My List of the Most Useful WordPress Plugins

WordPress plugins

These are life-saving WordPress plugins that I use on many of my clients’ and my own sites.  OK, maybe “life-saving” is a slight exaggeration, but these can definitely cure some of your worst WordPress headaches. I have tested each of these (except where noted) and vouch for their quality. I hope you find them as … Read more

Why I Switched from Evernote to OneNote

Photo of man typing on computer by Glenn Carsten-Peters on Unsplash

Evernote and OneNote are the two most popular cross-platform note-taking apps. In this article, I’ll compare features and tell why I switched from Evernote to OneNote. My Evernote Story I was a happy user of Evernote for many years and didn’t mind paying for it. I used it for keeping track of client info, keeping … Read more

How to Fix a Corrupted Database in eM Client

eM Client checking for corrupted database

Occasionally, the database of my eM Client Windows email app will get corrupted, usually after the power goes out unexpectedly. It’s easy to panic in this situation because it won’t let you view your email until the problem is fixed. But, it’s often not disastrous since you usually have a copy of your email in … Read more

How to Track Outbound Link Clicks in Google Analytics 4 (GA4)

Report showing outbound link clicks in GA4

Google Analytics 4 has the ability to natively track outbound link clicks without the use of JavaScript or Google Tag Manager. Unfortunately, it makes you jump through some hoops to see the data. In the article, I’ll explain how to set up a Google Analytics 4 Exploration to track outbound link clicks on your website. … Read more

How to Vastly Improve the Accessibility of the Divi Slider Module

Divi slider with white background for dot navigation

Out of the box, the Divi Slider Module has many gross accessibility violations. The keyboard control is poor because you can’t see what you’re selecting as you’re tabbing through the navigation controls. And, the dot and arrow navigation symbol contrast can be bad. For an example of an accessible slider, check out W3C’s demo. In … Read more

How to “Fix 500 Internal Server Error” When Trying to Log Into Your WordPress Site on Siteground

500 Internal Server Error on Siteground

Siteground is my “go to” hosting provider. Their servers are reliable and fast, by shared hosting standards. But, I have one site on Siteground that gives a “500 Internal Server Error” every few months when I try to log into the admin of a client’s WordPress site. Or, sometimes I can log in and it … Read more

How to Restart PHP on GoDaddy Shared Hosting

GoDaddy cPanel showing where to change PHP version

There may be some instances where you want to restart PHP on your GoDaddy shared server. For example, you might want to do this if your server is misbehaving, i.e., serving HTML files but not PHP. I had a case where the site was showing the error “Your PHP installation appears to be missing the … Read more

15 Important Things to Do During Your Freelance Business Downtime

Home office desktop

Being a freelancer can mean periods of feast or famine. But your business’ downtime is actually a golden opportunity to catch up on important things you might have neglected while you were working those twelve-hour days. Here are some important things to do when you have downtime in your freelance business. 1. Check Your Health … Read more

How to Defeat Ad Blockers by Substituting Affiliate Links

F35 Fighter Jet

While everyone hates sites bristling with ads and popups, ad blockers are causing legitimate web content creators to suffer more and more lost income each day. Many of the traditional tactics to defeat adblockers, including putting up a paywall, hiding the site content until blockers are turned off, or just begging people to turn off … Read more

How to Use PHP to Interface with Zoho Analytics API / OAuth 2.0

A PHP web app that I created using the Zoho Analytics (formerly Zoho Reports) API suddenly stopped working one day. Digging into the Zoho documentation, I discovered that they ended support for their “authtoken” authentication method (basically a password) and switched to OAuth 2.0. Hmmm… After looking into it, upgrading my app to be compatible … Read more

Globally Disable Commenting in WordPress Without a Plugin

Microphone

Surprisingly, I wasn’t able to find a native solution online to globally disable commenting on a WordPress website. WordPress doesn’t have a checkbox called “Globally Disable All Comments”. But, a quick and easy solution does exist which does not require a plugin! To be clear, I’m talking about still showing the existing comments, but not … Read more

How to Set Up WordPress Multisite on Your Local Machine with MAMP

Note: since writing this article, I have switched to LocalWP, which is superior to MAMP in practically every way except that it doesn’t easily support Multisite with different domain names pointing to the same Multisite install. I’ve kept the article below for those still using MAMP, but rather than messing with these settings, I’d recommend that you check out … Read more

How to Give a WordPress Popup Maker Popup its Own URL for Sharing

Web development clients seem to love popups. They’re always asking me to add popups to websites. My “go to” solution for WordPress popups is the popular Popup Maker plugin. But, as explained in this article, WordPress Popup Maker has had its “popup” custom post type set to “private” since version 1.7. While there are cases … Read more

Why You Probably Shouldn’t Use WordPress Multisite

WordPress Multisite lets you create multiple WordPress websites that all use the same set of themes and plugins. It might appear to be a great way to make maintaining multiple sites more efficient, as you can update the WordPress core, themes, and plugins once, and they are updated for all sites. But in practice, the … Read more

The Best Spelling and Grammar Checker for WordPress

photo by Stanley Dai on Unsplash.

As a frequent blogger, I depend on spelling and grammar checking, especially because I’m not a very good proofreader of my own content. So, I was surprised and dumbfounded when I found out that Automattic’s own Jetpack spell checker did NOT work with their new Gutenberg block editor! After looking online, I saw that one … Read more

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