You’ve just installed a new plugin or upgraded WordPress and you’re getting the dreaded White Screen of Death. You visit your site and you get nothing but a white screen. You try to log in to your dashboard and you can’t even get the login box. What to do? In this episode I show you how two of the most common fixes to the dreaded White Screen of Death.
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Wait, haven’t I already made this post? Well, yes, but it’s a hot issue again.
In case you’ve been living under a rock, here’s the controversial meeting of Matt Mullenweg and Chris Pearson (creator of the Thesis theme).
Would WordPress Sue The Maker Of Thesis, A Leading WordPress Theme?(sorry the embed code doesn’t work so you’ll have to head over there to listen to it.
Please listen to the whole thing. It’s amazing how Chris chooses to ignore the GPL, and disrespect the whole WordPress community, simply because he doesn’t think the GPL makes business sense.
Chris – if you don’t think the GPL makes business sense, go find another project to develop your themes for. You’ll have to find a CMS that runs on Windows Server & SQL server, running IIS. Yeah, there’s a big market!
I love the part where Chris claims he is one of the most important people in the WordPress community. Before tonight i’d never heard of him. For a good counter-point, check out The 10 most important people in WordPress
The solution? According to Chris: “There’s no resolving this. Either you sue me or you don’t”
So people, please stay safe, use GPL themes, hug a WordPress developer and help make the world a better place!
Wordpress.org/extend/themes is the only place you should get WordPress themes from. Why? Googling for “free WordPress themes” is dangerous. In this episode I show how the first page results for “free WordPress themes” will return you themes full of Very Bad Stuff(tm). How can you avoid this stuff, and find out if your themes are clean? Find out in this week’s episode!
Download the episode Here
I’m going to WordCamp Savannah (GA). A WordCamp is a kind of conference where you can meet lots of other interesting people who use WordPress. I’m giving away 4 tickets to WordCamp Savannah – but you have to watch the video to find out how to get them.
Ok, so if you Google “free WordPress themes” the results are full of themes that have bad stuff in them. By bad stuff I mean encrypted code. This code could be doing anything – installing viruses on your visitor’s computers, sending spam, hacking your site (or other people’s sites). Installing random themes is a very dangerous thing to do.
WordPress Theme Authenticity Checker to the rescue. This is a WordPress plugin which will scan all of your installed themes for Bad Stuff. In the video I demonstrate how it finds encrypted code in an infected theme. You should install this plugin and run it whenever you install a new theme – before you activate the theme.
Now you’re wondering, where can I get safe themes? It’s actually very easy. Just log into your WordPress dashboard and go under Appearance/Add New Themes. The themes there come from WordPress.org/extend/themes and these themes are much less likely to have bad stuff in them. Plus they’re way easier to install – just click the install button! Also, either now or very soon, each theme in the WordPress.org theme repository will be reviewed by a group of theme reviewers, so they’ll be even better.
That’s it. Be sure to listen to the Podcast to see how you can get a free ticket to WordCamp Savannah (you still have to figure out how to get there, I’m not paying for a plane or hotel room!).
Heat Maps allow you to see what people are clicking on, and optimize your web site, advertisments, and navigation. Click Heat is a Open Source (free) Heat Map program, and I show you how to set it up on your WordPress site. Enjoy!
JanRain RPX/Engage is a plugin that allows users to sign into your web site using many different proviers, like twitter, facebook and openid. In this episode I show you how to install and configure JanRain RPX and conifgure it to allow twitter logins.
WordPress is great software, which allows people who don’t have much technical knowledge to publish their information on the Internet. For me, the WordPress software was a really interesting ‘gadget’, a cool piece of software that was really easy to hack around with, modify, and yes even to make a bit of money with.
The vast majority of the Internet is either outright spam, or thinly veiled money making schemes, and a high percentage of this crap runs on WordPress (because it’s so easy!). This can be frustrating – I know that some of the viewers of my podcast are using the tutorials to set up spam sites, autobloggers or other such crap. Several times I’ve thought about quitting the podcast because of this.
On May 1, that all changed. For the second time I made the trek to San Francisco for WordCamp 2010, which is basically a gathering of WordPress users and fanatics. I knew this one was a ‘must attend’ because Richard Stallman, guru of Free Software was speaking. Now, Richard (aka: rms) has an important message about the importance of freedom and the role open source plays. And WordPress is open source software, which is why it is such a huge success. But rms himself came across as a childish, religious fanatic, and to be honest, I spent most of his presentation laughing and mocking him on Twitter.
(and no you can’t watch his talk. He had the stream turned off, because they weren’t streaming in an ‘Open’ video format)
I was kind of bummed. The big talk of WordCamp was a flop.
Then came the ‘lightning sessions’ – quick 5 minute talks. Kudos to the organizers for trying something new, but mostly it was ‘in person’ spam.
Finally Rinat Tuhvatshin got up on stage and started talking about his little WordPress MU site that he runs. Kloop.kg (or Kloop.info for english version). In Kyrgyzstan. Actually it’s more of a new site. They get young people, and teach them how to be reporters, and these people report the news on the web site. Now Kyrgistan isn’t exactly a stable country – just check out Google News. Human rights issues and violently oppressed protests are not uncommon. Kloop.kg reporters report what is really happening, and the Government isn’t happy about it.
Rinat explained how he once received a call from a representative of the government, who told him he had to take down a certain post or he would be killed. We (the audience) all burst out laughing. But he wasn’t joking and the laugh died off quickly, as the audience realized this wasn’t just another ‘SEO Expert’ or Author with a book to sell. This was a man who was willing to risk his life to get the word out about a repressive government. This was a man who had received and defied death threats from his own government. Who’s reporters were risking their lives every day, so that they could post updates to their WordPress blog. How stupid we all were to laugh.
This was the most serious, important talk of the day and it was only 5 minutes long. There wasn’t a dry eye in the house, myself included.
Maybe 25% of the WordPress blogs out there are spam. Maybe 50 or even 99.999% could be spam – who cares. As long as there is at least one person like Rinat and his band of reporters, who are risking their lives to get the word out about important stuff (like a repressive government), the WordPress project is worth contributing to. If 29,999 of the episode views of my podcast were spammers trying to build better faster Viagra spam sites, and only one single view of one single episode helped one single person make life a little better for his or her fellow citizens, that makes this Podcast and all of the thousands of dollars (yes that much) I’ve spent worth it.
That’s why WordPress is no longer a hobby or cool gadget for me. WordPress is an obsession. WordPress is a world changing tool. WordPress is serious, and important. WordPress is a software program that IS making the world better, and not just in some theoretical way.
At the time of this writing, both Kloop.KG and Kloop.info were down. The last twitter post on the kloopinfo account was over a month ago.
Do you want to contribute to WordPress? The Contribute page at Wordpress.org. has many ways you can contribute, even if you aren’t a programmer. Please, help make the world a better place by contributing to WordPress!
How to install and configure the W3 Total Cache, and set up a CDN (content delivery network) using AWS S3 and Cloudfront. Don’t worry, it’s much easier than it sounds, and you’ll get more visitors to your site!
Backing up your wordpress installation (or installations) is extremely important. For all you know, as you read this your web hosting provider could have just gone out of business. Or a hard drive just died. Or somebody just deleted the wrong folder. How will you recover?
In this episode I show you how to do a full back up of all of your sites (even non-wordpress sites). Please, please back up your data ASAP!
Once we get that over with, I also show you the cool Google Font API, which allows you to add fonts to your web site, without your end users having to have them installed. Exciting stuff!
So, do you like the new site? Yesterday I completley re-designed the web site. The old site was looking quite ugly, and cluttered. It felt to me like it was just a dumping ground for new podcast episodes.
So I re-did it. The new site is based on teh Atahualpa theme. The front page is a static page, which will always show the current episode, plus a few (as few as possible) links. You can get to older episodes or to the blog from the links along the top or bottom.
In addition, I now have a Blip.TV pro account ($8 a month) which gives me some extra video encoding features. For any of the new episodes, if you visit the web site from an iPhone or iPad you will be able to play the video right in your browser! I also plan on releasing an iPod compatible RSS feed, so that you can subscribe and watch episodes on your iPod. I’m currently going through and re-encoding older shows, so if you browse through the archives, you should slowly see more episodes be viewable on your iPad/iPhone.
I also have two advertising pages up. It’s sad but true, I do need to do some advertising on this show. It costs me about $20 a month for hosting accounts and I spend about 8 hours a week just producing the show. This doesn’t include equipment costs and time spent maintaining and promoting the show. Any of the ads you’ve seen before have been affiliate ads, you may have noticed that in the last few episodes i’ve dropped those ads, and I’m now looking for legitimate advertisers.
If you are interested in advertising on the show, there are two ways you can do it. I’m thinking of doing Micro-Ads which will be short ads for $2 a show (depending on viewer interest), and as soon as I can find an advertiser I will start doing real ads too. So if you’re interested check out those pages, and email me at podcast@teachmewp.com
So what do you think about the new web site, and what do you think of advertising? Please let me know in the comment box below.
This episode is chock full of SEO tips for your wordpress blog. Tips that are easy for a normal person to impliment! Meta tags suck, Google XML Sitemap, Page Rank checker and more! Visit teachmewp.com for more episodes