Proof of the Pudding is in the Eating

By using Genesis and Beaver Builder, we were able to go — from request to the site launch — in under 3 weeks and for less than $600.

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: Expert WordPress Hosting SiteGround provides superior WordPress hosting focused on speed, security and customer […]

Normally putting the URL of a pdf on a line by itself doesn’t display the pdf on a Word­Press page, and if you use the add media button and paste the URL for the pdf into the URL field, you get a link that will open the pdf, but the pdf does not display on the page itself,

Recently a reader raised a question in a comment to a previous post. He was confused about how to move an existing site to Godaddy Managed WordPress Hosting. Having done this several dozen times now I’ve developed some “best practices” and work-arounds I can share.

Google has started rolling out filtering for Google searches from mobile devices. If you site doesn’t meet the criteria for mobile-friendly, your site won’t show up in the search results no matter how relevant your page is to the search. As more folks are visiting websites using smartphones and tablets it becomes increasingly important for […]

Release Candidate RC1 has been deployed.

I’m trying that out on my Hartsook Letter Staging site. Everything looks good so far, I haven’t found my theme or plugins breaking. You can take a look for yourself at https://hartsook.com. (the link will open in a new window so you can compare 3.8.2 and 3.9 if you want to.

Here’s a link to what wordpress.org has to say about 3.9 RC1

Admittedly it’s a new product, but currently there is no elegant way to manually backup your WordPress site at GoDaddy WordPress Managed Hosting. GoDaddy does take a nightly snapshot of the files and database and keeps it around for 30 days. If you want to rollback to a previous version, you have to call customer support and get them to do it. But change is coming…

Hosting your WordPress website on GoDaddy has been strongly discouraged by me and most of the WordPress consultants I know. But GoDaddy has just introduced a new WordPress Managed Hosting plan that may change all that.

There are several reasons why you might want to copy your website,

• you want to make a “sandbox” copy to experiment on, without affecting the public-facing production site
• you want to change hosting companies to get a better deal, faster performance or more functionality
• having a complete copy of your website is a great insurance policy should something happen to your host and your site is lost.

Jetpack Photon should help 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 next time the image is served after you activate Photon. Subsequently the images are served from the CDN network concurrently […]

Using column shortcodes to make 2 columns didn’t work for this post. But I was able to do this on a Page (instead of a Post) using the theme’s 2-column page template.

See the succesful results at: Multi-column video test page

BackWPup plugin developer, Daniel Huesken has decided to begin offering a “Pro” version beginning with version 3.0 of the plugin. I don’t have a problem with this and in some cases might recommend the Pro version to some of my clients. All the issues I had with the switch to version 3.0 have been fixed. The current […]

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 edit posts on my iPad. In the previous version of WordPress the insert media interface was too large for the iPad mini with the insert-image button off the […]

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. Relevanssi replaces WordPress default search with a partial-match search that sorts results by relevance instead of the default reverse chronological order. It also indexes comments and […]

Q: Why build a website?
A: It’s an extension of your business marketing, reaching new customers and new markets.

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

Your website and other internet properties are part of your business marketing ecosystem, and an extension of your brand on the internet, and should be viewed in that context and not as isolated objects. You website design should be reinforcing your brand and extending your marketing messages to reach potential customers on their terms.

To help with your website design it’s useful to know what your goals are for having a website and how the website fits with the rest of your marketing.

Here are seven questions that will help you understand what you need for your website:

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 use a lot of plugins (currently using 29) since I use this as a test bed to explore plugins and themes. I don’t recommend […]

Someone at our recent Weekly WordPress Support Group at TechLiminal in Oakland CA asked about how to create an image map to use as a navigation feature. There are websites that will do this for you and of course you can do this in applications like Dreamweaver and Photoshop. You can also do this pretty easily with […]

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 Grunion forms (included with Jetpack). The contact form shortcodes are there in the […]

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 problem manifested when […]

The website you are looking at right now is using the WeaverII-Pro Theme. In order to show the contrasts and similarities between Suffusion and Weaver I made this site a facsimile of my website which is currently using Suffision (at least on April 22, 2012) while I am giving a presentation at the East Bay […]

https://slate.adobe.com/a/78Z5K

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’ […]

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 has written a WordPress plugin that you can install. It will find any vulnerable copies of […]

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 up your database and your files too. And it can automatically create and send the backups to Dropbox, Amazon S3, and other cloud-based storage spaces. The problem is that in the […]

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 […]

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 3.1 was released today I hit the auto-update button to see what […]

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 sites. Looking into why this was happening surfaced what apparently is […]

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 Spring about the decline (populations are down about 90% in the last 20 years!) of an important but mysterious global species of fish (yes, eels are fish), and the natural history […]

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 addition to SlideShare and […]

  Mary Meeker of Morgan Stanley has created a really great presentation for the 2010 Web 2.0 conference here in San Francisco. If your business, or your clients, use the internet, whether on the desk or on the go, you should read through her analysis of current trends. http://www.businessinsider.com/mary-meekers-web-2010-11?op=1

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. The plugin allows you to surf easily […]

  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 readers see them as a slide show? Here are […]

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 and interesting account of 100-foot waves, the big ones that are expected and provide an “Everest” for tow-surfers to climb and ride — and the unexpected ones that come out […]

Time for a change 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. Also, there are rumors that GoDaddy is on the block and I’m concerned about long term changes in service and pricing should ownership change. I’ve been using BlueHost.com […]

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 see a larger […]

BackWPup is what I’ve been using.    

This post is Under Construction