WordPress

Jetpack kills Contact Form 7 — Like Because Why Not?

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JetPack installs it’s own comment form and kills your nice contact forms that you spent lots of time getting just right… <sarcasm>thanks.</sarcasm> WordPress gets me again! See this: https://contactform7.com/jetpack-overrides-contact-forms/ This is very frustrating since one of the happiest features on my site is that my contact Eric Shefferman form has a drop down selection for Don’t bother … Read more

Why I hate WordPress – Part 9,347

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Seriously, https://wordpress.org/news/2011/06/passwords-reset/ And to crap on top of it, I actually do have W3 Total Cache installed and did update it just the other day. However, it only updated “because it’s there” — I don’t actually use it. I just never happened to delete it after I deactivated it. I guess I was hoping I’d … Read more

How To Include Amazon Text and Image (Enhanced Display) Affiliate Links In WordPress – Part 2

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Feh. As per my previous post on inserting iframe tags in the TinyMCE editor in WordPress for amazon affiliate links and youtube videos, this is something a user needs to be able to do without having the editor delete them as soon as you switch into WYSIWYG mode. This plugin — Amazon Widgets Shortcodes — … Read more

How To Include Amazon Text and Image (Enhanced Display) Affiliate Links In WordPress

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Another WordPress thingy to drive me crazy! I try to put an amazon affiliate link in a post and it seems to work, but then as soon as I switch back the the Visual editor the link disappears!

As with many WordPress things:

  1. There’s probably a reason beyond my comprehension why this “bug” is actually a feature
  2. There’s all sorts of solutions posted by people with such high levels of technical expertise that I can’t understand how to implement their “obvious” solution
  3. The fix is actually simple (I think)

NOTE: Watch the video below to understand the danger of the word “simple” — then read the rest of the post for what I did to make it work.

FYI – I’m a huge fan of Jeri Ellsworth!

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Check Your WordPress Website’s Speed and Make It Faster

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Google thinks the web should be fast, and that’s kinda the final word. Here’s some (older but still useful) info on site speed as a ranking factor.

I recently found a useful website for testing your website’s speed – it checks the website by accessing it from multiple locations (in multiple countries) and thus gives a better test than just checking the speed in your own browser.

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Nifty On-Screen Ruler For Web Design

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I was looking for some tool to measure distances in pixels on screen so that I’d know the width of various columns in the themes of some of my WordPress sites (so that I could size advertising to the proper dimensions). A quick search came up with PicPick as the best. It seems pretty powerful – you can measure horizontal or vertical distances as well as do screen captures and color picking. It seems to play nice and just sit as a little toolbar icon when not being used.

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WordPress – Be Ready To Be Hacked Again

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Ahh… the dreaded

3.0.4 Important Security Update

…a very important update to apply to your sites as soon as possible because it fixes a core security bug in our HTML sanitation library, called KSES. I would rate this release as “critical.”

Yeah. What that says to me is, “A hacker has already looked at the vulnerabilities in 3.0.3 and written a script to exploit it and deployed it on the websites he/she has already hacked so that it can go out and get access to even more web servers by simply crawling the web looking for WordPress installations that haven’t been updated yet.”

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