In July 2021, WordPress 5.8 was released with a powerful new feature – the block pattern directory. It’s an addition to WordPress’s existing library of themes and plugins and is sure to be a huge asset for web developers. I must admit, I didn’t see the potential for block patterns until I took a look […]
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An Easy Way To View Debug Info In WordPress
Debugging in WordPress is annoying. It’s turned off by default, and there’s no GUI for viewing the errors. Turning it on requires you to add lines to the wp-config.php file – something not everyone is comfortable doing, particularly given that it’s so sensitive and can easily destroy your entire site if you’re not careful. As […]
Google’s Disdain for “Random Affiliate Sites” Betrays Us All
All website owners are SEOs, whether they know it or not. Those of us who have been running websites ever since we started working have seen how our content models evolve with time. Website design has changed so much as well! But the promise of the web was always this – every business is on […]
Using the New Autoptimize Aggregate Inline JS
On the 26th of July, 2021, the well-known plugin Autoptimized released a new update that allows for deferring in-line JavaScript. Here’s the new option as seen in the settings screen: This new ability, lets you final defer inline JavaScript so that it doesn’t mess up your page load times. But should you enable it? And […]
Site Owners: Be Suspicious of Google’s Link Spam Update!
On the 26th of July 2021, Google announced that it would be rolling out something called the “Link Spam Update” over the next two weeks. Unlike most core updates, however, this time Google is actually asking website owners to change their behavior – namely add rel=”sponsored” to their affiliate and guest post links. Last year, […]
How To Minimize Scraping Of Your Site
Have you ever come across a website that’s almost an exact duplicate of yours? It can be a somewhat disorienting experience! It seems incredible that a 3rd party would take your content and claim it as its own without attribution. They even copy the images! These people are called “scrapers”, and site scraping can be […]
Dtables – A New Lightweight Data Tables Alternative
I think a lot about tables in content. Despite being cast away in favor of things like GridLayouts for website design, they’re still invaluable for doing their primary job – displaying data in a structured manner. And because I use a lot of data myself on my site, I’m always looking for ways to make […]
How To Let A WordPress User Moderate Comments Even With Low Trust
When you have a large site, maintenance can be a hassle. You might have multiple authors and thousands of comments to sift through, on top of all the regular work like updating plugins, etc. One solution that many organizations take, is to outsource the comment moderation. Of all the possibly risky areas of a site, […]
How To Use Blocks In The WordPress Widget Area
In April, I had written about Full Site Editing (FSE) coming to WordPress. The idea is to expand the notion of widgets to outside just the post or page content area, and allow users to place them in other areas of the theme like the header, footer, and sidebars. While we haven’t yet reached FSE, […]
How To See The WordPress Blocks Outlines
WordPress Gutenberg changed the focus of the editor from writing, to “page building”. While a lot of people including myself hated it at first, its benefits have begun to grow on me. And with the bugs ironed out, I can unequivocally say that it’s far better than the original editor. Now I use blocks myself […]