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How To Fix The White Screen of Death In WordPress

How To Fix The White Screen of Death In WordPress

White Screen of Death on WordPress

You try to log into your WordPress website one day and white is all your see. No message, no error notifications. Nothing! Yikes!!! You think that it might be a mistake.. you try another browser.. and still you see that white screen of death. We all dread this sort of problem. Here are some things you might want to try:

Clear your browser caches. Some browsers like Chrome allow you to clear your browser in a certain time frame (past hour, day etc.)

Disable plugins

Your first step is to try disabling your WordPress plugins one by one and see if that solves the issue. This is due to the fact that nine times out of ten plugins are the culprit for login and white screen issues. You can disable them by renaming them via FTP. (Eg. Add an ending to each folder called “.disabled” or “.null.” Start with any caching plugins then go down the list and each time see if disabling that plugin resolves matters.

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A Week With “Benny” – The WordPress 4.0 Update

It’s been about a week now since the 4.0 update for WordPress codenamed “Benny” was released. Overall, 4.0 makes the step from draft to publishing a much more seamless experience and I love it.

The new update includes a lot of bug fixes and security updates as well as lots of nice nifty new features that WordPress enthusiasts will love. Video embeds are so much easier now. All you have to do is paste in the URL directly from your web browser into your blog post; no more looking for the video embed codes. In addition, WordPress 4.0 supports more sites not just YouTube Sites like WordPress.tv, Ted.com, Vimeo.com, Spotify.com and a ton of other media sites are all supported with this new feature. Furthermore, video and audio files are playable right within the editor.

Plugins are a lot easier to find with the new interface as well. Instead of an all text interface, the plugin view now sports thumbnail pictures of all the plugins plus a whole lot more detailed information that you will find useful. Even currently installed apps show more detail than they ever did before. Without even opening the page, you can more easily see how popular a plugin is as well as when it was updated and even if its compatible or not with your current version of WordPress. Clicking the “More details” link opens up a pop-up window giving you a more detailed description of the plugin. Prior to this you had to go directly to the WordPress.org page for the plugin in another browser window or tab. Certainly the new plugin view makes this makes plugin searches and selection a whole lot easier.

Editing and viewing your posts is a lot more fluid as well. With 4.0 you get a better picture of what your finished masterpiece will look like on your blog page. The new media library, sports an interface with infinite scrolling of your uploaded media. I find this is a great tool to find any broken media as I do occasionally find. Being able to scroll my media lets me find things more easily. The editing window fits your content as you write and keeps the formatting toolbar in view even as you scroll your post, kind of the same way you might freeze panes in Microsoft Excel.

Ultimately, I think the 4.0 update makes the WordPress interface more fun!

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ManageWP An Awesome Way to Manage Your WordPress Sites

Do you find WordPress updates for all your multiple WordPress installs to be a pain? Well I am here to tell you that I am in love with a service called ManageWP . ManageWP enables you to administer and work with all of your WordPress sites at once from a single interface. An update session with each and every one of your WordPress sites can be as much as 40 minutes of your time.

Prior to using this service, I had several under-used blogs collecting dust. I would visit them every once in a while to do mostly major updates then I would forget them for another 4-6 months. Certainly this leaves a lot to risk. A spammer could hack your site and wreck havoc with your blog and even use it as an avenue for spam. Now I feel I have greater control of everything and WordPress updates even the daily ones aren’t such a chore. Pressing one “update all” button updates the plugins and themes for every single WordPress site I own if I choose. I can also update each site selectively or individually as an option.   ManageWP also allows you to :

  • moderate and delete spam comments * Create, post and schedule blog posts
  • Clone and migrate your WordPress sites * Optimize your SEO * Search for and add new plugins to some or all of your domains at once.
  • Check Google Analytics stats for your sites
  • Backup and restore your sites. You can back up  directly to your server or any of the popular 3rd party options including Dropbox, Amazon S3, Google Drive, FTP/SFTP or even email. Scheduling your backups is also available. * Check the security and reputation of your domains
  • Send client reports to people you manage WordPress domains for.

Furthermore, anything that isn’t built into ManageWP’s interface you can do through the native WordPress that it provides. All this comes with amazing 24/7 support and regular email status updates from ManageWP  keep you on top of everything on your dashboard allowing you to get to the business of using your WordPress sites. I feel more informed and in control of my WordPress sites without having to check a bunch of different emails and logging into a bunch of WordPress admin sites.

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Why We Love WordPress

WordPress is the most popular content management system in use today powering millions of websites including 48% of the top 100 Technorati blogs, ranked by In fact, as of this writing, more than 77 million websites run WordPress. This incredible number includes some of the top companies and brand names on the internet including TED, NBCSports, GigaOM, UPS, TechCrunch, CNN, and CBS Radio.
So without much further ado, here are some reasons why we love WordPress.

  1. WordPress is So Easy To Use
    WordPress is so easy to use with its intuitive admin interface. This brings the ability to create a website to the masses regardless of skill level. I think this is the number one reason why we love WordPress so much. Before content management systems like WordPress existed we had to learn complicated website programming code to create a website. Now anyone who wants to publish can start out with an account at WordPress.com or set up their own hosted blog/website using the software at WordPress.org. Best of all, no matter which method you use, WordPress is absolutely free!

  2. WordPress Is So Customizable:
    There are so many ways to customize our beloved content management system. There are tons of paid and free WordPress themes galore to help you customize the look of your WordPress site and with over 29,000 plug-ins and counting the functional possibilities seem limitless. With the power of WordPress almost anyone can make unique blogs and websites.

  3. WordPress Has Many Great Features
    Some of the great features of WordPress include the ability to schedule posts, use short-codes to add more design and function and incredibly design flexibility. If you want to add forums to your website you can do that. If you want to add a form or some other form of feedback on your site, you can do that. Practically anything you want to do with your WordPress based site is possible.

  4. WordPress Is Convenient:
    There are multiple ways to publish using WordPress these days. You can use your browser, email program, and other third-party programs. I think the most flexible of these is the email-to-Wordpress feature where you can publish from anywhere using most devices wether that is your cell phone, tablet, laptop or desktop computer. WordPress also has its own mobile apps. Here are a few links for WordPress apps on popular mobile devices:
    WordPress on Android
    WordPress on iPhone

  5. There are so many tools and services for WordPress:
    There are quite a number of third-party services that will enhance and help you with your WordPress site; from backup and security services to design and customization. Furthermore, if you are looking for a great host you can use any of the usual hosts or you can go with a host who specializes in WordPress hosting. I recommend WP Engine. Click to read my full review of WP Engine read here.

  6. WordPress Is Great for Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
    In a nutshell SEO is making it easier for search engines such as Google and Bing to define and find your website and blog. WordPress makes this easy because the codebase it is built on is very easily read by search engines.

  7. WordPress is fast, scalable and performs well
    A well tuned WordPress website will perform very well even with thousands of visitors coming to your website or blog.

  8. WordPress is well supported.
    If you have questions, the internet has answers. You can subscribe to my blog to learn more. You can also visit the following communities:
    WordCamp Community. There is plenty of help for those who need it. People from all over the world, share their tips and tricks for using WordPress year round and online. Helpful community who can help you with your problems and customization of your blog.
    WordPress.org Forums – This is the official forum for the WordPress website.

  9. Versatility – WordPress is great for bloggers, hobbyists and businesses alike. . You can use WordPress as a blog, forum, online directory, membership site, commerce or just about anything you want your site to do. WordPress is certainly the jack of all trades.
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A Checklist For Setting Up WordPress

wordpress check listThere are quite a few administrative things to do when setting up your WordPress blog for the first time. Some of these items may be on your to do list and others may not.  So here is my basic list:

The Basic Security & Back-up:

  • Check to see that “your display as” name on your blog isn’t the same as your WordPress login/username. This is done for security reasons.

 

 

  • Upload and active essential plugins including Akismet which usually comes installed with your installation by default.  Yes your blog can receive spam from day one, so to nip it in the bud set up Akismet right away. You don’t want unwelcome links or bots sniffing around on your site.
  •  Set up caching so WordPress loads pages faster.
  •  Setup a backup system for your blog. Again, If you go with my host WP Engine  you wont need a back up system or caching, because they provide back-up and caching for you.

 

Basic SEO (Most Can Be Found In The Settings/General Tab):

  • Erase or replace the “just another WordPress blog” tagline. That’s unless you want to keep it that way. I’d rather personalize my site with another tagline of my own or just leave it blank.

 

 

  • Change your permalinks to “Postname.” Otherwise the URL posted with the default settings will generally be your URL followed by the post number(s). Changing your permalinks to Postname will generally change the end of your post URL to
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