WordPress, Blogging & Tech Tutorials

Speed Up and Secure Your Site With CloudFlare

The speed at which your site loads is becomig increasingly important. Not only does a speedy site provide a good user experience, but it’s becoming increasingly important from an SEO perspective – site speed is a factor that Google considers in its rankings.

One of the easiest and most effective ways you can speed up your site, particularly if you are on an inexpensive shared web hosting plan is to use a service called Cloudflare. Cloudflare, which you can use for free, will speed up your site, help protect it from spammers AND help make it more secure. Here’s how it does that:

CloudFlare protects and accelerates any website online. Once your website is a part of the CloudFlare community, its web traffic is routed through our intelligent global network. We automatically optimize the delivery of your web pages so your visitors get the fastest page load times and best performance. We also block threats and limit abusive bots and crawlers from wasting your bandwidth and server resources. The result: CloudFlare-powered websites see a significant improvement in performance and a decrease in spam and other attacks.

How To Securely Remember Your Online Account Passwords

As soon as you own your own website you will quickly amass a large number of online accounts – your web hosting account, FTP access, WordPress access, Google, Twitter, Facebook etc etc. This leads to 2 main problems for bloggers. Firstly most people end up losing track of their information, forgetting passwords, always having to reset their info, and generally being disorganized and frustrated. This results in problem #2 which is security. For many people, keeping track of all these usernames and passwords is a real challenge and most resort to very insecure methods such as using “weak” passwords over and over again because it’s easy to remember.

We really can’t afford to be so cavalier with our account info. I always liken such pieces of info to the keys to your house or car. Most people guard those things pretty closely,but when it comes to online info, they take more risks. For consultants and developers like myself it’s extra important that we have ways to keep info securely because we are privy to the accounts of all our clients.

Whatever your situation, here are some free and cheap tools that will help you. You only need to pick one of them and I highly recommend you don’t put this off any longer!! For some background reading on the importance of secure passwords and more, check out this post from web security expert Tony Perez of Sucuri.

How To Embed A PDF In Your WordPress Site

A common question I’ve been getting as of late is about how to embed a PDF into a WordPress page/post so that it’s actually viewable inside the post. If you use the Upload/Insert button to add your .pdf in the same way that you would an image, you get only a text link to download the file which isn’t particularly exciting.

The best and easiest solution I’ve come across is a plugin called “Google Doc Embedder“. Don’t let the name fool you, you don’t have to upload your files to Google Docs – everything is done through your WordPress admin.

How To Automatically Post Your Blogs To Facebook and Twitter

A common question that clients ask me is about how to automatically update their Facebook page, Twitter account or other social profiles, when they publish a new blog post.

There are many ways to do this – here are a couple of my preferred methods. Although there are some WordPress plugins available for these types of tasks, generally speaking I don’t use them. Sometimes they are tricky to configure, or perhaps just not that reliable. Plus, why add unnnecessary plugins when you can acheive the same thing just as well, if not better, another way?

Tips For Designers Learning WordPress

If you are a graphic / web designer accustomed to coding websites in static HTML, as opposed to PHP or some other database-driven system, making the move to WordPress can seem difficult and frustrating at first. Having had several clients who fit this description, I have noticed some common issues that prove to be stumbling blocks. Here’s my suggestions for those attempting to make the switch.

1) Beginner’s Mind Is Crucial
Forget almost everything you know. I know, it sounds terrible, but here’s what I mean – if you approach WordPress with the same mentality as you would approach building an HTML site, you will get frustrated very quickly. So act as if you know nothing and start from scratch. Once you gain an understanding of WordPress you can then apply the HTML knowledge you know. But doing it the other way round is like trying to fit a square peg into a round hole. Building a database driven website is a totally different conceptual approach than building a static HTML site, so don’t let your current habits and knowledge get in the way.

Orange County WordCamp 2012 – All The Knowledge

As has become habitual, I am collecting all the links to slides and talks from this weekend’s Orange County WordCamp. It was of course, another awesome day of learning, community and WordPress nerdiness. There were many great talks so keep your eye on WordPress.tv for the videos to go up.