It’s WP update time, and I’m upgrading to 2.9.2 – not a huge hardship, since it’s all one-click now (unless there’s a plugin conflict, of course). However, a problem arose: one of my blog disappeared completely. Nada. Nothing. Just a nice white page, without anything whatsoever.

In the end, it was because of old wp-cache-config.php and advanced-cache.php files in my /wp-content/ directory. Briefly, these files caused a cache issue that was not needed on this blog. Remove them, and the blog was AOK.

The reason for mentioning this? I …

You know WordPress is great – easy to use, powerful, popular – but it’s still a long way from the idea to a finished, custom-tweaked site. So what do you do?

It’s always possible to save money by doing it yourself. There are many online tutorials, and sites that explain how to do WordPress setup and configuration (like this one). However, if your primary goal is to make money, it pays to stick to what you’re good at.

But if you prefer to get someone to set up your …

Write an email, hit send, and have it magically appear on your WordPress blog from anywhere. Here’s how to set it up easily AND fix any problems.

Copyright is a tricky issue – but no matter what copyright your blog uses, the date is more than likely wrong – so how do you fix it?

You can edit the theme by hand every year to insert the new date – 2002-2009, 2002-2010, etc – or you can use a little PHP to handle it.

In your theme, find the copyright year, which is probably in footer.php. It often looks something like this:

Copyright © 2007 by Somebody or other…

What you want to do is change …

In the past, adding a post (or any other text that ’stuck’ to the top of a WordPress home page) was annoying – the easiest solution in PHP was this:

<?php if (is_home()) { ?>

HTML text shown ONLY on home page…

<?php } ?>

However, now you can make a POST stick to the home page, and remain on top until you remove it. Go to that post’s edit section, and near the Publish button is the Visibility setting. Click on the Edit link there, and check …