, if your blog is secured by certificates that were issued by one of these companies your blog won’t be displayed in the upcoming versions of the Chrome browser.
What’s more, the other major browsers are expected to quickly follow Chrome’s lead.
Instead of seeing your blog, your visitors will see this warning in Chrome (or something similar if they’re using a different browser): [Read more…]