I solved a somewhat strange issue on a client’s WordPress website the other day. On their products page, none of the products would load until the visitor scrolled or otherwise interacted with the site. A “loading” icon showed up, but nothing would load until an action was taken. In this case, they were using the Essential Grid plugin on a … Read More
Tutorials - Category Archive
Fully Customize Chromecast Background in Ambient Mode
Google appears to have quietly added a new feature to Chromecast ambient mode that allows you some mechanism to manually chose custom photos that show up there. And it’s super easy to do! Recently I’ve seen tons of articles showing how you can use “Recent Highlights” from your Google photos to let Google automatically choose from your most recently uploaded … Read More
Get the Google Analytics 4 Tracking Code – 15-Second Tutorial
If you’ve been pulling your hair out trying to find the tracking code in Google Analytics 4, I’m going to be your hero. Steps to generate the tracking code for Google Analytics 4 Log in to your Google Analytics and navigate to the relevant account Click “Admin” in the bottom-left corner Go to Property settings -> Data collection and modification … Read More
Can’t Connect to Facebook for Chromecast Ambient Mode – Solution
I’ve got a super simple post here for you today that has nothing to do with websites, really! But it’s useful, nonetheless. Update 05/12/2021: Google has removed the experimental Facebook for Chromecast ambient mode feature. Full details over at our other blog post. I recently had a problem for months where I couldn’t get Facebook albums to display in my … Read More
How to Restore a Website from the Wayback Machine – Step-by-Step Guide
Sometimes life happens. Where once there was a website, all you have now is an error page. Your hosting has expired, there are no backups, and you are panicking. So how can you recover your old website? The Wayback Machine! For those of you who don’t know: the Wayback Machine (also know as the Internet Archive) is a digital archive … Read More
Autodiscover.xml Error Office 365 Solution – cPanel
I ran into a very strange error the other day with one of my clients. You see, they had an external provider for their Microsoft Office 365 email hosting, and they were trying to take advantage of the “Autodiscover” functionality to automatically get their Outlook 2016 configured. Now, I’m not expert in email configuration or Office 365. I’ve helped clients … Read More
Checklist of Ways WordPress Redirects to HTTPS + How to Force HTTP
This post might seem a little backwards but there is way less information for this topic than the other way around! I am regularly faced with the need to force http rather than the other way around. Disabling SSL and its inherent encryption is generally not something you want to do in ideal circumstances, but I suspect nobody is here under ideal … Read More
Redirect One File Extension to Another with .htaccess
For something seemingly so simple, it’s amazingly hard to find a good solution that redirects all files with a given extension on your site to another. I spent a long time Googling and testing and still kept running into issues. But my wasted time is your gain! Because I’ve figured it out. As it turns out, there is more way … Read More
Converting SSI / SHTM Sites to PHP in Minutes – Guide
I was recently lucky enough to purchase a local website hosting company, and I quickly discovered that about 30% of the websites used .shtm files. These SSI files used “HTML Include” directives to load additional content to each page, such as the header and footer. And they didn’t function – at all – on my servers. As it turns out, … Read More
How to De-index Individual Pages in WordPress
For a variety of reasons, you may have some pages on your WordPress website which you need to prevent Google from indexing. There is a right way to do it and a wrong way. Maybe you’ve just received the nasty notice from Google regarding your robots.txt file and how you need to remove the “noindex” directives from within and have … Read More