UPDATE 2019 – the article below was originally posted in 2013, and a lot of terminology and practices, particularly in SEO (do we even talk about PageRank any more? Remember those PR toolbars? Remember toolbars!?!), have moved on apace since then, but the general principles still hold true today… A lot of the time, when …
We receive plenty of traffic from people looking for answers to various WordPress and other open source questions, here at Silicon Dales, as we’re constantly posting tutorials and items of information which are likely to be of use to novice and professional webmasters. If you’re looking to troubleshoot issues with auto-update not working on your …
Some time ago, I wrote a short blog post explaining how to go about installing XCache on an Amazon EC2 instance to help with opcode caching. More recently, we’ve begun using APC for similar reasons, with excellent results, including on Amazon EC2 Micro instances, which can be used under their free usage tier to run …
We’ve been telling clients for some time that Google Apps (in principle, Gmail for domains) would likely remove it’s free service, as it looks to monetise this service further. When first launched, Google Apps offered a free service for up to 50 email addresses. Our business, and many of our early clients, were able to …
This is another of those SEO questions which we get asked periodically by our business customers, here at Silicon Dales. While the question is not always the same, it goes something like this: “Why do directories outrank our site?” or “Why do all these agency websites beat us in Google?” The short answer to this …
Because I just posted this description in the post I wrote on how to make WordPress Auto-Thumbnails work, I thought I would also post those instructions straight up as a pointer for anyone out there who is looking for the command required to install the GD Library in their LAMP setup, so here it is: …
If you’re recently installed WordPress onto a new server (we do this a lot on Amazon EC2 instances of varying sizes) and you notice that your image uploads aren’t auto-thumbnailing (when WordPress “crunches” your images into “thumbnail” “medium” and “large” sizes for use throughout your website) then chances are your server doesn’t have the GD …
In this tutorial, I will explain, very quickly, how to change the colour of some text, or a heading, in a post or page in WordPress, using the inherent Rich Text Editor (RTE). Step One – Click the “More Options” (show/hide kitchen sink) Button First up, the option you need is in the more, or …
There are lots of tools out there which help us to track, and measure, the speed of a website. You can install bits and pieces into various browsers. You can visit a variety of web tools, too. But which is the best method? Well, assuming you only want to occasionally check the page load times …
2018 UPDATE – please note that the issue below is resolved in the latest versions of WordPress. Update to the latest version of WP and you should find video embeds work exactly as expected now. You can chalk this off your list 🙂 On WordPress blogs, there has for a number of versions been a …
