Technically Easy

Category: Websites and Blogging

This category will contain any blogging-related posts, that includes platforms such as WordPress and Blogger.

  • How To Load the Contact Form 7 Script for a Contact Page Only

    How To Load the Contact Form 7 Script for a Contact Page Only

    You can stop the Contact Form 7 plugin’s script and stylesheet from loading on every page of your WordPress blog. While the plugin is a great one to install, since it makes creating contact forms easy, you probably don’t want to load the script and stylesheet on every page. For those that one to get every ounce of performance out of their blog, you definitely don’t want those two resources to load each time.

    The good news is that it is easy to only load the plugin’s resources on a specific page of your WordPress blog. By simply creating a few lines of code in the functions.php file of your current theme, you can control when scripts and stylesheets are loaded for many plugins that you have installed. Let’s look at how to do this for the Contact Form 7 plugin.

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  • Find RSS Scrapers with the CopyFeed WordPress Plugin

    Find RSS Scrapers with the CopyFeed WordPress Plugin

    A WordPress plugin called CopyFeed or CopyFeed can help you track down any RSS feed scrapers that are copying your hard work and publishing it on their blogs. This is a common problem for anyone that authors a blog. While you can’t stop anyone from taking your content and publishing it on their own blog, there are ways you can track them down and take action. If you own a WordPress blog, there are many plugins that can help you, including the CopyFeed plugin that I will discuss in this post.

    Keep in mind that there are several different methods of tracking down RSS feed scrapers, but I will focus this post on the plugin mentioned above. I will probably be looking at other such plugins in the future.

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  • Can You Succeed With Google’s Blogger Platform?

    Can You Succeed With Google’s Blogger Platform?

    It has been just over 3 years since I started Technically Easy. I have learned a lot within those three years, have made some mistakes (still do), met many great people, but more importantly, I continue to learn to this day. When I began blogging I started out on Google’s Blogger platform – mainly because it was a great way of learning how to blog as it was free and quick to setup.

    Since that time, however, I have switch to a self-hosted WordPress blog. While there were many reasons why I switched, I still enjoy playing around with Blogger, and the templates. One of the questions that I see raised quite often on various blogs and forums is whether you can succed with Blogger?

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  • Speed Up Your Web Site By Using CSS Sprites

    Speed Up Your Web Site By Using CSS Sprites

    If you own a web site or blog, chances are you have thought about how to make your pages load as fast as possible. This is an obsession with many, while a learning experiencing for others. I am one of those that look for ways to make my blog display faster. I have tried and used many different tactics, including changing settings for the browser cache, gzip compression, WordPress caching plugins, reducing the number of graphics, and reducing the number of third-party widgets that appear on my blog. The more that has to load, the slower a page will become.

    When I created this new WordPress theme, I wanted to try something new – CSS sprites. CSS sprites are used by some of the larger web sites to reduce the number of image downloads that are needed to display a web page. While I am not an expert by any means, I have managed to get some of the common images that appear on this blog to load from an image sprite.

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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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  • WordPress: Cannot Modify Header Information

    WordPress: Cannot Modify Header Information

    I have created and edit the templates for my WordPress blog long enough to come across a few confusing errors. While I have had good success solving many of the errors fairly quickly, there is one that has continuously come up, and caused my blog from loading.

    Recently, however, I managed to find the cause of this common error, and since then have quickly corrected any problems that have caused the error. This post explains the error, and how I solved the problem.

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  • Correcting ThickBox Path in WordPress

    Correcting ThickBox Path in WordPress

    For some of my larger images, I usually show a thumbnail in the post, and then allow the visitor to enlarge the image by clicking on the thumbnail. While there are many ways of doing this, I simply used WordPress’ built in ThickBox code to display a larger popup image of the thumbnail. After using ThickBox, I quickly ran into a slight problem – the path to the files wasn’t correct so some of the images weren’t be displayed.

    In order to correct the problem, I manually edited the ThickBox Javascript file to point to the correct location, however, each time I updated WordPress to a newer version, the file would be overwritten. This caused me to once again go into the Javascript file and edit the file. I managed to find a better solution on the WordPress forums, which I explain below.

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  • WordPress Cache Plugin – W3 Total Cache

    WordPress Cache Plugin – W3 Total Cache

    A few months ago I updated the WP Super Cache plugin on Technically Easy and ran into a major issue. After updating, I didn’t check my blog to ensure that it was still up and running. The next day I logged into Technically Easy, and then attempted to view the blog. Sure enough, the blog wasn’t up – all I got was a blank screen. It had been down all night. Not realizing the problem at first, I began to think about what changes I had made.

    The only thing I could think of was the update to the WP Super Cache plugin. I immediately disabled that plugin and recheck my blog. It appeared in my web browser instantly. The update to the plugin had prevent my blog from loading. From that point until a few weeks ago I hadn’t been using a cache plugin. I decided to once again look at plugins to cache my blog, but I wanted to see what other cache plugins existed before retrying WP Super Cache. I managed to find another plugin, and am currently using it on Technically Easy.

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