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.

Quickly Disable or Enable All WordPress Plugins via the Database

Clues to detecting spam:

1. The comment “when I was quite younger, i alway enjoy online chatting with friends and relatives” makes no sense on a “How To Contact DreamHost.com For Support”.

2. The author is not a person’s name, but a keyword, in this case “Electric Oven”.

3. The email address doesn’t match the URL’s domain.

4. The URL is obviously trying to get a link.

What was the objective? For SEO, you want links that have their anchor text (what you click on) to be a keyword. So in this example, they wanted the words “Electric Oven” to be the anchor text and wanted it to go to their electric oven website. In WordPress, the person’s name is the anchor text for the person’s URL – so they were trying to take advantage of this configuration.

Of course, I foiled them and clicked “Spam It” which tells Akismet, my spam plugin to report this as spam which then labels this person/ip address as a spammer, and will put similar message right into the spam bucket of other WordPress bloggers.

This video is in Quicktime. If you  don’t have Quicktime installed, click here for a free Quicktime download for Mac or PC.

The steps are:

1. Login to your WordPress dashboard.
2. Under Posts, click on Categories.
3. Enter the category name.
4. Enter the category slug.
5. Optional – Add category parent.
6. Click Add New Category.

You embed or add a pdf document much the same way you add an image:

1. However instead of clicking on the first “Add An Image” icon, you click on the last one “Add Media”. It looks like a little dot with spikes, like a star.

2. Next, just like adding an image, you click on “Select Files” and navigate to your PDF file.

3. Change the title to something obvious like “Click Here to Download Blah”, so that folks will know what will happen when they click on the link.

4. Be sure to click “File URL” under the “Link URL” section.

5. Then click “Insert Into Post”.

Here’s a screen shot of the “Add Media” window with the important parts circled in red:

I’ve had a few clients ask me this question, so I’m posting the answer here – because it wasn’t super easy to find on the internet. When you get to the end of a line and hit “return” on your keyboard – what do you want to happen? Sometimes you want a new paragraph. Sometimes you might just want a line break. This short tutorial shows you how to accomplish this. It works for WebYep and WordPress…and probably for many other text editors that might use TinyMCE or FCKEditor or others.

In HTML, there are paragraph tags: <p>I’m a paragraph</p> and there are line breaks <br />.

Paragraph tags make things look like this:

Paragraph 1

Paragraph 2

There’s a line of space between paragraphs.

But line breaks look like this:

Line break 1
Line break 2

There is no line of space.

How do you get what you want when you’re using WebYep or WordPress or some other application that uses a WYSIWYG text editor?

The answer is easy: If you want a new paragraph, simply hit “return“. If you don’t want a new paragraph and just want a line break, hit “shift return“.

Now, when I was researching this solution, I did find many folks who said you could accomplish this by changing a few lines of code in the TinyMCE initiation file. And this did work…but only on Internet Explorer. It didn’t work on Firefox. So I think the simple “shift return” solution is the best one for my clients to use.

UPDATE: For those of you on a Mac, I have found issues with Safari and this hint – but it works on Firefox for Mac, so give that a try if Safari doesn’t behave.

One of the most wonderful things about having your WordPress blog hosted on DreamHost, is the ease of keeping your WordPress blog up-to-date. This is a quick tutorial on how to use the DreamHost one-click-installation feature to keep your blog version current. This article assumes you used the DreamHost one-click-installation to install your WordPress blog using the Advanced Mode.

1. Log into your DreamHost control panel: https://panel.dreamhost.com.

2. Goodies: On the left hand side, click on “Goodies” and then on “One Click Installs”.

3. Select A Method: Click on “Upgrade or remove previously installed software – Advanced mode”.

4. Upgrade: Under the column “Actions” you’ll either see “Already…” meaning you’ve already installed the latest version, or you’ll see “Upgrade….”. Click Upgrade.

5. Finish: DreamHost will upgrade WordPress to the latest released version, and send you an email when it’s completed. There will be a link in the email you need to click on, that will upgrade your blog’s database if needed.

6. Plugins: The upgrade process may deactivate your plugins, so it’s a good idea to log into your WordPress admin area and check to see that all the plugins are activated. Sometimes not all plugins are compatible with all versions of WordPress – so it’s good to check this out. The new version of WordPress (2.5) has a auto plugin updater – which make this process really simple.

Why consider converting? You know all that wonderful content you’re writting on Blogger? If you have a blogger subdomain (ie. yourname.blogspot.com), and you have your own website, that content is not benefiting your website one bit!

Moving to WordPress that’s fully integrated with your website is a great way to get credit for that content, because the content lives on YOUR domain, not Blogspot. While Blogger does have a FTP publishing capability, in my experience it’s super slow for large blogs, and WordPress is a much more effective solution – easier to customize and jam packed with plugins that make it easy to super-charge your blog.

1. Verify. Login to your Blogger account and double check that it used Gmail. (Older accounts that don’t use Gmail, ie, aren’t Google related, won’t work with this tutorial.)

2. Import. Inside WordPress Admin -> Manage -> Import
Follow the steps for Blogger approval to communicate with WordPress and username choice. Complete the importing process…and marvel at how easy it was. All of your Blogger posts are now inside WordPress.

3. Permalink Matching. Inside WordPress Admin -> Options -> Permalinks
Set WordPress’s custom permalinks to match Blogger’s formatting:
ex: /%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html
Note the addition of .html at the end. Your goal is to set WordPress permalinks to match the permalink syntax of your Blogger blog.

4. Change Blogger Publishing. Inside Blogger: Settings -> Publishing
Switch to “Custom Domain” and point to your own registered domain where you’ve installed WordPress. If you’ve installed WordPress in a subdirectory (like I usually do) you’ll notice it won’t let you put in a subdirectory path, don’t worry, we’ll address this later.

UPDATE 7-29-08: While changing the blogger publishing was a simple task when I originally wrote this article, it’s become more complex. I ran into two issues recently in trying to complete this task. The first issue, was that I received an error that stated “”Another blog is already hosted at this address.” To fix this issue, I relied on the advice given in this blog, The Real Blogger Status. We tried filling out this form to clear the domain error, but it didn’t work. Next, my client had to figure out what his Google Apps account login information was, and send it to me. I was able to log in to his Google Apps account, and follow the steps noted in Real Blogger Status article. Once this was done, the error disappeared.

5. Verify Redirects. Go to Google.com and enter “site:YourOldBlog.blogspot.com” replacing “YourOldBlog.blogspot.com” with the exact URL of your Blogger blog. There are no spaces at all. This will show you all of the indexed pages (in Google) of your blog. This will be useful, because you’re going to click on every one, one at a time, to verify your indexed Blogger articles correctly redirect to your WordPress articles. Yes, I know this is tedious, but it’s important.

UPDATE 7-29-08: This step has also been made more difficult since I first wrote this article. To my surprise, the redirects simply didn’t work. You can read about my struggle to understand the issue with Blogger and Redirects in the Blogger Help Group. The issue regarding the redirects in IE being broken was not resolved. But through using this domain redirection tool, I was able to verify that my method of redirection did indeed work for search engines. Credit for this clever idea goes to David Bradley in his article “Custom Blogger Domain”. So this means, that for search engines, if you follow my method, you’re fine. But if humans try to access the articles directly using Internet Explorer, using the blogspot address, they won’t find them. But since all the blog posts are being reindexed, this is a short term issue. So after a few months, the search engines and humans will both be able to find all articles on the new domain without any issues.

6. Adust .htaccess file. You may need to add a .htaccess file to help the redirection from Blogger to WordPress. If you’ve installed WordPress into a directory (not in the root of your website), then you will need to include statements like this:

redirect 301 /2006/ http://www.yourdomain.com/blog/2006

This statement will redirect all posts from 2006 into the correct subdirectory “blog/2006″.

Similarly, you may need to create a redirect for archives:

redirect 301 /2006_01_01_archive.html http://yourdomain.com/blog/2006/01

Again, it’s important to click on every single indexed link (in step 5) and adjust your .htaccess file if needed to make sure all the redirects work correctly.

This tutorial has been derived from several others I’ve found on the web and modified to include specific .htaccess help. If you find it useful, please leave me a comment.

There are several solutions to this issue according to an article about pasting from Word in the WordPress forum:

1. Always copy and paste content from a plain text editor
2. Use the Advanced Menu feature for pasting
3. Use the code view to manually remove the unwanted HTML tags

I’ll go over each of these options:

1. Always copy and paste content from a plain text editor. A plain text editor strips away everything else but text, hence the name “plain”. Most operating systems come with these editors already installed. On a Mac, it’s called “TextEdit”, and on a PC, its called “WordPad” or “NotePad”. If you want to compose your posts off-line, use one of these plain text editors. If someone has sent you a Word document, simply copy and paste the Word content into a plain text editor, and then copy and paste into WordPress.

2. Use the “Advanced Menu” feature in WordPress. Inside the WordPress writing a post or page area, at the end of the first line of icons, there’s an icon that when clicked, displays a second row of formatting icons:

See the little icons with the “T” and the “W”, these will bring up windows that let you paste your Word content. I suggest you try out both to see which you prefer. The “T” (for “Text”) will remove all formatting, while the “W” (for “Word”) will leave some in.

If the icon for the Advanced Menu isn’t visible in WordPress, you’ve got a few options. First, try different variations of “control v” and “alt v” and “alt shift v” to see if you can get it to come up. I’ve had clients tell me that depending on their browser and their operating system, this pattern may vary. If you aren’t running the latest version of WordPress, you might consider upgrading because it’s possible that your version doesn’t support this feature.

3. Use the code view to manually remove the unwanted HTML tags. This last method is not for those of you who don’t know HTML. If you do know HTML and you want to clean up the unwanted tags manually, simply click on the Code view and delete all the unwanted tags yourself. Again, unless you know HTML, don’t use this method.

It’s important that the formatting of your blog articles is consistent to ensure that your blog looks as professional as possible – and if you write your blog articles off-line, be sure to use one of the techniques mentioned above to paste nice clean plain text into WordPress.

To optimize your blog for search engines (search engine optimization or SEO), you should understand how much of an impact individual post titles can have on your post’s rankings, and how to manipulate post slugs. Titles and slugs?!

When first creating a new WordPress post, you enter a title:

If you have the plugin installed called “Optimal Title”, then you’re in luck, because it will make the post title also show up as the page title with your blog title afterward, which is important for SEO. In page titles, positioning matters, and so when you create blog articles, put the most important keywords first. This is critical to the search engine ranking positioning for your blog posts.

Next, take a look at the “Post Slug” field. It looks like this:

Why is it called a “Slug” – I have no idea. If you leave it blank, the “slug” or page name of your blog will be set based on the settings in “Options” -> “Permalinks”. My setting is this: /%postname%/, meaning that if I didn’t set the slug, this post’s URL would look like this:

AldebaranWebDesign.com/blog/Blog-SEO-Using-Post-Titles-and-Post-Slugs/

But that’s a bit long and there’s no sense in having your post URL be overly lengthy, and this is where “Post Slug” comes in handy.

Post Slug will overrule the Permalink setting, so you can make them nice and short, and make sure they only include keywords. So if I use the post slug field like it’s shown above, my post URL will look like this:

AldebaranWebDesign.com/blog/blog-seo-titles-slugs/

Nice and compact and contains only the most important keywords.

Here’s a screenshot of this post in my browser, just to one more time, emphasize the difference between page title and slug.

So three things to remember:
1. Make sure “Optimal Title” or something like it is set up in your blog so that your blog post titles come before your blog name in your browser’s page title.
2. Put your most important keywords in your blog titles first.
3. If you have a long title, use the slug to make it shorter.

Or maybe you’ve heard others talking about RSS feeds and felt left out.

Or maybe you just are looking for a way learn about ways to improve your small business website but don’t have time to go around searching for information. Using RSS is a great way to have information that’s customized to your tastes and interests, come right to you – just like a waiter will bring you what your ordered from the menu.

RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” and from Wikipedia:

RSS is a family of Web feed formats used to publish frequently updated content such as blog entries, news headlines or podcasts. An RSS document (which is called a “feed”) contains either a summary of content from an associated web site or the full text. RSS makes it possible for people to keep up with their favorite web sites in an automated manner that can be piped into special programs or filtered displays.

So you can “subscribe” to RSS feeds, just like you’d subscribe to a particular newspaper, or magazine and the latest information in those publications gets delivered to you as soon as it’s available. Sounds great, doesn’t it? But you’re still wondering, how does this work?

How To Read RSS Feeds.

There are many different “feed readers” out there, and for simplicity, I’ll show you how to use the one I use, which is Google Reader (Here’s a link to a Google Reader Tour).
You’ll first need to create a Google account, if you don’t already have one. Once you’re in the reader environment it will look like this:

Ok, it won’t look exactly like this, but that’s because you haven’t subscribed to any RSS feeds yet. Read on

How To Subscribe To RSS Feeds.
Now the exciting part, learning how to subscribe to RSS feeds. We’ll start with my own blog, because you’re reading this, and maybe you want to subscribe to it. You can do this two ways. Look a the very top of your browser window and you’ll see the little orange RSS icon. You’ll also see it in the header section of this post. Now scroll down a bit, look to the right, and you’ll see it again in the right hand column of my blog. I’ve put it in several places so if you’re looking for it, you’ll find it.
Remember, you’re looking for this RSS icon:

Now, here’s the fun part. Click on one of these orange RSS icons. Any of them. Watch what happens.

Because I’m using FeedBurner to publicize my blog, you go to FeedBurner, but each blog will be different. What you’re looking for, is your particular feed reader symbol…which for me is Google Reader.

Click on Google, and it will automatically subscribe you to my website’s blog. That’s it!

On someone else’s blog, who isn’t using FeedBurner, you might be directed to a page that has this on it:

Getting the idea? You first select a reader, and then find blogs or other news sources, and find the little orange RSS icon, click on it, and select your reader of choice.

When you log into to your RSS feed reader, you’ll see the latest posts of all of the blogs you’ve subscribed to. The news you’re most interested in, comes right to you. And if you don’t like the content, simply “unsubscribe”.

Here’s what a partial screenshot of mine looks like (click to enlarge):

I’ve organized my into folders, and the ones that are bold, are new articles I haven’t read yet. It’s nice because it keeps track of what I’ve read, and haven’t read.

You’ll also notice that I have a “subscribe via email” form at the top of my blog, and this is for folks who don’t/can’t use a RSS reader. This automatically emails them new postings.

Happy RSS Feed Reading!

This is a video tutorial covering how to add an image to a WordPress post. It assumes that you already know how to login to your WordPress Dashboard and know how to write a post.

This video is in Quicktime. If you  don’t have Quicktime installed, click here for a free Quicktime download for Mac or PC.

The steps are:

1. Login to your WordPress dashboard.
2. Start a new post or page,or edit an existing one.
3. Put your cursor where you want the image.
4. Click on Add An Image icon.
5. Upload the image.
6. Click Insert Into Post.

This video tutorial takes you through the basics of creating a post in a WordPress blog. No matter what WordPress looks like on the outside, the administration area is always the same, and therefore this tutorial will apply no matter what theme of WordPress you may use. This video assumes you already know how to login to the WordPress Dashboard.

This video is in Quicktime. If you  don’t have Quicktime installed, click here for a free Quicktime download for Mac or PC.

The steps are:

1. Login to your WordPress dashboard.
2. Under Posts, click on Add  New.
3. Enter the post’s title.
4. Enter the post’s intro.
5. Click on the more tag.
6. Enter the rest of the post content.
7. Select a category.
8. Publish!