Erich Stauffer

Tag: Wordpress

  • WordPress Home Page Blank or White Due to Default HTML File after Migrating to New Web Host

    I had a problem where WordPress had a blank or white home page after migrating from another host. The answer turned out to be that there was a “default.html” copied over that the old web host used, but the new one didn’t. And it was that file that was making the home page of WordPress blank or white, while the other pages worked just fine.

    Answer/Solution: delete the default.html file in your root website’s directory that was copied over from the other host.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ChATlHT0OQg

    From AndreJ at WordPress Development at Stack Exchange, on the topic of “Migration issue – blog home page is blank“:

    Sometimes when you are migrating your page you can get blank home page.
    I found the problem with the home page not displaying from the base URL. it was because there was a default.html file in the root directory. The old hosting server must had set the order to look for start files to PHP extension as the first default so it ignored the default.html file in the root directory and loaded index.php.
    The new hosting server must have the default extension it looks for as an .HTM or .HTML file and was loading the blank default.html file first. Once I deleted the blank default.html file the hosting server started loading the index.php file and displayed the WordPress home page.

    Thanks, AndreJ!

  • How to Install WordPress on Root Folder & Sub Folder on a Windows IIS Server at Godaddy

    One of my clients uses Windows hosting on Godaddy. They wanted to host a new WordPress website on a new subdomain when a WordPress website was already installed on the their primary domain. I wasn’t familiar with Windows IIS hosting at the time (WordPress is normally hosted on Linux servers), and so gathering this information took several days and a call to Godaddy Support before I figured it all out.

    Here are the 4 steps to install WordPress on a subdomain in Windows IIS in Godaddy when a WordPress installation already exists on the primary domain:

    1. Upgrade to Deluxe or Ultimate Hosting
    2. Setup the Subdomain and Subfolder
    3. Create the web.config file in the Subdirectory
    4. Install WordPress Like Normal

    Godaddy Hosting Control Panel

    1. Upgrade to Deluxe or Ultimate Hosting

    Because they used Godaddy, they first had to upgrade to a deluxe hosting package as the base, “Economy” hosting plan does not allow you to host websites on subdomains. An upgrade was an extra $2 a month. Thanks to Chip O’Toole for this tip.

    2. Setup the Subdomain and Subfolder

    In Godaddy, this is done in the hosting control panel under “Manage Domains”. Click the domain you want to manage, and then create a new subdomain. It will prompt you to create a folder with the same or different name after that. Once a folder is created, go back to the control panel and setup a new FTP user account to access that folder if needed.

    3. Create the web.config file in the Subdirectory

    Once the hosting was upgraded, the subdomain still did not ‘show up’, but simply redirected to the primary domain’s website. To fix that, you have to create a web.config file in the subdirectory you created in step 2. To do that, go back to the hosting control panel and click on “File Manager”. Browse to the subfolder and then click new. Copy and paste the following code:

    [xml]




















    [/xml]

    Thanks to Samrat Saha on the WordPress Forums for this solution, which is based on this “Install WordPress on IIS” tutorial from Microsoft.

    Note:Be sure to change the “www” to your subdomain name, “youranotherdomain.com” to your primary domain name, and “\your\sub…” directory path to the actual path.

    PS. The “R:0” are “back-references to condition patterns“.

    4. Install WordPress Like Normal

    You may not be able to use the one-click install application in Godaddy for a subdomain, but you can still manually install WordPress. First create a MySQL database. Record all of the info from setup such as database name, username, password, and host name. You’ll need all of that to configure WordPress. Next, download the latest installation files from WordPress.org. Unzip the file and upload to your sub-folder using FTP. Once the files have been uploaded, go to [subdomain.primarydomain] and follow the prompts to create a configuration file.

  • How I Almost Lost Everything

    Well, not everything, but my entire blog.

    I went to create a blog post yesterday and instead of a publish button, there was a “Submit for Review”. Not really thinking, I just clicked it anyway, the page refreshed, and the post was gone.
    After doing some research it appeared that the database was full. I was using 150.6 MB out of an allotted 100 MB.
    While modern databases now come in 1000MB chunks, this database was started back when the standard was 100 MB and they had graciously let me go over by 50% until cutting me off (without notice).
    What else happened because of this?
    Backups had stopped running. Since there was no way for the plugin to add more data to the database, a new backup could not be created.
    One option was to clean up the database with a plugin, but I couldn’t add any new plugins because again, the database was so full, it couldn’t make an entry.
    How did I fix it?
    I created a new 1000 MB database, did an export, then attempted to import into the new database using WordPress’ import tool, but the file was too big (6 MB). The max size is 2 MB.
    So instead I went into the web host and used PHPMyAdmin to manually export and attempt to import the data. This also didn’t work because it exceeded the “max packet size”.
    Now I was starting to get a little panicked.
    I went back to the website and deleted all spam messages (~3000), which freed up enough space to install a plugin called WP-Optimize. I ran that, which deleted all revisions, freeing up almost half of the database, but the export file was still just as big.
    Another thing I noticed was that the theme I recently installed (Jupiter) had created several new tables and may have been what put me over the top in space so I removed it.
    Finally I remembered that posts can be exported by category, author, or date range so I exported them individually by category, which kept each file under 2 MB.
    I imported them into the new WordPress database 1 by 1, semi-automatically restoring the data to the new database. This worked.
    All 619 posts and all 5 pages have been restored.
    This is just another example of The White Album Problem. As databases outgrow their restraints they will need moved to larger databases over time and knowing how to manage this data transfer process is critical to preventing data loss.
    In addition, this process highlighted the need to monitor database usage at least on an annual scale.
    It would be nice if the web host would provide a function to expand out an existing database, but maybe this is an option they or some enterprising young entrepreneur will do in the future.

  • Content Management Systems vs. Managing Content

    If I were tweeting today I would have wrote: WordPress is not so much a content management system as much as a content display system.

    Content Management Systems vs. Managing Content

    A content management system (CMS) designed by Erich Stauffer would allow content to be platform-agnostic. In DRY (don’t repeat yourself) terms, the content would be an object who’s repurposing could be tracked. Essentially, the content management system would not store the content, but report on the status and whereabouts of the content. Let me explain with an example.

    Example: A blog post is written in WordPress. The dashboard in the CMS sees this new post via RSS and prompts the viewer to describe (via checkboxes) whether or not the material has been repurposed as a video, soundcloud, podcast, slideshare presentation, or as part of an email has been backlinked from Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

    In essence, the CMS would work more as a marketing automation workflow tool – guiding you through the process of wringing out as much value from each initial post as possible. This same process could be accomplished via any sort of trusted system: pencil and paper, Word worksheets, Excel spreadsheets, Trello, or even WordPress itself via custom code.

    I have yet to do it manually even once, yet I have recommended it to others many times. I’m not sure a tool would make me want to do it more, but ‘doing’ is not what I do. ‘Changing’ is what I do. That’s how I’m wired and I’m fine with that, but it doesn’t mean the ideas aren’t good or helpful for production workers who are more comfortable creating content in a structured environment.

    It’s not that I don’t do stuff. I do practically whatever anyone tells me to do. I guess it would make more sense to put that line in context. I once worked in a corporate department where my boss used an analogy about us being the rudder and ‘ops’ being the engine. I had very little ‘corporate’ experience prior to working there and had never worked as a business analyst before. (I am very thankful for the opportunity as I feel it was one of the best jobs I ever had.)

    As a result of my intial ignorance of how to be a business analyst, I wasn’t aware that other people had a similar or different opinion on the subject of how organizations should be organized. I only knew of it as ‘how my boss thought’. It wasn’t until after I visited the “Indianapolis Leadership Circle” (formerly known as the Leadership Mastery Group) put on by Tony Piazza that I heard something similar from the speaker, Scotty Bevill. He said (paraphrased for convenience):

    [Project managers] don’t like to run things – we like to build, change, and refine things. That’s just who we are as people.

    I use that word “people” specifically as Scotty was very adamant about business being “people dealing with people” and that we shouldn’t try to take the “human” out of who we are. The people in the room at the leadership meeting were mostly project managers who were mostly former IT workers. The other people in the room were current IT workers (such as myself, who is currently an IT Specialist in my day job). This is more of a belief about who we are as workers, not as much about the willingness to do or not do work. People like us (project managers and business analysts) prefer to be change agents, not production workers.

    Content Management Systems vs. Managing Content

    Permission to speak freely? Okay, for a second here I’m going to throw out all preconceived notions of what I should or should not do, what I am or am not capable of, and what does or does not make business sense. I’m just going to say what I think I want to do and then step back to see what sticks. As Scotty Bevill says, “Start with what is known.” Here’s what I know: I have found a way to add a sales funnel dimension to keyword research. Let’s call these “buyer keywords”.

    • Once you have identified ‘buyer keywords” you can start to write content that attracts those searchers.
    • Once content is created it can be both backlinked from social media and repurposed into other content.
    • Once visitors start coming to the content, the content can be optimized to increase conversions.

    Compendium, a business blogging platform which recently got purchased by Oracle, has 3 steps to create content which are 1) Research 2) Organize and 3) Create. I’d like to create a service that does 1) SEO Keyword and Competition Research 2) Creates and Manages Content and 3) does A/B Optimization.

    Content Repositories

    Update: Since writing this I’ve since discovered something called a “Content Repository“. There are several types, but what they all have in common is a clear separation between the content and the presentation of the content. What I’m still looking out for (and willing to provide as a service until software can be built around it) is a way to track all content like a database and know when and/or how often it’s been linked out via social media or to certain social bookmarking sites and whether or not it’s been repurposed to a pre-defined selection such as Youtube, Soundcloud, or Podcast.

    So when you take what I consider to be my ‘flux capacitor moment’ where I realized I had this ‘super power’ to attract customers to me by writing what matters to the customer and add in what I’ve since learned about content marketing, customer acquisition systems, and customer development I’ve got a knowledge base that is poised to be leveraged with the right content management system. By system I mean the methods (processes + tools) that can multiply the efforts of a content marketer by first finding out who is already seeking their product and writing directly to that person.

    I’m not sure how to do this, but those are my collection of ideas.

  • The Employment Roller Coaster

    Mark Thiele recently wrote an article entitled, Get ready for the coming employment roller coaster, in which he describes his perceptions of a changing career landscape where jobs not only do not last a lifetime, but where skills do not last a lifetime. Theile gives anecdotal evidence of jobs that are completely disappearing in less than 10 years. As I have been in the workforce for just over 10 years, I would like to share my evidence to support this trend.

    In 2001 I began working in the Items Processing division of a regional bank. Checks would come in by courier throughout the day and my job was to pre-encode their amounts for scanning. Balancing at that point was still done by hand, but within 3 months, it had been replaced by a new, digital balancing system. On October 28, 2003 United States Congress and the President enacted the Check 21 Act which enabled banks and other financial institutions to send checks electronically instead of by presentment of paper. It went into effect in 2004 and by 2006 large, central paper check sorting machines and facilities started to disappear and be replaced by local, distributed desktop scanners. I graduated college and got Microsoft and A+ certified only to land back at another regional bank installing desktop scanners in all of their branches. By the end of that project, my old job balancing checks had completed been eliminated – outsourced to a room full of keyers in Brazil.

    In 2004 shortly after graduating college I helped a friend start a small IT repair company called Neighborhood Geeks. I was the primary computer technician and went into new people’s homes and businesses daily to help them with their computer, networking, and server needs. It was a time when hardware costs were still higher than the cost of repair and the margins on the service work were good. I sold quite a bit of hardware too. It was a time when people were still converting from Windows 98 and ME to XP and from dial-up to broadband. Some computers still did not have ethernet cards so I actually carried them in my car with me along with spare hard drives, power supplies, and other peripherals. Laptops still hadn’t taken over desktops at that point and smartphones were still clunky. In two years, the market for desktop PC repair was almost over, caused by reduced hardware expense, the initial setup of broadband across America was over, and Windows Vista had just been released making our jobs a lot more easier (and less needed).

    In 2007 I started my own web design business and I used my knowledge of HTML to write simple web pages. Soon I had to learn CSS, SEO, and this new thing called WordPress. By 2008 I was fully touting SEO-optimized WordPress websites for small businesses around the Greater Indianapolis area, but by 2009 something had changed. SEO wasn’t working as well and any guy and his brother could throw up a WordPress site and slap it with a pre-built theme that looked better than anything I could code by hand. What mattered more was the creation of content and the management of the website’s layout, configuration, and security. My business shifted away from SEO and web marketing (although still very important) and into content marketing, management, and analysis. Google is constantly changing it’s algorithm, but content will always remain king. The problem is that as content grows, it starts to need managed and I soon found myself ghost writing and re-writing, going back through huge archives of content and ensuring it met the standards of today.

    I see the writing on the wall. The future of my industry is in code. If I fail to adapt and learn programming languages right now I face being a generalist in a specialist’s world. So here’s what I’m doing about it:

    • Learning to program WordPress with PHP – I bought a book about programming plugins in WordPress. It’s helping me learn PHP and become a more advanced WordPress user all at once. I make a bulk of my income right now from WordPress support in Indianapolis so I am investing in the now and the later.
    • Learning to create an iPhone app – This is a skill I’ve tried to learn off and on for a couple of years, but felt I needed more basic programming knowledge, context, and skills before trying again. I also need a Mac.
    • Building a web app to become an iPhone app – I found it’s best to learn something when you have a project in mind so I’m initially using WordPress to create a web app that will eventually become an iPhone app.

    What are you doing about this ever-changing work environment we are in?

  • Add or Exclude From Specific Post in WordPress

    I’ve been doing a lot of content management lately and that means managing larger back archives of web data used in content marketing. Over the course of time, things you might have wanted to happen in the past to every web post in WordPress may not always apply in the present or the future. When it’s a rare occurrence, such as when you don’t want a particular thing to display on a particular post that displays everywhere else, you’ll need to make an exception loop for that post in the single.php file.

    Now this sounds easy, and it is, but for some reason I had a really hard time finding it. The confusion lied in that WordPress names all pages and posts with a “Page ID” number, which is a unique number in the WordPress SQL database, like a primary key. But just because the name says “Page ID”, that doesn’t mean WordPress thinks of pages and posts in the same way. According to the WordPress Codex, when querying a post, you must use “is_single”. Here’s the code below:

    Where the number (in this case 1454) is the page ID of the post. NOTE: is_page and is_post do not work for blog post IDs.

    [php]
    thing you wanted to show if that post

    thing you wanted to show otherwise
    [/php]

    When I was searching for a solution, other people were using it to show or hide excerpts. I was using it to show or hide a specific block of code I was using like a boilerplate at the end of each post in the client’s theme. You can use it to show or hide whatever you like, but let me know in the comments.

  • IT Business Analyst with Dentrix Experience

    I do IT services for dentists and dental offices, specifically Dentrix training and implementation, Google Apps intranets, and WordPress websites.

    I’m an IT Business Analyst that provides IT services for dental offices. I’ve been providing IT services for 7 years after graduating from IU in Indianapolis. I’m A+, Network+, and Microsoft certified. I have experience with Dentrix G4 and G5 and am looking for other dental offices who are considering switching to Dentrix.

    IT Business Analyst and Indianapolis Dentrix Expert

    I recently upgraded a dental office in Indianapolis from Dentrix G4 to Dentrix G5. I’ve also helped them with their dental website design and online marketing efforts from Facebook to Twitter to Google Adsense. In addition to technical design and implementation, I also do business consulting in the form of staffing models.

    It’s become cliche to say you’re experienced at Microsoft Office, but I’d say I’m a pretty advanced Excel user. I even made an analogy at my last Indianapolis Marketing Meetup meetup that Google Analytics’ database could be manipulated similarly to a pivot table in Excel. Excel is a great tool and one I’m fond of for organizing and displaying information, which is something I really like doing.

    In fact, you could boil almost everything I do down to organization and display because whether I’m setting up a Windows server, a network architecture, a website in WordPress, an Intranet in Google Apps, or a custom dashboard in Excel, I’m always doing the same thing: categorizing, organizing, and displaying information so it’s easy to follow, easy to read, and useful.

    Do I always succeed? No, but I’m continually seeking ways to get better – and I adapt to my users. Dentrix is a perfect example of this. I didn’t set out to learn Dentrix, but when no one in the dental office knew how to use it, they asked me to learn it and teach others – so that’s what I did. Now I realize that Dentrix is just CRM software to organize and display patient information to dentists. Who would have thought?

     

  • Two Types of Clients

    In the 10 months since I went full-time running Erich Stauffer I have taken clients from a dysfunctional, disparate web presence to having a cohesive web platform that they can use to self-market their own business in a responsive manner. I’ve converted clients to WordPress, implemented Google Apps, and ensured their files were getting backed-up.

    I had a client email me to tell me. “[We] are progressing with WordPress. Little steps but steps none the less. Although I was not always thrilled with the WordPress idea I do want to thank you again for leading me down this path. All things considered it is not everything I want…but, it has allowed [us] to make changes and updates from my desktop that were never possible before.”

    All of this has led me to discover that the clients I have now are not the same clients I had 10 months ago. They are not the same clients without a website, a social marketing strategy, or an email newsletter. They are clients with questions about how to use their new marketing platform to integrate into how they run their business. They are businesses who want to get more out of their initial marketing to see a return on that investment (ROI).

    Integrated Marketing is Responsive Marketing

    When you use your web platform to respond to marketing data to fulfill daily production goals, fill appointment slots, or push a particular product, you are practicing integrated marketing techniques. At Erich Stauffer, we can teach you how to have a responsive marketing strategy that is integrated with your business processes and procedures. We will train you or your staff to use your web marketing platform to work for you.

    I still serve that first type of client who needs their first web page or their web site converted to WordPress for easier management. I still help people setup their Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, and Pinterest accounts. I still help people setup or optimize their email marketing solutions, but now we also do more. We are technology consultants specializing in web technology and business analysis. I am Erich Stauffer.

  • Coding WordPress Columns to Match Length

    A client recently asked what they could do to make the content in their sidebar column match their main content column.

    The short answer is: it’s not easily user-editable, but it can be done.

    WordPress works by using “theme files” to construct a web page ‘on the fly’. The content of the page is stored in a database, but the design of the page is stored in theme files. While WordPress only requires two theme files (index.php and style.css), most WordPress web sites use at least six files. The main theme files are as follows:

    • header.php – contains information for the header
    • index.php, front-page.php, page.php, or single.php – calls the header and footer; contains instructions for the middle part of the page
    • footer.php – contains information for the footer
    • sidebar.php – contains instructions for the sidebar

    In this client’s particular design, the header and footers go all the way across the page and the middle content area is split into two columns. The sidebar is a column that goes all the way from the top, just under the header, to the bottom, just above the footer. The other column is where the post or page content goes. Whichever column’s side has more content will determine how long the page is. The sidebar only appears when it’s ‘called’ to appear. Each page you see could be a different type of page. Page types are as follows:

    • Front page – what the home page looks like (front-page.php)
    • Page page – what a Page looks like (page.php)
    • Post page – what a Post looks like (single.php)
    • Category page – what a Category view of Posts looks like (index.php, category.php, or archive.php)

    For example, the front-page.php theme file controls the home page and it doesn’t call the sidebar. There are other types of theme files like search.php for searches, but this is a short list.  There are also more specific theme files that can be created based on a page name. For example, I could create a theme file called “page-health-benefits.php” for the Health Benefits page and I could code it to look completely different if I wanted to. I could also call a different header, footer, or sidebar, for example.

    Here are some options for when columns don’t match up in your WordPress design layout:

    • Stop using the sidebar – You can eliminate the problem by only having a one-column layout.
    • Page-specific theme file(s) – I can code a theme file specific for the Health Benefits page which would show a different sidebar altogether or none at all.
    • Page Continuation / Pagination Code – to make the sidebar area never have white space at the end, I could code in a ‘page continuation code’ so that when the content gets to a certain length, it paginates to a ‘page 2’.
    • Manually Code in Scenarios to the Sidebar: I can code in scenarios that say, “If the page is Health Benefits, then display more content in the sidebar”. This would not be something you could easily edit.

    Summary

    It’s not uncommon for sidebars to have more or less content than it’s corresponding column. Dynamic changes to column length are possible through custom coding. Custom coding makes the site harder to keep updated in the future, but that’s not really your problem unless you’re doing it yourself. If it really bothers you, go to a single-column layout. If you can’t get over that extra white space, contact us. We are an Indianapolis web design firm that makes custom WordPress websites.