A friend recently built her clients’ new WordPress site in a sub-folder so the old site would remain functional while they worked on the new one. Now that she’s ready to go live, she wasn’t sure how to move the new site to the main domain and asked if I would be available. I told her she really doesn’t need me. This is why. You don’t have to move it. You only need to tell WordPress where you want your blog/site to appear to load from. It is super easy and only takes a few minutes. Just follow these instructions. Definitely bookmark or clip it for later reference. Don’t want to do it that way or absolutely must move it? You could do it manually. The best way I’ve found is to simply use BackupBuddy. Yup, it’s not just for backups. It is 10 times faster and easier than manual. Definitely what you’ll want when working on client sites – especially if you’re being paid by project. Here’s a quick post about BackupBuddy’s restore process if you want to learn more how that works. Image by Asurroca

A friend asked recently, Isn’t there a way in WordPress to turn of comments globally? I have unchecked everything in the discussion settings and the posts still show a comment box. What have I missed? There are 3 things you need to keep in mind when it comes to comment display. The general setting, Old posts and the theme. New blog sites If it’s a new site then you want to make sure you set comments to off under Discussions. You also want to make sure to go into your default first post and page individually and uncheck the allow comments box. Existing blog sites If it is an existing site with posts and pages added, the process is the same. Turn it off under Discussions – this will turn comments off from the time you set it off onward but not past posts. You can disable comments in bulk using the bulk edit feature – select all posts then hit edit and apply but if you have thousands of posts – hmm… I generally prefer to edit the database But wait! There’s the theme None of the above settings will work if the theme is poorly coded to ignore them. You see, a good theme will

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The insufficient permissions error can cover a lot of different things. And that’s the bad news. It means the solutions can also be very different each time. That’s why it is absolutely important to pay attention to what you are doing just before you hit the problem. That’s true no matter what you’re doing but that’s another post. Sometimes this error is triggered due to wrong folder permissions. At other times, it can be related to the way a plugin is coded – assuming of course it is a plugin we are talking about. It is rare I encounter the insufficient permissions error working on WordPress. Today, my problem had everything to do with a plugin and I thought I’d document it here for everyone’s benefit. While working with a plugin, some features were not accessible to me because it threw an insufficient permissions error. This is odd because the general settings page for the plugin loads without problems. After some investigation, I discovered it was a case of poor coding. The developer hard coded the plugin directory name in some areas but my plugin directory name was different from the one coded. The simple fix was to simply rename

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Another good question from our mailbag “The www seemed to have disappeared from my site when I visit it. I always use www in my links but when I go to my site it loads without the www in it.” Before I go into the likely fix, a little back story so you understand the underlying issue. Normally all sites are accessible using either www or without. However for SEO purposes, some web masters ‘force’ the URL to only www or without. If you notice TechBasedMarketing does NOT use www. Why? It’s just my preference. I think it shortens my already long domain name and I feel by now or at least going on out, people are more focused on the domain name than the www.  In short, I feel the www is redundant. Ok… so now you know you can ‘force’ your site to display with or without whichever you choose doesn’t matter as long as you pick one and stick with it. According to the question above, the site owner obviously wants the www in the URL back. Since she is using WordPress, the first thing you should do is: Log into WordPress ad admin, go to Settings

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New to online information publishing? Then there’s a good chance you’re wondering where people get those PDF file creators – and since you are bootstrapping it, you might especially be interested in a free PDF file creator. We understand. Even though we aren’t at the start up phase anymore, but we still use a free PDF file creator mostly because we are really happy with it. But let’s backup a little bit. There are multiple ways to create PDFs. Many of the free and popular ones are nothing more than virtual printers. That means, when you install it on your computer, it will show up as a printer in your printer list. One such free PDF file creator we’ve used a lot in the past is well… aptly named PDFCreator. It is an opensource program – so you pay nothing. The other way is just to use a word processor that is also capable of saving or exporting to PDF. You can use Google Docs, or you can use OpenOffice – a program we use extensively and used to create all kinds of PDF documents from reports, checklists, paid products down to our (ahem!) beautiful blogging planner and calendar. We

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