Blog Category: Tutorials

For another improvement to your website’s SEO performance, try redirecting your home page (index.php, etc) to your domain. So far this has only been tested with DreamHost.com

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You know when you type an FTP password into Dreamweaver, it turns it into little stars? Well what if for some reason, you need to know what that password is?

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I recently did some clean-up work on my robots.txt file, to stop Google from indexing all of the /feed/ and /trackback/ URL’s that are generated for each post. But I had trouble with two blog articles that started with the word “Feedburner”. I tried many variations for the robots.txt file, but the Google Webmaster kept saying those two were blocked. So I decided to change the URL’s of those two blog articles instead.

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This morning I woke up and checked my email via my iPhone. I noticed an email from my website traffic tracking company Web-Stat that my website was unavailable (meaning it was down). Normally when I get these messages, there is another one from Web-Stat saying the website was up again. Usually they are spread apart by 15 minutes or so. But this time, the original “your website is down message was an hour earlier, with no accompanying “your website is back up”. Something was wrong.

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Here’s what has worked for me:

RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^coolexample.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.coolexample.com/$1 [r=301,nc]

Create .htaccess (text) file and put at root directory level.

Now if someone leaves out the “www”, it will be put in, which is good for search engines. They don’t like to find the non-www and the www version, they want one or the other.

My clients often ask me if and when they should upgrade their ECT or ECommerce Templates online stores. The ECT folks work quite hard to fix bugs and implement improvements and on average, will come out with a new version every month or two. So what’s a store owner to do?

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I often have my small business website clients request images to be used in online advertising. Generally they place these ads on a website and are charged a monthly fee. When visitors click on the image, they are taken to my clients’ websites via a link.  But how do my clients really know what kind of return on their advertising investment they are getting? My favorite website traffic tool is Web-Stat. This tutorial assumes you are using Web-Stat, but it should give you enough general information to help you regardless of the tool you’re using.

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I have many clients who seem to get stuck at this point in the DreamHost set-up process, and it’s because, well, while I love DreamHost, they don’t make this easy or intuitive. So here’s my attempt at making it clear. This assumes you already have an account with DreamHost, and have registered a domain, but need to set up  hosting.

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Today one of my WordPress clients couldn’t modify any of her posts. She was using a computer with IE 9. I was on my computer using Firefox, and could modify her posts with no problem. A quick search on Google yielded others with the identical issue. For this client, all I could recommend was to switch Firefox, which she did and verified problem solved. You can view the identical issue reported here on the WordPress.com forum.

I had a client today upgrade her WordPress blog to 3.1.1 and when she clicked on any categories or posts, she got a 404 page not found error. Took a while of searching on the web but solution was found. Solution required regeneration of brand new .htaccess file and deletion of one plugin. Details are below.

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