After upgrading to PHP 7.4 on BlueHost, one of my sites started giving this warning message when viewing the site: Deprecated: Directive ‘allow_url_include’ is deprecated in Unknown on line 0 Sometimes it would occur with raw HTML formatting, reading: <b>Deprecated</b>: Directive ‘allow_url_include’ is deprecated in <b>Unknown</b> on line <b>0</b><br /> Read more…
I have a bunch of different merchandise available for sale in the shop on my music/comedy website. Creating merch to sell to your fans and delivering it to them turns out to be a lot easier than you might think.
The secret is to join Printful. They are a print-on-demand printing house who drop-ship the products directly to your fans. You don’t need to handle orders, hold stock or worry about warehousing yourself.
Your fans see a professional looking shop on your site where they can order products that are physically created in response to each order and shipped directly to them by Printful. All you have to do is sit back and collect the cash while you make music.
I use my iPhone to record audio for my blog sometimes. Exporting these memos is easy once you know how; but since I use a PC rather than a MAC, the iTunes user interface is… well, less than entirely intuitive to me. Voice memos show up in two places in Read more…
I recently had a Google Custom Search box appear at the bottom of all the posts on my blog, which I don’t remember asking for. After a bit of digging, I found that the Really Simple Share plugin was generating it. I’m guessing it’s a new feature, that ReadyGraph have Read more…
I’ve just had Google Webmaster tools report phishing attacks on all my sites hosted by HostGator. Initially, I thought my sites had been compromised; but since I always use strong passwords and pay attention to site security, I couldn’t work out how. So I contacted HostGator technical support and learned Read more…
I recommend FileZilla for transferring files to and from your hosting service provider via ftp. It’s much easier than using the CPanel file manager for uploads and downloads, especially when several files are involved. Sometimes you need both though, such as if I’m uploading and extracting a ZIP file; then Read more…
I’ve recently upgraded MailPress on my comedy blog and The Confident Man Project. Upgrading MailPress is a little trickier than upgrading most WordPress plugins because the automatic upgrade will wipe out your local customisations, like your MailPress child theme. Here’s the simplest way I’ve found to do it: On the Read more…
I’m finally getting into outsourcing, and I came across one small gotcha while outsourcing the transcription of a bunch of YouTube videos on The Confident Man Channel. I wanted my freelancer to transcribe the videos and create a blog post on The Confident Man Project with the text of what I said in each video.
Now I don’t want to give my freelancer free reign on my site, so I created a user for them to log in with, assigned the role of Contributor. This allows them to create draft posts for submission, but not to publish them. I still get the final chance to review the posts before hitting the “publish” button. (One day I’ll let go of control completely… but not yet).
That’s all well and good, except that by default Contributors can’t upload and set featured images, which many themes use to entice readers to click on other articles when they visit my site, and is important for SEO.
(a.k.a.: How to remove the Conduit search virus) There’s an evil Firefox plugin distributed with some downloadable software which reconfigures Firefox to redirect to search.conduit.com whenever it encounters a 404 error from any website. I know it’s evil because it’s installed without your consent. It’s also confusing and massively annoying Read more…
Every now and then something goes wrong on one of my blogs, and I want to resend an existing post in my next MailPress newsletter. Perhaps I mess up something in the server configuration and mail starts getting lost, but I don’t notice for a few posts. Creating a new Read more…