Chris K Designs

You have no idea how hard it was to refrain from using the command ‘sed’ in a totally ridiculous homophoned title. Have you found yourself wanting to change the domain on an established WordPress installation, or even trying to replicate many times over the same exact WordPress database on a different domain? Yeah, me too. I’ve found while doing plug-in development, it helps to have the same database information copied over when I start with a new branch. Luckily, Linux comes to the rescue with the sed command. It’s a 3 step process. Export your source/current database. Search and replace with sed, and then import the database. Here’s a step by step for you.
Continue reading “Change your WordPress domain quickly with Linux, MySQL, and sed” »

Ok, you’ve read this title and thought, “Why would I want to remove the version from WordPress…in fact, what does he even mean!?”. By default, WordPress (since version 2.5+) includes the version of WordPress you are using in the HTML code of your site, and does not have an option to remove it.

If you view the source code of your site after you’ve loaded it up in your favorite browser you’ll see a line like so:

<meta name="generator" content="WordPress 3.0">

Continue reading “How To: Remove the version from WordPress” »

The 404 – File Not Found error. Its the darkest corner of your website that you probably don’t encounter too often, but do you know how often others are getting them on your site? Odds are, you don’t. One way to increase visitors (and more importantly keep visitors) is to avoid the 404 error, or embrace it by planning for it. Part of development is to always test the ‘negative case’. The case in which you know your code will fail. The same holds true in URLS. What happens if someone goes to a page or URL that doesn’t exist on your site? Go ahead, try it…I’ll wait. – There, that wasn’t so hard was it? What did you find? For most of you using WordPress, it’ll be a standard 404 page that your theme is using. Not too bad, but how many people are actually seeing this, usually content-less, page? Let’s find out.

Continue reading “The 411 on 404s” »

I have a confession to make, I’m a Google Chrome addict. *Phew* Ok, that wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. Ever since Google Chrome moved out of beta for the Mac, I’ve given it a fair shot as my primary browser. The change from Firefox to Chrome wasn’t easy to start, but I slowly found Chrome to be must faster and more stable. The one thing I was missing…were my Extensions. Well, now that Chrome is out of beta, Google has enabled extensions for the Mac version. If you are a blogger there are plenty of great plugins to help your writing and moderating, but here are a few that I’m finding helpful.

Continue reading “3 Chrome Extensions for WordPress Blogging” »

The most commonly misused part of any blogging platform is by far the categories features. I’m sure you’ve seen it before, the post that is “Filed In: Updates, LOLCATS, Funny, Images, Pictures, and blah blah blah”. Misused categories can lead to ugly meta data, poor navigation, and even worse SEO. At this point you might be asking yourself, “So why did he mention these ‘tags’ things?” Well, I’m glad you asked.

Continue reading “Categories vs. Tags – A Simple guide” »