Blog Posts

Ever want to provide your readers with email updates to your website? WordPress’ built in RSS feed functionality provides an easy way to provide the content to email newsletter services like Mailchimp or Mailerlite.

But what if you want to create email updates that don’t include all your new posts, just specific post categories? Well that’s pretty easy. According to

I made an animated gif screenshot recording to demonstrate a code snippet, but I wanted to resize the image and make it loop. I found a useful website that has easy

click the green switch at the top of the screenshots to compare the WordPress vs the Static HTML versions of the same website

the static version is live at: http://halcyonlearning.com/

Master Roofing Company  is a family-owned and operated Oakland roofing contractor with nearly 40 years experience of servicing residential and commercial clients in and around the San Francisco Bay Area. They had a Yelp page, but they didn’t have their own website.

After a phone call

I've been working on a new website, and rebranding The Hartsook Letter. By the end of July 2017, the Hartsook Letter will forward to:

WordPress-Website-Coach.com

I won't add any new material to the Hartsook Letter site after this post you're reading.

The new site includes all the posts from The Hartsook Letter site, but is focused on the following three areas:

1. Building new websites
2. Re-launching older websites
3. WordPress developer resources & coaching

I hope the new site will be better organized, more up-to-date, more informative, and more useful. Let me know what you think.

WordPress is an award-winning web software, used by millions of webmasters worldwide for building their website or blog. SiteGround is proud to host this particular WordPress installation and provide users with multiple resources to facilitate the management of their WP websites:

SiteGround provides superior WordPress hosting focused on speed, security and customer service.

Google has started rolling out filtering for Google searches from mobile devices. If you site doesn’t meet the criteria for mobile-friendly, your

I recommend Jetpack-Photon module (deactivate all the other Jetpack modules you don’t use). Photon is an image-only CDN solution using Automatic’s servers. All your images are uploaded to their servers the

BackWPup plugin developer, Daniel Huesken has decided to begin offering a “Pro” version beginning with version 3.0 of the plugin. I

Another in a series of painless upgrades from WordPress. Double thumbs up for WordPress.org.

One big advantage of this version of WordPress is that now I can create and

Relevanssi – A Better Search plugin breaks the search function in the “Media Library’, “Insert Media panel”, and also the ‘Insert link to existing content” in the hyperlink panel.

Your website design is the key component in your internet marketing ecosystem

No news is good news! I applied the WordPress Upgrade 3.4 from 3.3.2 and so far I haven’t found any conflicts with my themes of plugins on this site. And I

Someone at our recent Weekly WordPress Support Group at TechLiminal in Oakland CA asked about how

But, if I deactivate Simple Facebook Connect the Grunion forms show up in the post.

Response :

(here’s the current discussion thread on the Simple Facebook Connect support forum  that I started)

Pieter Hartsook:

Simple Facebook Connect still disables the display of

While I was configuring options in the Weaver theme (Weaver II-Pro) in preparation for my presentation at the Configurable Themes presentation for the Oakland WordPress Meetup the other day when I discovered a strange behavior when selecting one of Weaver theme’s most useful page-specific options: selecting the One column: No sidebar option.

The website you are looking at right now is using the WeaverII-Pro Theme. In order to show

I just pasted the URL of a Picasa album below (http://picasaweb.google.com/107310476656218787840/PieterSUkulele)

Using the raw URL doesn’t does work, but making it a link will take you to the album at Picasa

Using the Photonic “shortcode” will also make it work. The general shortcode format is:

[bracket]gallery type=’picasa’ user_id=’abc’ album=’ablum_name'[closebracket]

So I’m going to use

[bracket]gallery type=’picasa’ user_id=’107310476656218787840′ album=’PieterSUkulele'[closebracket]

And here’s

There is a great post on the background of this problem by Mark Maunder that I recommend you read to understand the severity of the issue:

Technical details and scripts of the WordPress TimThumb.php hack

But even better, Mark

The best free backup plugin, the one I’ve been using on my site and recommend and install for my clients is BackWPup.  It backs

I thought I’d try out the upcoming version of WordPress since it’s now already rolled out on wordpress.com. I want to see what plugins and themes break before I recommend upgrading to my clients.

So far everything seems to be working with RC2, RC3 3.2 (with one exception….*)

* BackWPup plugin is currently busted, but there is an interim workaround

I use the Hartsook Letter blog as a testbed for WordPress themes, tools, plugins, and extensions. I need to see how these work and ferret out potential interactions among the various extensions before I recommend them for a client’s site.

So when WordPress

This presenta–tion just won 3rd prize on the "Worlds Best Presentation Contest 2010" at SlideShare. It's worth the look.

I first became aware of the Referrer Spam problem after installing and using the WordPress plugin Stat Surfer. One of Stat Surfer’s statistics categories is Top Referrers. I noticed on a business-client’s site they were getting referral traffic from porn sites and other unlikely

Eels by James Prosek
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I just finished reading “Eels”. This book is on the order of Rachael Carson’s Silent

I wanted to display a slide show that was hosted on Scribd.com (see Mary Meeker’s slides on theBrilliant analysis of current internet marketing trends post). There is a lot of good content on Scribd that you may want to share with your audience, and it should be one of your choices in

Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley has created a really great presentation for the 2010 Web 2.0 conference here in San

StatSurfer dashboard widget doesn’t use Google Analytics.

StatSurfer is the evolution of StatPress and StatPress Reloaded, the plugin is therefore consistent with the data of the two StatPress systems.

I like the aggregate display graph and the alternative view of the site traffic that doesn’t run through Google.

So you want to spice up your posts with Flickr, Picasa, or iPhoto, images from your computer? You can just insert one or two using the Upload/Insert button on the post editor. But what if you want to have a dozen photos, or have your

The Wave: In Pursuit of the Rogues, Freaks, and Giants of the Ocean by Susan Casey

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

A well researched

I’ve been looking for a new hosting vendor. My account at GoDaddy.com is up for renewal and I think I can do  better.

July 2017 update: The Lightbox Plus plugin is no longer available. I’ve replaced that on this site with Responsive Lightbox by dFactory. This plugin has lots of options for lightbox libraries and display. I’m currently using the prettyPhoto library setting,

This is a demonstration of the Lightbox Plus plugin. Click an image below to

BackWPup is what I’ve been using.

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