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Easy throwaway email addresses

Easily create unique email addresses to give to companies, so you can tell who leaked your address to spammers and shut them down.

Making Contact Form 7 more usable

If you use Contact Form 7, there’s a thing you might do to avoid user misunderstandings from the default form behavior.

Plugin review: WP Rollback

If a plugin update causes a problem, how do you find out which plugin and how do you rewind to a previous version?

Plugin comparison: Watermarks

I compare plugins for adding watermarks to protect images from unauthorized reuse (aka theft).

Theme Review: Neve

My current favorite, the Neve theme has a clean look, great typography control, and enough options to make it easy to customize without being overwhelming.

plugin icon - CC Child Pages

Plugin review: CC Child Pages

I often want a page containing an automatically generated grid of subsidiary pages, without having to work hard to make it happen.

A new plugin by me

I was working on a website — needed a way to edit the “excerpt” of a page (as opposed to a post), but the theme I was using didn’t let me! So I wrote a very simple plugin to wrassle it into submission. It is now available on this site, free to anyone.

Read More »A new plugin by me

Plugin review: The Paste

You can paste images directly into a post or page while editing — but the resulting filename in your media library is completely random. Here’s a plugin to let you specify the filename as you paste.

Tork on Torque!

I recently participated in a discussion of author websites — watch the recording here!

Post-Read Pages

For authors who have their own websites, this is a way to leverage the site to engage readers, to encourage additional sales and reviews. When… Read More »Post-Read Pages

Change of Plan

My publisher and I have mutually decided their production process isn’t fast enough to accommodate the frequent updates a book such as One Hour Author… Read More »Change of Plan

Using the Accordion Control

The Accordion control lets you create “click to expand” outline entries. I share the custom CSS I came up with to make this control more website-visitor friendly.

Website hosting on sale

if you’ve been thinking of launching a new website (or if your current hosting service could be better and cheaper), this might be a good time.

How to Manage Your Passwords

For your security, it’s best to use a different password on every account. But keeping track of them all is a pain.

Make menu items into buttons

Highlight selected menu items in your WordPress site by changing them into buttons.

Plugin review: Lightbox for Gallery & Image Block

This provides an essential function that really should be baked into WordPress. When you click to enlarge an image, a modern, professional site doesn’t navigate away from the current page to do that.

Thoughts on Featured Images in WordPress

Where should themes display featured images, how can you gain some control over that, and how does that tie in to what images show up in social media shares?

Mailchimp vs. Mailerlite

Two popular free subscriber list services go head to head. Main difference is whether your postal address has to be in your emails.

Remove your mailing address from MailChimp newsletters

Bottom line: you can’t; use mailerlite instead. By law, a company sending email for you has to know your mailing address. The law doesn’t require revealing it to your subscribers. That’s MailChimp’s policy.