Realbasics.com

Busy day. Quite a long list. As I say at the end

---
Yes, this was a busier day than usual. And yes, there’s more I could have / should have / wish I could have done. That’s what tomorrows are for, I guess.

But it wasn’t that much busier than usual.

What do you need done for your website? Tomorrow, I mean. Or later in the week.
---

Busy day in the life of a Wordpress website support specialist - Realbasics.com After nearly 15 years working with WordPress, and more than 13 years supporting other people’s websites, I end up doing a lot of really cool stuff. So I just thought I’d mention what my workday was like today. So today I… Attended my weekly business networking meeting Moved two sites to new ho...

From the post: "Real Wordpress is free, open-source, created and distributed by a not-for-profit foundation, and distributed to individual tens of millions of personal web servers around the world. Meanwhile, the for-profit, deceptively named Wordpress.com is a social-media-style company like Twitter or Facebook, with terms of service that let the owners freely collect and sell your information."

Click through to read the rest.

Why the difference between real Wordpress vs for-profit "Wordpress.com" matters - Realbasics.com Short answer? Real Wordpress is free, open-source, created and distributed by a not for profit foundation, and distributed to individual tens of millions of personal web servers around the world.Meanwhile, the for-profit, deceptively named Wordpress.com is a social-media-style company like Twitter o...

From the post: "Everyone knows websites can be important for sales and marketing, sure. But what about recruiting and reputation management?

Early in my career I got a 2nd-hand referral for a surprisingly large B2B company that didn’t have a website. The referral was from a consultant who felt they should have one, even though the owners didn’t think they needed one..."

Other than sales, what else are business websites good for? - Realbasics.com Short answer? Everyone knows websites can be important for sales and marketing, sure. But what about recruiting and reputation management? Early in my career I got a 2nd-hand referral for a surprisingly large B2B company that didn’t have a website. The referral was from a consultant who felt they ...

Very cool intro to creating posts for blogs and social media I've quoted in full from a post on Reddit's u/smallbusiness subreddit.

From the post: "In this post, we'll discuss how to boost engagement in your Instagram stories without divulging your private life, without sticking to the same topics, and without spending all your time on [public media]."

Good stuff. Includes a link to the original post. I grabbed the whole thing in case the original violated u/smallbusiness's questions-only rule.

Principles for blogging or any other social media posts - Realbasics.com The post is about using Instagram stories but it applies to social media posting in general, and blogging in particular. It’s the full text of an excellent article about posting strategy, from Reddit user Remarkable_Celery709. It was posted in the u/smallbusiness subreddit on Reddit. I almost neve...

But when I do I… 😂😂😂

Ran into my friend and fellow Wordpress colleague Cami Shields MacNamara at WordCamp Vancouver. She was smart enough to get a photo.

Why aren’t website’s contact form messages showing up in my inbox? It’s a common problem. It’s a common question. Here’s an answer.

Answering the question "Why is email through Wordpress so complicated?" - Realbasics.com Why aren't website contact form messages showing up in my inbox? It's a common problem. It's a common question. Here's an answer.

Cool set of questions that Google looks for when ranking website content.

From the horse's mouth - what content does Google look for? - Realbasics.com You’ll often hear people say the best way to boost your ranking with Google is to have great, useful, relevant content. Which to be honest ought to be pretty obvious… but isn’t, given the zillions of ways people come up with to try and game the SEO system. So… what exactly does Google mean w...

Bogus DMCA Infringement Notices May Be The Product Of “Black Hat” PR Agencies.

First Of All, What They’re Doing
It looks like the actors behind this behavior do this one neat trick
- Identifies a “controversial” or negative post about one of their clients
- Copies the contents and posts it on their own website…
- …using the names of attorneys (at least one) as the authors
- Manipulates the publication date to one day before the original’s published date
- Submits an infringement notification with the alleged lawyer’s name and a phony gmail address.
- …
- Make money
They’ve got a lot of !% # gall, right?

Bogus DMCA infringement notices may be the product of "black hat" PR agencies. - Realbasics.com Have you received an email claiming you’ve infringed the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) recently? For people with screen readers here’s the relevant text from the screenshot Cloudflare received a DMCA copyright infringement complaint regarding: realbasics.com The information we received ...

If you use NinjaForms and got that forced security update in mid June, 2022, your forms may have disappeared from your Contact page or other places on your site. Chances are the site isn’t really broken. Instead the plugin may have disabled the forms by putting itself into “maintenance mode.” Here’s how to fix it.

Fix missing Ninja Forms on your WordPress website - Realbasics.com So, about the WordPress Ninja Forms plugin and missing forms. If you use NinjaForms and got that forced security update in mid June, 2022, your forms may have disappeared from your Contact page or other places on your site. Chances are the site isn’t really broken. Instead the plugin may have disa...

You might not always be possible to own all your own content but it's ok to try to control it.

In my experience as a WordPress support specialist, Facebook (or Amazon, or Google, etc.) outages are very rare compared to even very well-run individual websites. 99.9% uptime still means about 8 hours of downtime per year, right? So it would be risky to publish only on WordPress as well!

I still recommend that people have their own websites, not because they’re more reliable or more popular but because it’s a great foundation for the COPE/CORE publishing strategy: Create Once Post/Repost Everywhere.

On Facebook outages and why it's still ok to "own your own content" - Realbasics.com Over at PostStatus David Bisset has a thoughtful post about brushing off the recent Facebook/Instagram/WeChat outage with quips about “own your own content.” Time will tell if Facebook being down on Oct 4th will be the single greatest system failure in tech in 2021. There’s been some good writ...