UPDATE: Donna Fontenot is the lucky winner of a Developer account at Elegant Themes!
Looking for a fancy new theme for your WordPress site? Today might be your lucky day. Elegant Themes has been kind enough to let me give away some developer memberships. I have 3 to give away in total and I plan on doing multiple contests. This is part one in which I will give away 1 of the 3 memberships. So if you don’t win this one, you’ll have more chances in the future. Read on for the details.
Seems like podcasts, especially of the video variety, are having revival at the moment. Here’s a few WordPress-related ones worth checking out. They are all feature some very smart developers and other members of the WordPress community so it’s a great way to learn about best practices and generally what the latest trends are within the community.
This weekly WordPress-centric Google Hangout is the brainchild of my friend and WP multimedia expert Jason Tucker. Every Monday at 11am PST, up to 10 WordPress developers, designers and consultants gather on Google Hangout to discuss a WordPress topic. Sometimes they even stay on topic ;) Hilarity and wisdom ensue.The hangout is streamed to YouTube so you can watch live or catch the archived episodes on WPWatercooler.com. If you prefer audio you can subscribe to the audio-only version via iTunes and Stitcher.
While on the Facebook recently I was targeted with an ad that told me that if a certain 9 year old child can make WordPress websites, I should be able to as well.
It’s not the first time I’ve seen such marketing messages that tout WordPress to be so easy that a kid can do it. Even putting aside (which trust me, was reeeaaally hard for me to do!) the fact that the product seems to have been made by some cheeseball internet-marketing-bandwagon-jumper-type and that it’s all possibly fake anyway, this approach to selling WordPress irritates the bejesus out of me for a couple of reasons.
First, when you tell me I should be able to do something a kid can do, it makes me feel kind of dumb and it also makes me feel like you are being condescending to me.
Way to set the tone. (And I’m someone that does know how to make websites. So imagine how that feels to someone that has found it difficult to learn WordPress!)
Of course, I get the point they are making – WordPress isn’t rocket science so get over yourself and build that site you’ve been talking about. Fair enough. And yes, a child could quite feasibly set up and manage a blog.
Want to highlight your social media profiles in any widget area of your WordPress site? Here are the best-looking and easiest to use, social media widgets for WordPress.
If you’ve been on the internet in the past week or so, you’ve probably heard about the spate of “brute force” attacks that have been made on WordPress sites, specifically targeting accounts with the username “admin.” It has always been a security best practice to not use this username, or any other similarly generic one but the recent attacks have highlighted the issue to the masses, which is really the silver lining here.
The reason “admin” is the target is because it is the default username that is assigned upon installation of WordPress. If you install WordPress through your hosting control panel, you are usually, but not always, given a chance to change that before installation, but many unsuspecting folks, especially new users, may not see a reason to change it. So now a hacker has 50% of the information that he needs to get into your site. Since most people use extremely weak i.e. simple, passwords, hackers can automate the submission of zillions of attempts at guessing your password. If your password isn’t strong, they have a good chance of gaining access.
I recently had to find a mobile solution for a client. Their theme had been custom made a while ago and was not responsive so the easiest route (and the one that fit their budget) was to use one of the many available mobile plugins for WordPress.
If one of your goals is to make the mobile version of your site perform better on PageSpeed Insights and other speed tests, check out this guide to making your mobile WordPress pages faster.
What’s the Difference Between A Responsive Theme and A Mobile Plugin?
A responsive theme adapts to the size of the screen it is being viewed on, so it retains a consistent overall look and feel. The mobile plugins work in various ways – some of them do let you use a responsive theme of your choosing, but oftentimes they install their own mobile theme which could look significantly different than your standard theme, but it may have some handy mobile-specific features. A mobile plugin will detect the actual device being used (rather than just the width of the screen) and show a different display based on that. It’s a quick and easy way to get a mobile solution for your site. Retrofitting an existing theme to make it responsive requires custom coding, so for many people, a plugin is the easier way to go.
Criteria for Comparing Mobile Plugins
As I played around with various plugins, several key distinguishing factors emerged. So before you start looking at plugins you may want to think about these factors and how important they are for your circumstance so you can make an informed decision:
