Technically Easy

Category: Tips

Tips about managing a blog can be found within this category.

  • Finding Where Referring Site Visitors Land on Your Site in Google Analytics

    Finding Where Referring Site Visitors Land on Your Site in Google Analytics

    Google Analytics is probably the most popular free traffic statistics tools that is used by web site owners. It provides a wealth of information about visitors to a site, and can easily be used to help manage a site.

    With all the information that is available by Google Analytics, it can be confusing as to find out where visitors from referring sites land on your page. A single referring site can send visitors to your site through several different pages, and it may help to know the pages that those visitors opened from the referring site. This post explains how you can easily do this with a few clicks of your mouse button.

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  • Web Server Returns 404 Instead of 200 Status Code

    Web Server Returns 404 Instead of 200 Status Code

    I have been experiencing a rather weird issue with my blog recently, and one that I hadn’t noticed until I accessed my Google Webmaster account. The reason I hadn’t noticed the issue was because it wasn’t easily identifiable when viewing my blog, or the administrative pages. The problem was the fact that several of my posts were returning a “404 Not Found” status code instead of a “200 OK” status code.

    What has made this problem weird was that it was only happening on about 5 pages of my blog. All the other pages were returning a “200 OK” status code. Since all post pages use the same template file, and therefore are created the exact same way, I couldn’t figure out what created the problem. While the headers of the pages indicated a 404, the pages were displaying in the Web browsers without any problems.

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  • How to Display Web Code Examples in Your Web Site

    I had been struggling with an issues in some of my blog posts. In posts that explain how to change HTML or PHP code for a web page, I like to display the actual code in my blog post. The problem is that when a visitor copies the code, it isn’t formatted properly. While the actual alphanumeric characters are copied properly, the single and double-quotes aren’t valid.

    When I simply typed the single or double-quote character from my keyboard, the characters would be rendered in the browser differently than if I had typed them in the code. The characters would be formatted and looked different on the web page and when they were copied, it would cause coding problems, such as when the code was pasted in the Blogger editor. I think that I have fixed the problem, and I’ll explain how in this post.

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  • Preventing Directory Browsing with .htaccess

    In the past few weeks I have written a few posts about plugins I have installed to assist with administering Technically Easy. I find it very important to perform regular maintenance on both the WordPress database and the files to ensure my blog is constantly running. One thing I haven’t touched on is the importance of securing my WordPress blog.

    There are many web sites and blogs that provide great tips on how you can secure your WordPress blog, and I may repeat some of those in the future. In this post, however, I will discuss a problem that is evident in many WordPress blogs. This problem is the ability of a visitor to browse the contents of the WordPress directories on your host. If you are unsure if a visitor is able to browse a directory, then I’ll show you how you can test it, and also show you an easy fix to correct the problem.

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  • Increase Your Web Site Speed With .htaccess

    Web site and blog owners are usually trying to increase the speed of their sites. Visitors won’t wait for a web site that loads in 30 seconds, so making a site load very fast is crucial.

    With many sites containing many additional files that are downloaded, such as Javascript, CSS, images, and flash, web sites can take quite a bit of time to finish downloading. In this post I will show how you can change your .htaccess file to increase the speed of your web site very easily.

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  • What is Your Web Site’s Copyright?

    I am active on the Website Babble forums where I occasionally attempt to provide assistance to web site and blog owners. One question that is continuously raised is that of copyright. If you were to publish your own content on a web site or blog, what is the copyright of that content?

    One fear of a web site or blog owner is someone copying their work and publishing it on another site. In this post I will talk about the copyright of your own work as well as talk about what you do to stop it.

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  • How to View Your Web Site as Search Engines See It

    For many who start out in web site management, they learn quickly from the experienced webmasters about search engine optimization. Such things as layout and keywords are usually discussed with many tips and tricks offered to improved a web site’s earch engine ranking. There are many web sites that are made up mainly of flash or images which can cause problems with search engines since they have difficulty reading either format.

    One of the biggest tips is good unique content with lots of text. The text is what search engines use to rank a web site. In this post I will show you a quick method of viewing your web site as search engines may see it. This will allow you to determine if what the search engines see is how you expect them to see your web site.

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  • Fix: ASP.Net Client-side Validation

    Besides managing Technically Easy, I also manage other web sites. These web sites were developed using Microsoft’s .Net framework and were coded in C#. Recently a problem had developed that caused me some grief.

    In the test environment, the ASP.Net client-side validation controls (used on some web forms) worked perfectly. They highlighted the fields that weren’t filled in correctly when a visitor clicked the submit button. In production, however, they stopped working. After some serious research I determined the cause of the problem and was able to fix it. This post will explain how I did it.

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