WordPress

There are 23 posts filed in WordPress (this is page 1 of 3).

What to do with too many open browser tabs

For me, I tend to open browser tabs when I am using my RSS reader River5 through my reading list app. I then keep the tabs open until I read the tab, and save it somehow if I want to keep the URL. For most of my browsing life, the “save” action is to copy the URL to a link dump file. I have used text files, Libre Office word documents, and a notes app on my phone. I used to let these files get really big, then I decided to stop doing that and creating a new file at the beginning of the month. You can probably tell that I have quite a collection of links. And, after copying links to the file, I rarely (IF EVER) would go back to those links (so mostly a write-only file). In 2022, I did try using a “zettlekasten” approach to collecting links by category (using an OPML file and a static website). However, I eventually went back to link dumps…

This weekend, with a lot of cold weather coming, anticipating I would not be going anywhere, I decided to bite the bullet and review all my open tabs, and create posts on my website for each link I wanted to save. If you are one of my 3-4 regular readers, I apologize for the link flood. I added categories for each link (all of them also have the “Links” category), started with using the Status post type, then switched to Link post type later in the day. I will be finishing the tab review today, then hope to keep up with adding links to my site. I will have to see how I like the look on the website (in other words, if I want to create a separate view for posts with the category “Links”), but I am hoping to give this a good try for the rest of the month.

Let me know if you have any ideas/techniques for managing links that you want to save!

Adding podcast cover art to a WordPress podcast

When I decided to create the Georgia v. Trump podcast, I wanted to have a more professional look, with some cover art. In my previous podcasts, I did not do anything extra, so the title in the RSS feed was all that would appear in my podcast app.

I was going to use WordPress for the website and the podcast, since I have used WordPress for other podcasts. I looked at the settings for the site theme, but did not see anything that let me add an image to the feed, so I decided to look for a plugin to help.

Before that, I looked into ways to create the podcast cover art. I  tried Edit.org, and was able to create an initial image. Next, I looked at several WordPress plugins that supported podcasting features. The first I tried was Seriously Simple Podcasting, but it was not as simple as the plugin title. I  also had some problems with post settings and image settings, so I  decided to look for another plugin, and went with Simple Podcasting. With this plugin, I was able to add an image for the podcast feed, add a podcast block within a post, and use the regular post structure for podcast posts.

During testing, I wanted to update the podcast cover art. The previous graphics tool created images that were smaller than the minimum size for Apple Podcasts,  so I went with Canva. I still had to use Microsoft Paint 3D to resize from 3000 to 2000 pixels to get the image to display properly in PocketCasts. My final test was to make sure that the post text would show up in PocketCasts. It took 3 posts before I could see the text. if I had been more patient, the post text probably would have showed up on its own. I know from some previous WordPress troubleshooting that my hosting company Bluehost sometimes caches RSS feed updates.

I hope this helps future podcasters to see that WordPress provides an adequate platform for hosting a podcast – no need to use Libsyn or other podcast hosting services (at least until you have the audience of a Joe Rogan….)!

Solved my problem with WordPress caching

For a long time, I have had problems with apparent caching of WordPress RSS feeds. In my recent work on WordPress support for rssCloud, I eventually was able to get a notification about a WordPress update from the RSS Cloud plugin, but the content of the feed did not update. I spent some time on this again this week, and decided to search for “wordpress caching issues bluehost” (since Bluehost is my hosting service). I found this post on ThemeSkills which described a feature within the Bluehost interface that controls caching on a site-by-site basis. After reading through the post, I was able to turn off caching on my test site for RSS Cloud. I then made a post on that site and saw the update within seconds on FeedLand and MyStatusTool, and saw the latest post display – at last!

Here are the steps:

  • Log into Bluehost account
  • Click on the My Sites link on the left navigation bar
  • Scroll to the site to review and click the Manage button
  • Click on the Performance tab
  • In the Cache Settings area of the page, slide the slider all the way to the left. If it is already there, move it to the right to the Blog area, then back all the way to the left
  • A pop-up will appear, click on the Disable Caching button

PS – Here is a Bluehost page on this topic as well

Lazyweb request – I am trying to make sure WordPress is not caching RSS feeds, I tried these things but it did not work. WordPress devs, please get in touch if you have any ideas! I am trying to test a RSS Cloud plugin I developed.

Trying to get my WordPress site back

Earlier this week, I wanted to start posting again on my website, AndySylvester.com. When I went to log in, all I saw was a white screen. After some searching, I found that this was a thing for WordPress sites (“white screen of death”). Ugh – just what I needed! I found a few articles (https://themeisle.com/blog/cant-access-wp-admin/, https://www.hostinger.com/tutorials/fix-wordpress-white-screen-of-death, https://www.hostinger.com/tutorials/fix-locked-out-of-wordpress-admin-issue)

and did the following steps:

• Added a line in wp-config.php to increase memory to 64 MB
• Checked my WordPress core files (they were up to date)
• Renamed my plugin and themes directories
• Added a DEBUG MODE statement to wp-config.php

At this point, I was able to see some error messages:

Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /home3/andysylv/public_html/wp-config.php:1) in /home3/andysylv/public_html/wp-login.php on line 462

Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /home3/andysylv/public_html/wp-config.php:1) in /home3/andysylv/public_html/wp-login.php on line 478

Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /home3/andysylv/public_html/wp-config.php:1) in /home3/andysylv/public_html/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6828

However, I still could not log in. I spent some time with Bluehost tech support (both chat and phone support), but did not get much help there. As part of their troubleshooting, I turned SSL support on and off (that had a side effect, will discuss later in this post).

Per this post, I removed the closing PHP tag in wp-config.php.

Per this Stack Exchange post (https://stackoverflow.com/questions/42832860/wordpress-utf-8-without-bom), I resaved wp-config.php and wp-login.php to force UTF-8 encoding without BOM. At that point, the error messages were removed, and the login fields remained, but now I was getting messages related to cookies, and saw some redirection in the URL field in the browser. Read through these articles (https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/215032/cookie-domain-setting-confusion, https://wp-staging.com/how-to-fix-the-error-cookies-are-blocked-or-not-supported-by-your-browser/).

I tried to get Bluehost to turn off SSL for my site (although I already de-selected that). They said they turned it off, but subdomains on andysylvester.com still showed up as secure sites, which messed up some of the display (had links to http which were interpreted as “unsecure” – arrrgh!).

I decided to change the URL of my site in the MySQL database from http://andysylvester.com to https://andysylvester.com.

Also, per this post (https://themeisle.com/blog/add-wordpress-https/) , I added the following line to wp-config.php:

define(‘FORCE_SSL_ADMIN’, true);

After I did this, I was FINALLY able to log into my site – whew!

I do not know how this whole thing started, but I am glad to get back to posting!

Choosing a mailing list tool for WordPress besides MailChimp

I started a news site for covering the protests in Portland (https://portlandprotestnews.com/), and I wanted to offer a way for people to subscribe to an email newsletter containing the daily posts. My first thought was to set up a MailChimp newsletter, since I already had one set up for another site (https://OrgModeForBeginners.com). However, I quickly realized the first limitation of a free account on MailChimp – only one mailing list allowed – darn! I was not interested in starting to pay $10/month to MailChimp, and it would only bump up to 3 mailing lists. So, I started looking for other free alternatives.

My first step was to find another service like MailChimp. After a little searching, I decided to try out Sendinblue (https://www.sendinblue.com/). However, the email it sent out was not impressive (I selected a RSS publish, and it did not show any links except to the main posts), and the subscription form had some problems in sizing, so I resumed my search.

My next experiment was to look at the mailing list feature provided by my web hosting service (based on GNU Mailman (https://list.org/)). I spent about 4 hours over 2 days poring through setup instructions and managed to get a mailing list set up that seemed to work the way I wanted. I then needed to create a signup form, and tried using WPForms (https://wpforms.com/), which was available as a free plugin within my WordPress install. I got a form set up, but then had problems getting the form to send an email to the email address for the mailing list to add a new subscriber. At that point, I decided to try another tack – looking for a WordPress plugin that could handle everything.

The first plugin I tried was WP-Subscribe (https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-subscribe/), but it only worked with MailChimp, Aweber, and Feedburner (could not use any other email delivery provider, I was thinking I could reuse the Mailman list I set up, but no go). The grand prize winner was The Newsletter Plugin (https://www.thenewsletterplugin.com/), which had a free version that supported signing up subscribers, creating a newsletter, and sending it out to the list. After about an hour of testing, I sent out my first newsletter, and it looked good! I ended up deciding to copy the text from the daily weblog post to the HTML email newsletter form, and adding custom embed code for Twitter posts.

Overall, I learned a lot about setting up mailing lists and figuring out what I wanted from a mailing list tool. My top features were price and ease of use. If I could have created another MailChimp list, I would have done it in a second (since I had an account). Since I did not want to spend anything just yet on a new mailing list provider, ease of use was the next criteria. It was a shame that it took the better part of two days to weed through the contenders, but I think I found a solution that will at least get me started.