Hello again! I hope you had a great week!
Regular readers of my Rick’s Daily Tips tech blog and all of my other blogs run on the WordPress platform. I LOVE WordPress because of its unique combination of power and simplicity.
I’ve been using WordPress for several years now, and during that time I’ve picked up quite a few tips for creating, securing and maintaining a great WordPress blog.
Today I’d like to share a few of my favorite WordPress tips with you:
1 – Thanks to awesome deals from Godaddy and Hostgator, you can create a brand new WordPress blog for only $1 up-front! This post explains how, step-by-step.
2 – Once you have purchased your domain name and your first month of Hostgator web hosting for just a buck, you can sign into your Hostgator account and literally create a new WordPress blog in 5 minutes or less. Read this post for step-by-step instructions.
3 – Once your new WordPress blog is up and running you can either use the default WordPress theme as-is, modify the default theme to your liking or replace the default theme with another free WordPress theme from the official WordPress Theme Repository.
Better still, you can replace the default theme with a fantastic theme framework such as Genesis or Thesis. (Disclaimer: I use the Genesis Framework to power all of my WordPress blogs, and I love it!)
4 – Once you start using using the WordPress editor to write your blog posts you’ll quickly find out that pressing the “Enter” key always creates a new paragraph instead of moving the cursor to the next line (i.e. insert a line break).
While it isn’t at all intuitive, you can easily insert a line break anywhere in your WordPress post simply by holding the “Shift” key while pressing “Enter”.
5 – In all likelihood you’ll continue enhancing your blog over time by installing WordPress plugins to add new features and capabilities.
It’s also likely that you’ll eventually install a plugin that breaks your blog (causes it to stop working and/or displaying properly). Should that happen to you, don’t panic. Simply follow the instructions in this post to get your blog back up and running in a hurry.
6 – We live in a strange world these days, and unfortunately hackers love attacking WordPress blogs. This post lists 8 things you can do to prevent your own blog from getting hacked.
7 – If you only do one thing to protect your blog from hackers, it should be enabling Two-Factor Authentication on the Admin section of the blog. Click here for step-by-step instructions for enabling it.
8 – And finally, it’s extremely important that you create and keep regular backups of your entire blog installation in case something catastrophic ever happens to take down your blog.
There are a number of outstanding options for backing WordPress up, but the best option by far (in my humble opinion) is a very inexpensive subscription to VaultPress.
I use VaultPress to protect all of my WordPress blogs, and I strongly recommend that you do the same.
For as little as $5 per month, VaultPress will automatically make regular offsite backups of your entire WordPress installation. What’s more, if something does happen to your blog, you’ll be able to quickly restore it from the backup set of your choice with the click of your mouse!
Well, that’s it for this week. If you have a tech question that you would like for me to answer, click here and send it in!
Special note: As a subscriber to the RicksDailyTips Tech Newsletter you’re automatically entered to win one of my monthly Tech Gear Giveaways. Monthly winners are announced in the first newsletter of the following month.
Congrats to Jamie C. of Oxnard, California for winning the awesome TP-LINK Archer C7 AC1750 Dual Band Wireless AC Gigabit Router in July’s Tech Gear Giveaway!
August’s winner will receive a handy Apricorn EZ-Upgrade SATA Notebook Hard Drive Upgrade Kit.
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I hope you found this edition of the newsletter useful and interesting. If so, I hope you’ll consider passing it on to any of your friends and associates who might enjoy reading it as well.
Thanks a bunch,
Rick Rouse
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