Tips and tricks by Brian Shim for web developers, bloggers, and WordPress users
Moving a domain name from one registrar to another can be tricky, especially if it’s something you don’t do often. If the domain is attached to a live site, doing it wrong could result in downtime. I wrote this guide for myself, to remind me of some of the gotchas associated with migrating a domain … Read more
When you post a web page in a Facebook feed, Facebook will attempt to find the thumbnail image from your site’s metadata. If found, Facebook will cache that image so that it doesn’t have to re-load the image from your site every time it shows up on a Facebook feed. This works great until you … Read more
The Ultimate Member plugin is a formidable package for managing membership on a WordPress site. Surprisingly, however, it does not have a built-in way to import members through CSV file or other method. But, you can still do it using the method I describe here. Install the “Import Users from CSV” Plugin The first step … Read more
Elegant Themes already has a blog post entitled “How to Add More Columns to Your Divi Builder Posts or Pages” which shows how to add more columns to your Divi theme. Currently, the builder maxes out at 6 columns. The blog article’s method works fine if your modules are all equal height as shown in … Read more
Stock photography can be expensive. And randomly grabbing licensed images from the Internet can cost you thousands of dollars if you’re found violating copyright and threatened with legal action (this happened to someone I talked to at a Meetup). Filtered Google Search You can find free legal images through a filtered Google search, but I … Read more
I had a very common problem for which I could not find a good CSS solution. Namely, I wanted my website footer to extend to the bottom of the browser window, regardless of how much (or little) main body content I had. What I wanted was this: What I was getting was this: There are … Read more
On one of my sites, my Divi contact form worked great on desktop but someone told me it didn’t work on mobile. Sure enough, they were right! On my iPhone, I got this message after submitting the form: “Please refresh the page and try again.” In French, the error is “Veuillez actualiser la page et … Read more
WordPress is a great website platform that I use and develop on every day, but, it has its weaknesses. It requires a database that is accessed dozens (or hundreds?) of times every time a page is loaded, which can slow down page load times. It’s kind of a wasteful use of server resources if your … Read more
In mid 2016, Microsoft announced that they were no longer going to support Windows Live Mail. This was bad news for me, because I had been a long-time user of Windows Live Mail, dating back to when it was called Outlook Express. I used it not only for email, but for my calendar and contacts. … Read more
Many people who use the WordPress Divi Accordion Module want it to start out closed by default. Every WordPress client I have who uses the Divi Accordion has asked for it, and there are many people online asking about it. The way it works now is that the first element of the accordion defaults to open, … Read more
Querying a WordPress database is pretty straightforward using WP_Query or get_posts(). However, I ran into a problem when I was trying to search for all Posts with a certain custom field value that was stored as an array. The Problem I was using the popular Advanced Custom Fields plugin. The field type I was using … Read more
If you look up how to increase your PHP max file size, most sources will tell you to change the upload_max_filesize setting in your php.ini file. Well, I did that and it still wasn’t working for me on my client’s shared GoDaddy Linux hosting. So, I called them up and found the un-publicized “secret” way to … Read more
Let’s say you have a page or piece of code that needs to be run regularly, say once a day, or once an hour. It might update a database, import something into WordPress, clear out log files, make a backup, or whatever. If you have access to the server, you can set up what Linux … Read more
Ultimate Member is a very widely-used membership WordPress plugin. It works well, but I’ve come across a number of problems with the uploading of member cover photos on multisite WordPress sites. These were so maddening, I decided to write about them and provide solutions to you! So, here are some things to check if cover … Read more
When I first started monetizing my websites using Google Adsense I was surprised that there wasn’t an obvious way to see which pages were generating my income. This seemed like a critical piece of information for any blogger or site owner! Of course, there is a way to get this information, but it not given … Read more
Let’s say you have two completely different primary domains, say, example.com, and purchase.com, and you want to track them as a single property on Google Analytics. For example, if a user goes from one site to the other, you want that visitor to show up on the same Google Analytics report and not count as … Read more
I had a situation where I needed to create a WordPress Multisite network of sites with each site having completely unique domain names. I found everything I needed by Googling around and I got it to work, but I wanted to document it for later use because there are some “gotchas”. Here’s the procedure. Note, my … Read more
I had a client who wanted to map a domain name (different than the site’s root) directly to a WordPress Page, and not show the WordPress URL. For example, let’s say you had a WordPress blog with this Page:http://myblog.com/my-first-post/ But let’s say you want the URL of that post to be http://airplanesarecool.com. Of course, you could … Read more
Comments are a really important part of any blog. They give you important feedback about your work, and give you invaluable information about what people are looking for. I’ve gotten ideas from some of my most popular blog articles from the comments. So, it’s important to encourage comments on your blog whenever possible! Here are … Read more
A while ago, I had to do a survey of the most popular commenting services out there so I could use it on my highest-volume blog. My “must-haves” as far as commenting systems are concerned were: For me, some “nice to haves” were: Only ONE commenting platform met all of my requirements! Here’s a rundown … Read more
Have you ever gotten this Linux “out of memory” error when working with your WordPress site? If you Google around to solve this problem, almost all of the advice you’ll get is to increase your PHP and WordPress memory limits, or add memory to your server, or to remove plugins. I didn’t want to just … Read more
I recently had a project where I wanted to stop the “Go” button on the Android and iOS popup keyboard from submitting a form on my web application. Why would anyone want to do this? In my case, I wanted to prevent accidental form submission (or “butt-dialing”) on my app. I had implemented a “swipe-to-save” … Read more
When I transitioned from being a career corporate cubicle-dweller to being a freelancer working from home, I wasn’t sure if I could pull it off. Would I be on Facebook and YouTube all day? Could I really get any work done? Well, after doing it for some time now, I can say that I love … Read more
I finally decided that it was time to move from my primitive accounting “system” based on Word and Excel to a modern cloud-based solution for my freelance business. I wanted invoicing, time tracking, and expense tracking. After doing some research online, I narrowed my choices to two popular solutions: FreshBooks and Harvest. I signed up … Read more
A client requested a “slot machine” hover effect for their social network buttons. When you hover on the icon, it moves up, sort of like in a slot machine, and changes color. Here’s an example of what I’m talking about: It turns out that this effect can be accomplished with some clever CSS! No JavaScript … Read more
My “go-to” desktop browser for doing web development is the Chrome browser. However, it has one annoying problem for people like me who do responsive web development: It won’t resize down to 320 pixels wide, the width of an iPhone. With my Chrome browser on Windows, the minimum width is 500px. On Mac, the minimum … Read more
This is a list of items to check before and after launching your site. It’s not necessarily an exhaustive list for every type of website, but it is a good starting point for most sites. Getting Your Site Known 1. SEO 2. Social Media Appearance With the importance of social media, you should check to … Read more
Here’s how to host multiple sites on your EC2 instance running the Amazon Linux AMI. Remember to make a backup of your instance before proceeding. Assign a Static IP Address The first thing you should do, if you haven’t already, is assign a static IP address to your EC2 instance. You can do this in the Amazon … Read more
I developed a website for a client that would display different photos based on a query string in the URL. An example of this type of URL would be “http://mysite.com/album.php?photo=ab12345”. But, that is an ugly URL. Not only that, some people claim it’s not ideal for SEO. Much better would be “http://mysite.com/ab12345”. Here’s how to … Read more
This article describes how to style the audio player in the WordPress Classic Editor (it uses MediaElement.js). Note, if you upgrade to Gutenberg, these styles will no longer work! The Gutenberg player uses the HTML audio element. If you want to style the Gutenburg player, check out this article. The Basic Shortcode You can invoke … Read more
Blogging can be a very personal experience. You’re baring your soul before the world. You are vulnerable. One of the worst things is to put yourself out there and receive critical or even mean or hateful comments. I’ve been blogging for some years and overwhelmingly, the response has been positive. But, one bad or mean … Read more
Here is the scenario: You’ve searched high and low and found the perfect WordPress theme for yourself or your client. But, there’s one big problem: it’s not mobile-friendly. With mobile web traffic soon expected to exceed desktop web traffic, being mobile-friendly is critical. I often have to go through the exercise of converting a non … Read more
We all want to protect the content that we create for our blogs and websites, right? Wouldn’t it be terrible if someone copied your site’s content and you later found out that your copyright notice was wrong and offered you no legal protection? Well, I thought I was diligent by slapping the standard copyright statement … Read more
Much has been written about the differences between Facebook Pages and Groups. When I needed to decide which to use for a project, I looked online and found lots of sites listing the features of each, yet I felt they missed the essence of which to use in actual practice. Furthermore, much of the info … Read more
The conventional wisdom is that you have no visibility on what goes on inside an iframe on your site. That is mostly true but it turns out that you can detect when a form is submitted inside an iframe. My Goal I was given the task to fix a website bug of the following nature: … Read more
One of my blogs reached a level of popularity and income where I started thinking about trademarking the name of the site. I figured that would protect it from someone trying to steal my URL by changing “.com” to “.info” or whatever. I hate legal stuff but I went ahead and did a bunch of … Read more
The little icon that shows up in each web page’s browser tab is called a “favicon”. Adding this tiny detail really gives your website a professional appearance in the browser. Here’s how to do it. If You’re Using WordPress… WordPress provides a way to specify the favicon. Log into your site and go to Appearance … Read more
Often times you’ll have an image, perhaps a logo, that you want to use on a website, and you’ll want that image to have a transparent background. Here’s how to make an image have a transparent background using a free drawing program called Paint.net (note this solution works on Windows only). 1. Download and Install … Read more