The iAssistant is an AssistU trained virtual assistant who also writes instructional ebooks about WordPress plugins.
Archive for WordPress
No SEO Plugin With Thesis
Posted by: | CommentsOne of the reasons I chose Thesis, aside from its appearance, was the builtin SEO features. Say goodbye to Michael Torbert’s SEO WordPress plugin (but thanks to him for his hard work)!
The Thesis philosophy is simple—you can change your design all you want, but you should never change the core code that powers your website. For long-term success in the search engines, it is crucial to serve semantic, information-rich HTML that loads quickly, and optimization and efficiency are two areas where Thesis shines.
As I’ve said before, I’m not that tech savvy. What I see when I look at a new post page in Thesis that I don’t see in my old theme, even with the SEO plugin, is more SEO fields to complete.
This is what I see in Thesis.
This is what I see in my current theme.
I’m still investigating all this, and I repeat: Thesis has a learning curve.
Isn’t it fun?
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!
The iAssistant Is Getting A New Look
Posted by: | CommentsA few months ago, I joined Lateral Action: Creativity + Productivity = Success. Then I joined Sonia Simon’s Remarkable Marketing Blueprint. Most recently, I joined Third Tribe Marketing.And now, I am different, and my business is different. It’s hard to explain what has changed, but I’ll try. I’m more focused. I have ideas, lots of them. I have a plan to carry out my ideas. I have a community to mentor me and offer advice. All three websites are alike, and yet very different. I highly recommend them all.
So, I need a new look to go with my new ideas and have asked Pamela Wilson – Big Brand System (also a 3rd Triber) to design the logo for my new site: My WP Works. It is forthcoming toward the end of this week.
Part of what I have found is that I enjoy working with WordPress sites, and more specifically WordPress plugins, so hence the move to my new URL – My WordPress Works. Because of trademark legalities, I did not use the full WordPress name in the URL, only the first letters, as requested by Matt Mullenweg.
Another change: after working with Lateral Action, Remarkable Marketing Blueprint, and most recently, Third Tribe Marketing, I find myself in love with Thesis and have purchased it for my new look. While I enjoy the different themes I’ve purchased from iThemes, I think Thesis will work best for my new look.
Thesis is installed and active at My WP Works, but the site is anything but complete, so if you decide to visit now, do so with the intention of coming back in a month to see the final product. Looking at it now will be good experience if you want to see a makeover in progress!
To return to the original focus of my blog, my next posts will chronicle the plugins that transition from this site to My WP Works. The Hard, The Easy, and The Impossible!
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.
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.
