Welcome to the software and web development section here on Ghacks. We mostly cover web development related news here, for instance updates for the popular blogging platform Wordpress which we use, but also news about other development related topics of interest.
This includes general webmaster related information, for instance if Google, Bing or another company add, remove or modify features, how to articles that explain how you can do development related tasks – like migrating from one server to another – or how you can check your website’s reputation on the Internet.
All in all, this category is essential for webmasters, especially those using Wordpress as it informs them about all important news and changes.
Most developers use a local development environment that replicates the live website. They use it to test any change made to the website before it is pushed to the live server. This can be an update, for instance a new version of WordPress, the installation of a new script or feature, or a change to […]
When you visit a website in a modern web browser for the first time, contents get loaded from a web server to the local computer. While some resources may be loaded from cache already, for instance if you visited another page on the same host or if the same third-party host was used on websites […]
WordPress creates a lot of pages on a website and the majority of them are created by pulling information from single articles that you create. There is the homepage that lists the most recent articles, categories and tags that sort them into different groups, date pages that sort them by date, and several other pages […]
As a webmaster, you always need to be on the lookout for things to improve on your sites. This is less the case if you are just maintaining a private website, but if your business runs on it, or if websites generate all the money that you earn, then you better make sure that there […]
I'm currently going through all aged posts here on Ghacks Technology News to update them whenever possible, or remove them from the blog if it does not make sense to do so. This is for instance the case for posts about giveaways on third-party websites. Since the giveaway is long over, it does not really […]
If you are running a blog or website for a long time, you will encounter days or even weeks where there is little to write about. There are plenty reasons why this can happen. Maybe nothing happened in that week that was of interest to you, maybe you overlooked it, ran out of ideas, or […]
Neowin.net is one of our partner websites, and it came as a surprise yesterday that the site went down completely. I first thought that this was just a fluke and tried connecting again in a different browser, but that did not work out as well. After some digging I found out that neowin.net was indeed […]
Every now and then I'm running page speed analysis tools such as Google Page Speed or Yahoo's Yslow on the sites that I administrate to make sure that the sites load as fast as possible. I spotted one issue recently that prolonged the loading time of index pages on Ghacks Technology News. The site is […]
Yoast's WordPress SEO plugin is a well designed plugin for self-hosted WordPress blogs that takes care of several SEO related settings and preferences. It enables you to define how permalinks should look like, how titles and other meta information are displayed, allows for the creation of XML sitemaps, supports breadcrumbs, and can be used to […]
Every year or so it seems, I'm receiving quite a few emails from various domain registrars asking me to verify that the contact information of my domains are correct. Contact information link a person or company, or proxy, to a domain name. These information may change over time, for instance when a site gets sold, […]
The default WordPress writing environment is not well suited for writing at all, in my opinion. You get a sidebar on the left, modules on the right, and a toolbar on top that displays items that you may never use in your life. In addition, you also have modules below the text area. While this […]
Google Analytics is a service by Google for webmasters who want to track the traffic, conversions and other metrics in regards to sites that they add to the service. The service highlights where visitors come from, what they do on the site, and how they leave it again among other things. Recently, Google has started […]
A new version of the popular blogging software WordPress has just been released, introducing a new admin dashboard theme and the brand new Twenty Fourteen frontend theme. As you may know, a new default theme is released each year which showcase what WordPress is capable of, and to implement modern design philosophies and web technologies. […]
If you hang out on web forums regularly, you know that most of them have capabilities to make posts sticky. What is meant by that is that these posts are always displayed at the top of the forum, and not in chronological order with the rest of the posts. This is often used in forums […]
A new version of the blogging script WordPress has just been released. WordPress 3.7 is a feature and bug-fix release for self-hosted WordPress websites. So called background updates are probably the biggest feature of the new version. This adds an option to WordPress to install maintenance and security updates automatically in the background without user […]
As I pointed out numerous times before: speed is important for any kind of operation on the Internet as a better loading performance will improve conversions on your websites. Mozilla managed to increase Firefox downloads by 60 million per year by shaving off 2.7 seconds of loading times on the organization's download pages. Many modern […]
