plugins

April 30, 2013

Things to do With Stealth Login Page – Rickroll Hackers

Since launching my Stealth Login Page plugin on April Fool’s Day (I know, I should have waited until Tuesday), I’ve been Rickrollling would-be hackers. Because you can enter any URL you want into the redirect field, you can send them Rick Astley’s way when they don’t enter your login string correctly.

I’ve been Rickrolled myself a number of times and it’s annoying as heck when my headphones are jacked to the max… on MY OWN site!

Here’s how:

Download Stealth Login Page from the repository or directly in your dashboard.
Activate the plugin.
Click the Settings link to set up the Rickroll.
Once on the settings page, enter http://youtu.be/dQw4w9WgXcQ?t=2m6s as the URL for the redirect.
Enter your answer and question phrases.
Be sure to e-mail yourself the new login URL so you can always get back in without getting Rickrolled.
Click the Save Settings button.

Now go Rickroll some bad dudes.

January 14, 2013

Changing the Genesis Minimum 2.0 Banner Image – GMIE

Introducing Genesis Minimum Images Extended – GMIE

One of the first things I fell in love with in the new Minimum 2.0 child theme was the large banner image on the homepage. Then I was sold on using it more and more (I’m running it on 2 of my own sites) when I saw the banner was also on the single post pages.

Pinterest's shortcoming Then I noticed an issue with it that affects the social media sharing (hi, Pinterest) and the grid loop or archive settings when displaying the featured images I was creating. When there is only one featured image assigned to a post or page, regardless of them thumbnail sizes that can be created, aspect ratio is often king. Pinterest (unlike Facebook, Google+, and LinkedIn) doesn’t even allow you to scroll to another image, so you’re stuck with the original image AND aspect ratio of the featured image.

Most great things people use come out of having a need or want and finding a solution. This is my solution to this dilemma. Never having written or published a plugin before, I sought out the teaching help of Nick Croft, Robert Neu, and Brandon Kraft to release Genesis Minimum Images Extended, known by us as GMIE. Even the legendary Bill Erickson contributed some assistance with portions of code that included his work with Custom Metaboxes (CMB).

How it works

It’s rather simple (and we have an update to some tiny improvements in the next day or two). We’re all familiar with featured images for posts/pages, right? Well, the stock use of that in Minimum 2.0 is to also make that into the banner image below the header in single posts and pages. To fit the 1600px width of the theme’s CSS, that calls for a 600px tall image.

Who wants a 600px tall image pushing down their valuable content? That’s fine for the homepage like a big banner (like I’m using now), but not for posts. I quickly started shrinking the banner images to 350px on down to 250px. That was making for awkward slivers of images on the homepage grid loop, blog index page, and in Pinterest (see above).

My only solution at the time was to disable the images in the blog index and homepage. That made my content very plain until people arrived at my posts. I didn’t like that.

No longer is that the solution with GMIE. Now you can select another image to be used for the banner and you can make it any wonky aspect ratio you want and still keep a beautiful featured image for social media and the other uses Genesis has for featured images, such as the featured widgets and more. Just treat it like you would the featured image function and it’ll automatically appear below your header.

Why don’t you give it a try on your own Minimum 2.0 sites/projects and see how you like it?

December 31, 2012

4 Tips to Speed up Your WordPress Site

Speed is crucial in those precious first seconds someone visits your site. If you can’t satisfy someone’s basic desire to get content quickly, they won’t care how good your content is and won’t stick around to find out if it was worth the wait.

There should be no wait.

People are an impatient breed. In separate studies, Amazon showed a 1% decrease in purchases for every 1/10th of a second of delay they intentionally added to their servers and Google experienced decreased searches when tripling results by taking 0.5 seconds longer. Page load speed directly influences how long people will stay on your site. Google ranks slower sites lower than sites with a faster load, all other things equal. The numbers any way you look at it tell you to speed things up.

I’ve been a constant tweaker of code, plugins, servers, hosting plans, and all of that stuff isn’t for everyone, so here is the quick version of all that work to find speed success.

Use a FAST host

If your hosting company/plan can’t serve up content quickly, it won’t matter what you do on the server, no one will be able to see content faster. You’re at the mercy (or benefit) of your host first and foremost.

I use WP Engine – a managed WordPress host – after a steady progression from bad shared hosting to good shared hosting to VPS to managed hosting. I have about 10 solid reasons why its $29/mo is the best money you’ll spend on your WordPress site and more than 25 of my clients have migrated their business sites to WP Engine, with more making the move soon.

Use an optimized theme

I’ve seen lots of free and “premium” themes do things that would make Hannibal Lecter cringe – things that ought not to be. Ever. Some slow a site down by multiple seconds because they were poorly written to load all of the “features” on every pageview and in the header rather than the footer (more on that later).

The best advice is to go with a reputable developer with a proven track record of quality and support. For me, that’s landed me with the Genesis framework by StudioPress since 2010. There are others, but I’ve been down “the path of many roads” and it led me to sticking to one and I’ve not yet regretted my choice in over the past 18 months.

Cache your content as much as possible

Some really good hosts offer automatic caching and CDNs while others just require you to use a caching plugin or a good 3rd party CDN to vastly improve the load times of content that’s already been processed and quickly fetched from the cache. CloudFlare is a great option for simple CDN setup and many hosts offer it as a simple option to enable it.

Be conservative in your use of plugins

Plugins can slow a site down just as much as any or all of the previous points. Sometimes, they’re five times worse than all of the other downfalls put together, taking 20-30 seconds to load a page. Not every new benefit or feature you want to add to a site requires a plugin. Often, there is a simple line or snippet of code that you can easily add using any one of hundreds of tutorials to avoid a plugin.

Simple, eh?

That’s not too much for the average semi-proficient WordPress user, at least not to receive the core benefits of these steps. You might have a more cookie-cutter site unless you happen to be able to do all of the changes (and modify the theme to suit your design style, if you change to a framework), but your site will instantly be a hit with Google and readers who aren’t so caught up in fancy design.

If you want/need any help, I’m always available via the comments or my contact page.