Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.php\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^index\.php$ http://www.yourwebsite.com/ [R=301,L]

The answer for the credit goes to this article from Daft Logic: Decode / Recover Dreamweaver Password.

On this website, you export the website (from Dreamweaver) and it will come out as an .ste file. This is a text file you can open and read. The password is preceeded by something obvious like “pw”. But it’s encrypted. That’s why Daft Logic’s site is great, it will decode it for you.

Thank you to Daft Logic!

How to change the URL of a WordPress Post

1. Note the original URL of the post somewhere

2. Go into the post and click “edit” next to the Permalink

3. Change the Permalink

4. Click “Update” blue button

5. View the post and verify the new URL/Permalink is working

Next you need to tell humans and search engines that the URL/Permalink has changed. This can be done in two ways. You can download a redirect plugin or you can modify your .htaccess file.

Note that whichever method you use, the format usually takes this syntax:

/blog/article-name-old/ http://yourdomainname.com/blog/article-name-new/

The first is the old article, and it is written without the http://yourdomainname.com while the new article URL is written with that included. This rule holds for both creating the redirect inside a .htaccess file and WordPress plugins. Note with .htaccess there is a single space between them and it starts with redirect301.

And yes, my robot.txt did prevent feed/ however it still blocked /feedburner for some reason. So rather than fighting, I renamed the articles.

I went to check my website, and sure enough it was down. So I immediately went into my website hosting company’s control panel and submitted a support ticket saying my website was down.

It’s wonderful that Web-Stat has this built-in site monitoring feature. I began to wonder though, what if Web-Stat had the ability to send me a text message when the website went down – that way, I could have been notified immediately, versus when I happened to check my email.

The answer is yes. Web-Stat has a text notification service. It costs $0.50 (fifty cents) per message sent out, and you buy credits in advance. If you have a Web-Stat account, login and go into the control panel area. Then click on “Watch Dog Settings”. You will see the email alert fields (which are available at no additional costs) but you will also see a section below called Cell Phone Credits!

So now, whenever my website is down, I will get a text message and immediately be able to contact my hosting company that my site is down and to hurry up and fix it. I love Web-Stat!

If you want to be notified that your website is down via email or text – in addition to getting really excellent website traffic tracking services – my recommendation is Web-Stat. Just click on the name and you can get a free 30 day trial.

Keep tracking those websites! A $0.50 text could be the difference between getting a new client and missing that client because your website was down.

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.

First, log into your ECT store and see what the version is, and notice if there is any warning that a newer version has a security improvement. If that warning is there, I’d suggest upgrading.

If the warning isn’t there, but a newer version is available, you can use this link to compare what’s changed since the ECT store you have now, and what’s currently available: List of ECT Upgrades.

But I’d recommend folks upgrade at least once a year. Upgrades are generally easy to do, taking less than an hour.

You can request upgrades here at this ECT Updaters Request Page.

And if you need to purchase, you can do that here.

1. Find a website traffic tracking tool that is able to capture “labels” that you are going to add to the destination URL of your online ad. As I’ve mentioned, I use Web-Stat. They have a free 30 day trial. You install a small paragraph of code onto every page of your website. Visit your own website and watch the Live Streaming Traffic view to see yourself. Now that you have the traffic tracking tool set up, you’re ready for the next step.

2. Find out how to “label” the destination URL – the correct syntax is extremely important. For Web-Stat, it’s adding ?source=whateveryouwanttowrite at the end of the URL that people will be taken to when they click on the ad.

3. When you submit the ad, be sure to give the ad company the full destination URL with the “label”. Let’s use this example:    http://AldebaranWebDesign.com?source=HelloThereAd

4. Once your ad is running, click on it to test it out. You should be directed to whatever URL you submitted. Then check inside your Web-Stat account, and you should see the visit with the “Referrer” displayed as whatever you put after ?source=   Here’s a screenshot of my own test to show you what this should look like inside Web-Stat. Two visitors are showing. One came from Google, the other came from clicking on the link of my “ad”:

http://AldebaranWebDesign.com?source=HelloThereAd

5. After a period of time, say a month, you can now look at all this traffic as a distinct group under “Referrers”. This allows you to compare the results of various advertisements. (Again, this is a screenshot from my own Web-Stat account as a demo – the HelloThereAd is way down at the bottom because I only clicked once). Note that the bounce rate is calculated for different referrers. The bounce rate is the percentage of visitors who leave after only visiting one page, meaning they came into your website and bounced right back off it, not finding what they were looking for. For an ad that you’re paying for, your bounce rate should be relatively low compared with random Google searches. If your paying for an ad that has a high bounce rate (over 50%) something might be wrong with the ad itself.

1. Login to your DreamHost Control Panel – you should know the email address you signed up with and the password you picked. DreamHost usually sends this info to you in an email if you’ve forgotten it.

2. On the left hand side, click on Domains and Manage Domains. It looks like this:

3. Next to the domain that you’ve registered, if it doesn’t have a hosting account, you will see this green “Add Hosting” button:

4. On the next page, select Upgrade to Full Hosting by clicking on the “upgrading to our Happy Hosting billing plan”. Yes, I know it’s a dumb name and confuses all of my clients, but it’s the right thing to click on. The image is shown below:

5. Next, look down on the page and under Hosting Plans, click Add A Plan:

6. After this, you will get a screen that asks you how long you want to purchase a hosting plan for. Most of my clients pick 1 or 2 years. Don’t worry about naming your plan. Click “Add Plan Now”.

7. Now the plan should have been added if DreamHost has your credit card information. Go back to Domains and Manage Domains…and if that green Add Hosting is still  there, click it again. This time you’ll see a big long bunch of choices. Don’t panic. Ignore them all except: check “add WWW” and  uncheck Google Apps, and click on the Fully Host This Domain button at the bottom of the first section. You may be prompted to enter a “username” this is for FTP, so just make something up and then click on Fully Host This Domain button.  And then, finally, finally, you’ll be done. And DreamHost will send you a bunch of emails.

Sorry this is so difficult for so many clients. DreamHost needs to make this so much easier. It’s gotten more complicated over time.

Solution was found here:

If Pages Return A 404 After WordPress 3.1 Upgrade

Here’s what we did:

1. disable all plugins

2. remove .htaccess file from blog folder on server

3. switch permalinks to default and then back to her setting, and then verified this recreated a brand new .htaccess file on her blog folder on server

4. verified this fixed issue (yeah!)

5. one by one, enabled plugins, and discovered that a category related plugin (that renamed a category to something else) was also causing problem so we deleted it.

6. so with all plugins enabled again, retested and it worked. Many thanks to Dre Armeda for this solution.