This post is part two of a series on setting up an Amazon Web Service Instance for a WordPress site. Part 1 covers the initial setup, security, and terminology of Amazon's AWS. Edited: Oct 12, 2016 to include newest versions of software. If you've read the link above, you should have a newly created Amazon AWS account (running on Free Tier settings!) with an…
For a while now, I've been diving more and more into the realm of the "server administrator" and setting up servers for clients. I started with Ramnode, but eventually moved to Digital Ocean because of its ease-of-use for a (then) newbie like myself. Over the past few days, however, I've been migrating a client away from a big-box WordPress host over to something they…
Quick: how do you add a custom function into a theme. If you said 'add it to your functions.php file', then you would be correct. But is that really the best way to go about things? The Problem Let's say you've customized your site with some pretty fancy functions you've added in through the hooks and actions in WordPress. You're in the process of…
Since I've switched to my new design, I've also done quite a bit of cleanup work on the content side of things. I pruned a lot of old articles that weren't bringing in search traffic (and weren't related to the site anymore), cleaned up a lot of the categories, and set my permalink structure to something that was a little easier to digest. The…
We are right in the middle of the "second wave" of podcasting. If you're a younger person (low to mid 20s) you may not realize just how popular podcasting was back in the 00's. It's back, and bigger than ever, and most brands would benefit from having some sort of podcasting element on their site or blog. And the easiest way to do that is…
There's nothing scarier than trying to log into your WordPress site and realizing you are unable to do so. Honestly, it happens for one of a few reasons: we forget our password, we've given our account to someone else and they've forgotten the password, or an unsavory individual has gotten access to your account and has now locked you out. Any of these examples are…
Did you know WordPress had a special field for category descriptions? Most people have seen it while working on category lists in their WordPress blog, but chances are you may have skimmed over it or paid it no attention. You see, most themes are ill-equipped to take advantage of it - that means that, for most, it sits unused. But there's an untapped potential…
This is our final post of a 6-part series on diving "under the hood" with WordPress. Today, we're covering jQuery and JavaScript - a power language that can manipulate elements and - in some cases - even bring content in, even after the site has loaded. Intro HTML CSS - Introduction CSS - Examples PHP / MySQL jQuery We're in the home stretch with our WordPress…
This is Part 5 of a 6-part series on diving "under the hood" with WordPress. Today, we're covering PHP - the "PHP Hypertext Preprocessor" that runs, computes, analyzes, and stores your WordPress data. Intro HTML CSS - Introduction CSS - Examples PHP / MySQL jQuery Well, if you've made it this far, give yourself a silver star - you can now read and interpret the displayed…
This is Part 4 of a 6-part series on diving "under the hood" with WordPress. Today, we're covering the last part of CSS (Cascading Stylesheets). We'll go over some specific examples that you'll see often as you look through a WordPress theme. Intro HTML CSS - Introduction CSS - Examples PHP jQuery So, after yesterday's CSS lesson is your head spinning yet? The positioning piece…