If you used Fantastico, Softaculous, cPanel’s script installer etc. They all have an easy delete button. Use it. This by the way is in your cPanel or your web host‘s control panel. You cannot delete WordPress by logging into your WordPress site itself.

If it was installed manually or you don’t know how it was originally installed, then follow these steps for web hosts that run cPanel.

Step 1 – Find out your database name and user by reviewing the wp-config.php file.

Step 2 – Delete the MySQL database and user. Be careful when deleting user that it is not being used by another script.

Step 3 – Delete all the WordPress files in your public_html folder.

For more detailed, step-by-step instruction, watch this video to see how I do it.

The time has come for May Madness again. Woot! We have put up a special too. It is a 2-day intensive class for those who:

• Need guidance setting up a WordPress site or,
• Anyone who wants to develop WordPress sites F-A-S-T without FTP, HTML or CSS

Everything we do from set up to editing fonts, colors, backgrounds and even creating custom layouts is all point-and-click using the browser.

Photocredit:Yutaka Tsutano 

There’s a really good chance, this won’t be a decision you have to make – good for you. Most marketers I know, sell their digital content via a third party system like 1ShoppingCart, eJunkie or Clickbank. If you ever wished you could drop that monthly payment, perhaps you might reconsider after reading this post. With that said, I’m writing this not to convince people to stay nor switch to a third party system, merely to pose the question to all – a question that we have perhaps never worried too much about until now.

Why now? Because, in the last 6 months (and I predict going on into the future), we’ve seen more hacking and site breaches. These are beyond the normal defacing and uploading of malicious content. Those are bad enough but this is even more scary, ranging from domain hijacking to outright stealing of customer databases.

These types of attacks, rob us of our brand, business, credibility and trust. Things that are much tougher to fix than cleaning up a site and getting it back on into the search engines. They also leave small businesses very vulnerable to law suits. Just one case could end our business and perhaps leave us in financial ruin which is why it’s important to set your company up with the right structure. That however is another huge topic for another day.

Given this scenario, I’m actually re-considering a 3rd party shopping cart.

True, it is another monthly expense but having customer information stolen from them vs. stolen from you is a huge difference. You may not be off the hook completely but depending how the breach occurs, customers could even be sympathetic. Have information stolen from you and there is absolutely no room for any excuses. Zero. At this point, we are only talking about data like name, email address and perhaps a telephone number. Not about storing credit card data and other more sensitive information. Few people I know actually store that kind of data. Yet, name, address, emails and phone is still plenty depending who you talk to.

What do you use? Does this post make you look at your monthly shopping cart payments in a different light? Does it make you want to switch to a 3rd party system if you use a self hosted cart – this by the way includes WordPress carts and membership systems. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

You go upgrade your WordPress site using the usual one click upgrade and BAM! It fails. Ugh.

Maybe you’re equipped with the skills to manually upgrade it and you do it, you click the database to update and everything should be good right? Noooo… you had to get this error

“An automated WordPress update has failed to complete”

WHAT? How can that be? You just manually upgraded it and it went OK how do you get this message off?

Here’s how.

Fire up your FTP program or log in to cPanel. Find the upgrade folder found inside the wp-content folder and remove it. Then, inside the same folder wp-config.php is found, you will likely see a .maintenance file. Get rid of that too and the error will be gone.

The problem with images is, you only have so many of your own you can use, it can get uber expensive to buy stock photos for every single post. So most of us will go search and use images from Flickr or similar places. Free images usually require a link back or credits – small price to pay really.

Sadly, by default WordPress captions don’t allow links. It will strip them out and you can add photo credits that link back to the photographer, I often had to relegate it all the way to the bottom which is OK I guess but rather disjointed. I could make the image clickable but I don’t think that would give a good user experience because people just don’t expect that when they click on the image.

Then, I found out links in captions will be supported in version 3.4. Yay! So I downloaded the 3.4 beta to test. Here’s how it works.

When you add images, you won’t notice anything new in the interface but now, you can enter anchor links in HTML directly into the caption field.

If you are not good with HTML no matter, after you add the image to your post, you can simply highlight the caption text you want linked, then click the Insert/edit link button in the Visual editor. You’ll get the familiar popup to either enter your URL or choose to link to one of your old, published posts. Nice!

The end result will look a little like this.

Keep in mind, your theme will use its own styling so the final design will depend on your theme but otherwise, links in caption works great! Looking forward to WP 3.4

Here are two places to learn more about it.

Sucuri

iThemes

Photo credit: David Singleton via Flickr

If you are using aMember version 4 and getting ready to pay affiliates, you may find there are no commissions to pay. The good news is, it is not a bug but a setting. By default, aMember sets commissions to be delayed by 31 days. So any sale that is less than 31 days old is not included in the report. If you had no commission-able sales older than 31 days, aMember assumes no commissions are to be paid.

To protect yourself, a 30 or 31 day delay on commission payments isn’t such a bad idea. There have been merchants who lost a lot of money on fraudulent sales. The fake sales were made using stolen credits cards through an affiliate URL. So the merchant is already out of the money from the stolen card but since they had paid the affiliate their commissions, it’s a double whammy.

Of course, if you have an established affiliate program and change your payment terms, you will want to give your affiliates a good explanation and some time to get used to the idea.

Anyhow, in aMember, changing the delay to 0 will allow you to generate commission payments.

Photo credit: Johan Larsson via Flickr

So what are the apps that can be found on my mobile devices that are also on the laptop and desktop?

On the phone (Android)

1. BizCalendar by Mikado I love love love the many calendar widgets.

2. Navigation – this is turn by turn GPS directions that came with my phone. LOVE IT! Great when visiting new local clients in unfamiliar territory.

3. FlexT9 – I can actually ‘write’ instead of type and something else called trace or swype. You don’t type but you just trace the words with your finger this is fantastic. Unfortunately have not been able to find similar app for my husband’s iPhone. Of course with Android I can talk instead of type – it’s just… I’m not a talker.

On the iPad

1. WordPress

2. Air Sketch like a whiteboard with the option to stream your whiteboard over Wifi. Great for presentations or webinars.

3. HoursTracker – Time Sheet & Time Tracker. Very helpful for tracking jobs for clients or even your own projects so you know exactly how much time (and money) you spend on a project.

On both the phone, iPad, laptop and desktop

1. Evernote

2. Dropbox

3. Roboform

4. GQueues – Project and task manager – this is not exactly an app but a web based app you access via the browser yet behaves like an app. I’m becoming quite attached to GQueues so this is essential.

In the past, I’ve been rather paranoid about these keys and always archived them safely in my email. Which of course is a good thing. But over time, I’ve found even my emails can be unreliable. How?

• If you use Gmail and lose access to it. BIG problem, Google does not make it easy to get your account back, I’ve known people who lost it all, never to regain access again.
• If you store your emails on your computer well… you know for sure things happen to your hard drive. So here, I’ll insert the obligatory reminder to backup your computer always. Even with backup, on more than one occasion, I’ve almost deleted the backup to my entire archive of emails. What can I say, I forget what’s in there sometimes because I don’t use desk top based email anymore.

Within the time span of 6 months, I’ve had to re-install Windows once and upgrade Windows once. Which meant I had to scramble to get all my software back in my computer – twice. If you’ve done it before you know this is a huge pain in the behind. But wait! It gets more fun. I needed license keys to many of them grr…

The upshot to that – I’ve started saving all my license keys in Evernote as an extra backup. It’s a lot easier for me than trying to sieve through all those emails and, I don’t have to download Thunderbird just so I can view those emails to grab the keys.

Of course, because Evernote accepts so many formats, it works for boxed software too. When I purchased my Livescribe pen, they were running a promotion where we got the handwriting to text converter software $30 value for free. Yippee! Not so good – the license key was printer on a sticker which they stuck on the box! I kept the box around for a while and last year finally tossed it out. After I took a snapshot of the key with my phone and had it uploaded to Evernote of course.

In fact – do it for all your software. A friend just told me the other day she had to buy Microsoft Office all over again because she couldn’t find the box. These software cost a lot of money. If you had to repurchase them that means less money to pay outsourcers, pay yourself or reinvest in your business. So save your investment. Evernote the keys.

What’s not so fun is editing the title of every single image – oh I know, I’m already thinking how to write a plugin that would work great for tutorial writers but that’s a post for another day.

Anyhow, WordPress uses the file name of the image as the title. So if your image file name is Beautiful-hyacinths.jpg then the title will be Beautiful-hyacinths.jpg.

Hyacinth photo credit: Jeff Kramer via Flickr

Due to habit, I always name all files images or not with underscores or dashes. Never with spaces. It’s just something I picked up from the DOS days you know when computing is not as advanced as it is now. That habit got re-inforced when I got online late 90′s because then, you cannot have spaces in your file names either. Your links would break. Web servers just didn’t know how to process files with spaces in them.

Well today, that’s no longer the case. Anytime you upload a file with space in its name, the spaces will be interpreted as %20 which will complete the URL and thus no more broken links to files and images.

Knowing this, if you upload an image to WordPress via the image uploader and the file name is “Beautiful hyacinths.jpg” (quotes only for clarity) then what you get is “Beautiful hyacinths” (without quotes) as the title which would need no further editing. If you look at the screen shot below, the file name still shows with a dash. Apparently, WordPress adds it for us. It’s little things like this that make me love publishing with WordPress so much.

Hyacinth photo credit: Jeff Kramer via Flickr

In other words, if you are uploading a lot of images, re-name them to what you want the title to be, with spaces and you won’t have to edit the image properties. This little bit can save you a lot of clicking and typing, speeding up your content creation.