I have been using WordPress ever since I started blogging here on Ghacks in 2005. It has been a pleasant ride most of the time, with the occasional rough bump down the road. As a WordPress administrator, you have access to thousands of different plugins that extend or improve the blog’s functionality. One issue that [...]

The majority of web developers develop their websites and services locally before they publish them on the Internet. This makes sense in a variety of ways, from saving a lot of bandwidth to faster updating or improved security. Even better, new technologies have made it a lot easier to setup a local web development system [...]

WordPress is one of the most popular blogging platforms currently available on the Internet. Popular sites like Techcrunch, Gizmodo or yours truly are all powered by WordPress. Users who are just getting started have a few options at their disposal. They can start with a blog over at WordPress.com, get their own website and self-host [...]

In Why Website Investments Are Better Than Stock Market Investments I mentioned that I bought several websites last year as an investment. When it comes to buying websites, there are always two options: First you can continue running and improving the site to earn monthly revenue from it. That’s great unless it requires to much [...]

A new version of the popular blogging software WordPress has just been released. WordPress admins should already see update notifications in the dashboards of the blogs that they administrate. The update is also already advertised on the official WordPress website. It is as usually possible to update the blog right away from within the admin [...]

The developers of the popular blogging platform WordPress have released version 3.3 just a few minutes ago. WordPress 3.3 update notifications should appear right in the admin interface of the blog. Users can use the internal updater to update from within the admin interface, or by downloading the new version from the official site to [...]

How do you make Excel data available on the Internet? You could upload the spreadsheet directly, or use the program’s export feature to export the spreadsheet as a static table full of data. Developers who wanted more than that had to find a way to use the spreadsheet data with a web scripting language, for [...]

Search engines like Google Search use a page’s loading time as a signal when they compute that page’s ranking in their search engine results. Webmasters have a lot to tweak, from the server backbone to the scripts they use and embed, and the images and media they post; Everything has an impact on the page [...]

Most webmasters have started to learn HTML before they moved on to programming languages such as PHP. With PHP come databases like MySQL as the primary storage for project data. Many popular online applications, such as WordPress, use the PHP and MySQL combination to power sites online. You usually do not need to know PHP [...]

Content scraping is a big issue on today’s Internet, and a challenge for search engines to get it right. It basically comes down to the question of attribution. Who is the original author of a piece of content and on which website was it published first. Search engines get that right most of the time. [...]

I recently noticed that my WordPress blog’s page loading times increased through the roofs which made me reevaluate everything that contributed to the loading times of the website. I implemented a few changes on the blog to improve page loading times. I first got rid of the three social networking buttons pointing to Google Plus, [...]

The rise of smartphones and other mobile handheld devices has increased the importance of optimizing websites for smartphones and other mobile devices. There are three core aspects that need to be taken into consideration. The size of the display which is often a lot smaller than standard desktop display resolutions, the technologies supported by those [...]

Imagine that you have your business setup in Google under Google Places. Users from your town can search using location based queries to get your listing in the results or on Google Maps. Think Plumber Manhattan for instance. If you optimize the listing you usually have good chances to be at the top of the [...]

So called scraper sites or scrapers are one of the dark phenomenons of the Internet. The sites basically republish the RSS feed of one or multiple unique websites on a domain, usually without rights or link back to the original source. Technology in this sector has advanced in past years, and scraping has been combined [...]

Maybe you have spotted one of the recent changes on Google search results pages already. Some website listings, Lifehacker’s for instance, display an author profile photo next to their listing in the Google search results. This only happens on pages where a single author can be easily identified, which is the case for most blog [...]

So called sitelinks are displayed if a specific search term has an authority site associated with it. If you search for Ghacks for instance, you will notice that my site is displayed at the top. Below the standard listing are the site links, which previously used about the same amount of space as a standard [...]

Google launched a new search engine algorithm earlier this year that they internally called the Panda update. The idea behind Panda was to introduce a quality variable into the ranking equation. Sites with good quality contents would see an increase, sites with low level quality or article farms would see a decrease. That worked so-so [...]

I’m usually not reviewing commercial services for obvious reasons, but I’d like to make an exception today. I was looking for an A-B testing service that would allow me to test web page variations to find out which variation worked best for a site that I own. I first thought about using Google’s Web Optimizer [...]

Creating a new website can be a very rewarding process. Webmasters usually run into a phase shortly after they have setup the site where they have to wait until the site gets indexed in the big search engines. This can take minutes, hours, days and sometimes even weeks, as it depends on the search engine [...]

In Why Website Investments Are Better Than Stock Market Investments I have listed arguments for investing in websites, and not in stocks or other types of investment. I do not want to paraphrase the whole article, just that much: With investments in websites it is usually a matter of 12 to 24 months to get [...]

Google just announced the availability of the webmaster related service Page Speed Service. You may remember that the company started to introduce its Page Speed service about two years ago which provided suggestions to webmasters and developers on how to improve the page loading times of their websites and web services. The Page Speed Service [...]

Webmasters have really no choice but to add the Google+ button and other social networking buttons to their websites. Why? Because social signals will grow in importance in the coming years. These buttons can also be convenient for site visitors who would like to share a specific article or the whole website that they just [...]

One of the things that you need to make sure as a webmaster is support for various screen resolutions. The rise of mobile browsing, especially on smartphones but also on low resolution devices like tablet and netbook PCs, has made this step even more important. A website that is not offering optimized contents for popular [...]

You may know that I bought a website recently. One of the things that freaked me out in the early days of being a webmaster was moving a website to another host or server. Why? Because of all the things that could go wrong. Set the wrong nameservers for instance and your site won’t be [...]

Investing money requires research, lots of research. That’s true for the stock market, website investments and other forms of investments. Once you have done your research, you can make an educated guess about the investment. What are the risks? What’s the worst case scenario? Which return can I expect when I calculate conservatively? Lets say [...]

About a week after the push to version 3.2 comes the next WordPress update. Updates that follow quickly after a major release are usually either security or bug related. According to WordPress, version 3.2.1 is a maintenance release that fixes a server incompatibility related to JSON, and a few other issues that came up after [...]

With the release of WordPress 3.2 came a redesign of the admin interface, and with that a gruesome new font, line heights and margins. The new design looked that terrible that I – for the first time ever – switched from the plain HTML editor to the visual editor. The visual editor uses an eye [...]

Two WordPress releases in short time, that puts some pressure on system administrators and website owners. That is, if you update your blogs as soon as the updates come out, and not weeks afterwards. WordPress 3.2 is not a security update, which means that webmasters have more time to update their blogs to the new [...]

It seems that the WordPress developers have a thing for releasing a new version of WordPress shortly before I’m going to bed. Whenever they do it means that I have to stay away to find out if it fixes security vulnerabilities. If it does, I update all of my blogs immediately. Instead of going to [...]

As a webmaster, you have to make sure that your websites are loading as fast as possible, without sacrificing functionality. While it may be cool to have ten 500 Kilobyte images on your homepage, it may in turn lead to visitors leaving the site before it is completely loaded in their browsers. Lower page loading [...]

Blogging with WordPress is an easy, quick way to get your posts to viewers without sitting down and plugging through an entire website of code yourself. However, there are certain aspects of the program that cause some users pause. For example, many posts benefit from a nice, clean thumbnail seated just to the left of [...]

Mobile devices, from smartphones to tablets, start to become popular for normal web related tasks like visiting websites, watching movies or playing games. This can be attributed to the advancement of hardware to make the devices faster and more responsive, software like Opera Mobile that make the most out of what little space and speed [...]

When the website data or web applications are added to your cloud based servers it becomes essential to set up remote connection with the virtual servers in the cloud. Connecting to a cloud enables you to transfer data from the local network of the organization or desktop to the “virtual world” of the cloud server. [...]

Internet Explorer 9 supports a new pinned site feature that can be used to pin websites to the Windows 7 taskbar. The combination of IE9 and Windows 7 outlines that its reach is somewhat limited at the moment. Websites do not have to support the feature to make it usable. Internet Explorer 9 users can [...]

I have a lot of domains. Well, a lot is relative but it is enough to lose the overview occasionally. While the majority is hosted at one popular provider (Godaddy), some are hosted at other domain registrars and web hosting companies. I get regular automated emails from those companies. They tell me that a domain [...]

WordPress has just released a new version of the popular blogging platform. WordPress 3.1.2 is a security update which makes it a mandatory update for all self-hosted WordPress sites. The update “addresses a vulnerability that allowed Contributor-level users to improperly publish posts” notes Ryan Boren at the official WordPress blog. The WordPress developers suggest to [...]

For most developers, keeping your source code’s comments, error messages, check in notes and even variable names free of spelling mistakes is not the most pressing concern. As a developer and a dreadful speller, I’m one of the worst offenders and have been of the understanding it didn’t matter as the mistakes were kept safely [...]

All the good domain names are already taken. I hear that phrase on a regular basis. Is it really true? No it is not, unless you define good as in exact keyword phrase. For domain names, you basically have two options. You can grab a descriptive domain name, e.g. pchardware if you want to sell [...]

NuGet is a Visual Studio 2010 extension that enables you to download and use shared code libraries with the Microsoft development community. This is Microsoft’s attempt to benefit from a large development community and pool of shared code, a concept enjoyed by many open source communities such as Drupal and Ruby on Rails. The extension [...]

A core website metric is the page loading time. It determines the time it takes to fully load a web page. With each passing second, visitors are more likely to close the tab or hit the back button. The page loading time has long evolved, and studies have shown that a faster page loading time [...]

I’ve written a lot about tablets over the last few months and indeed I now own a Windows 7 tablet myself, the ExoPC Slate.  It didn’t take much use of this device to become disillusioned with the modern web as it stands today and I can’t help but wonder if the future of the web [...]

One of the aspects of being a webmaster is to make sure that your web pages are compatible with the most popular web browsers. This requires some tweaking and hacks, especially if Internet Explorer 6 comes into the picture. Validating web pages is just one aspect of this. Most browsers handle invalid elements well so [...]

Page speed is a ranking factor in the Google Search engine. According to Google officials it is currently used in 1 out of 1000 queries. I think it was Matt Cutts who said that speed acted as a tie breaker in situations. It is however likely that speed will play a bigger role in the [...]

Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to techniques to improve a website’s search engine visibility. Most Internet marketers divide SEO it into onpage and offpage optimization. Onpage optimization refers to local web page optimization, while offpage optimization everything that influences a site’s visibility on external pages. Offpage optimization is usually a consideration during development of a [...]

Web developers have several options to test their web projects in different web browsers. Among the available choices are virtual operating system images that provide access to specific web browsers. Microsoft has just updated a set of Internet Explorer application compatibility VPC images that are available as a free download for Windows operating systems compatible [...]

Favicons are small icons that help identify websites. They are used as a visual representation of a website both in the web browser and at many online services. The three most prominent locations of favicons are the browser’s address bar, the tabbar and the bookmarks folder. Many webmasters like to create custom favicons to add [...]

As a web developer, you have to make sure that your website displays fine for the most widely used screen resolutions. Doing so ensures that site visitors have a good user experience on the website. We have already covered several programs, like the Computer Monitor Hotkey Resolution Changer or the Resolution Changer, to change the [...]

Even the most experienced web developer has to look up HTML properties and CSS elements from time to time. Several websites like the official W3C website offer references online, and some web development tools have references integrated in the app. Codeburner, a free tool for the two web browsers Firefox and Opera, the Mac OS [...]

So called sitemaps are files that contain information about a website’s structure. It is usually not the only information but that should be enough as an explanation for now. Many content management systems, blog platforms and other dynamically generated website scripts come with options to automatically generate, and often submit sitemaps to the big search [...]

Site speed has been added as a ranking factor by Google some time ago. Webmasters since then have started optimizing their websites’ page loading times. Some of the optimizations done included reducing the number of elements loaded when people visit the site, optimizing media elements, minifying CSS and JavaScript, and using web caching technologies to [...]