Apologies if you tried to access this site in the last few days only to be told it’s suspended – I was informed by my web host that it was consuming excessive resources. This came as quite a surprise to me as it’s not a particularly high traffic site, nor have I been aware of any problems with it in the past.
Culprit plugins
In any case, I take my host’s word for it that it was causing undue load on the server, so I set about lightening it up a bit. I very much doubt anything in the WordPress core would be causing the problem, so the first thing I did was scan through my list of plugins. That, along with a bit of research on Google, suggested a couple of possible culprits: Yet Another Related Posts Plugin, Global Translator, and Broken Link Checker. Although some have reported problems with YARPP in the past, later versions have been significantly rewritten to address these problems, so I’m inclined to think it’s not the cause here.
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I always recommend using self-hosted WordPress instead of the free version, as you end up having much more control over your site. However, one area in which I’ve always felt a bit cheated with WordPress.org sites is the lack of built-in stats monitoring. I guess this is why most bloggers end up using sites like Google Analytics to keep track of things – myself included.
There are also third-party WordPress plugins available which provide some of this functionality – I wrote about one such statistics plugin a few months back. But a couple of days ago I stumbled across another plugin – that provides the bona fide WordPress.com stats within a WordPress.org blog! Now, this is not a new plugin – it’s been around for a couple of years already by the looks of it – but it’s the first I’d heard of it.
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Following on from my last post about translating your website, Dennis alerted me to the fact that there are WordPress plugins to do this too. Well, I don’t know why I didn’t think of that – I haven’t yet been able to think up a desirable bit of functionality that isn’t contained in a plugin – why should website translation be any different!
Sure enough, a quick search turned up several candidates. The Global Translator plugin looked the best, so I went right ahead and installed it – it’s those bunch of flags near the top of my sidebar.
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I bet you log into WordPress as an Administrator, right? Yup, so do I. Nothing wrong with that – after all, most of us run single-user blogs. But did you know that WordPress has built-in support for a wide range of Roles and Capabilities?
WordPress Roles
By default there are five Roles, each of which has progressively more power:
- Subscriber
- Contributor
- Author
- Editor
- Administrator
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Have you ever wondered how to take online payments via your website for your own products and services? Well, there’s an easy way: PayPal. Yes, you can accept donations, payments for products and services, even set up recurring payments and subscriptions. And the good thing is you’re not restricted to buyers who have a PayPal account, because this mechanism allows your customers to pay via debit or credit card if they choose.
There are a number of benefits to using this service:
- Simplicity – PayPal handles all the technical details for you.
- Security – no secure connection required by you – PayPal handles this too.
- Trusted brand – because PayPal is one of the most popular payment methods on eBay, it is a very well-known and trusted service – and trust is vital when payment details are being exchanged online.
- Cost-effective – setting up your own merchant account is expensive and simply not worthwhile unless you have significant turnover. PayPal doesn’t cost you anything until someone buys something, and even then you won’t be paying much more than 3.4%.
So, before this starts to sound any more like an advertorial, I want to show you how easy it is to set up a Donation button to allow your adoring public to shower you with gratuities.
Continue reading ‘Easily take Online Payments with PayPal’
