The iAssistant is an AssistU trained virtual assistant who also writes instructional ebooks about WordPress plugins.
Archive for plugins
The Easiest Way To Move A Blog
Posted by: | CommentsWhen I first started thinking about moving this blog to a new domain, I was really dreading it. I’m not that tech savvy, and in the past, moving my WordPress blogs have caused my sites to be down for several days. Since I sell two ebooks about plugins, Contact Form 7 and Subscribe2, on this site, I certainly didn’t want it to go down at all!
So, I started doing all the research ahead of time to ensure a smooth move. After purchasing Thesis and realizing it had quite a learning curve, I went to the DIY forum. I thought that migrating this blog to My WP Works, a Thesis site, might be harder than I thought.
Within a few minutes, pbarron on this thread, had answered my question. It was unbelievably easy! Just a few simple steps and all my blog posts and images were in place on the new domain.
To move the plugins, I went into my cpanel’s File Manager and copied and pasted them to the new domain. Many of them needed no setup at all, a few did. And some still don’t work. More on that later. I’m not sure how many of them I’ll need because Thesis has so many gadgets built into it.
My new site was up in seconds. I’m still amazed. There were a few glitches, like the permalinks. I couldn’t get them to work, but it was my own dizziness. I had set the permalink to custom: /%post-name%/. It should have been: /%postname%/. Once I did that, everything worked exactly as it should.
Don’t forget to go into Dashboard/Settings and change the General, Writing, Reading, and anything else that would be set up with a first-time installation. Otherwise, the information for the new blog will read for the previous one.
I’ve discovered my Contact Form 7 forms don’t work, but haven’t had time to investigate why. It seems that every Thesis page is a blog page with a place for comments. Maybe that’s why. I’ll get back to you on that.
My list of email subscribers in Subscribe2 didn’t move to the new domain, but there weren’t that many so I’ll transfer them manually. Any of you want to sign up? 
Bye for now, talk with you soon!
Thesis Has A Learning Curve
Posted by: | CommentsFirst, let me apologize for my lapse in posting. I am in the process, as previously mentioned, of migrating this blog over to a new domain: My WP Works. Along with the new domain, the site is getting a complete makeover.
It seemed that every site I really like had the same clean, organized look, and they were all powered by the Thesis theme. So, I purchased Thesis for a mere $87. While I waited on my logo art from Pamela Wilson at Big Brand System, I tweaked the layout. (By the way, I am very pleased with my new logo!)
While Thesis is great, it does have a learning curve. It doesn’t run out of the box, so if you buy it, be prepared to do some research or hire someone to do it for you. I love figuring out all that techy stuff, so I jumped right in.
I’m going to write a post about WordPress’s import/export feature, so I’ll save the details of that for later this week. I’m also going to post about Thesis’s builtin SEO. According to what I’ve read, you can just uninstall the SEO plugin. Thesis has everything you need for great SEO. I’ve also noticed there are several plugins I used with this website that don’t seem to work or are not needed. More on that in the next posts.
Thesis has great support. The DIY forum is active, and you can have an answer in sometimes minutes.
Take a look at My WP Works and let me know what you think!
Spam Fighter – Acceptance Checkbox
Posted by: | CommentsI had never thought about it until Takayuki suggested it, but adding an acceptance checkbox to your custom CF7 form is just one more barrier between you and those wish-they’d-give-up spammers.
Not only does it serve to remind the site visitor of your Terms of Service (you do have one, right?), but that one extra step, that manual clicking in the checkbox, is another way of screening sincere parlay-ers of your website information from those with less than sincere intentions.
This is an example of a quiz and an acceptance checkbox. Nothing that hard for your site visitor, one extra step of protection for you. Most people will appreciate your efforts to prevent spam.
Quiz Those Spammers Out of Business!
Posted by: | CommentsAnother great spam fighter within the Contact Form 7 WordPress plugin is the quiz option. You can require the site visitor to answer math problems (like Google does) or tell you the color of grass. Just one more obstacle for those just-don’t-get-it spammers.
Quizzes are less of a problem for the novice webdesigner because they don’t require the server support that CAPTCHAs do. And, for some of your site visitors, they will be much easier to understand than the strange combination of numbers and letters on a CAPTCHA.
Personally, I like the combination of a quiz and an acceptance checkbox. I’ll talk about that on my next blog post.
Captivating CAPTCHAs
Posted by: | CommentsCAPTCHA, all caps, stands for Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart. Hmmm, CAPTCHA is easier to remember. CAPTCHAs, plural, has a small s on the end.
Let’s just focus on what it does: helps prevent spam. A CAPTCHA can be a picture or numbers that must be typed in by the site visitor thus preventing machine spam.
CAPTCHAs are sometimes hard for site visitors to read. For the webmaster, difficulties occur if your webhost doesn’t provide a graphic library to store them.
With Contact Form 7, you, the webdesigner, can choose to use CAPTCHA when you create forms. Before you do, be sure to download the “Really Simple CAPTCHA” plugin, and then activate it.
Next, create a new form with Contact Form 7 and configure it. When you generate the CAPTCHA tag, you can choose from 3 sizes and enter color codes to customize it to your website. Here’s the one I did as an example using a black background and green text:
Very simple to do, thanks to Takayuki Miyoshi, the plugin developer.
