I love AmpForWP, Just Wished it Worked On Swift pages!

Good morning Glenn Burks here from  GlennBurks.com. Today I wanted to go over this new plug-in that I have tried to use AmpForWP.

As you can see here (in the video) it’s fairly pricey for a plug-in, in fact quite pricey, when you get all the features and everything plugged in.

The issue is you know how they talk about how responsive they are.

Yes the AmpForWP support group ARE responsive and get back to you.

But they keep on having you do the same old thing over and over and over again. Let me give you little bit of my background. I have been involved in aircraft electronic systems for almost 40 years now.

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vc43qPWvK5I&width=560&height=315[/embedyt]

I’ve dealt with everything from communications, navigation, satellite communications, satellite TV, to servers on board aircraft.

Over the course of my career I have done a lot, I kinda know what it takes to troubleshoot an issue, that’s what I do for a living!

They tell me it’s gotta be a configuration setting.  So I’ve spent close to probably hundred and 50 hours going through two of my websites which are almost identical in every facet.

Each one of them has the exact same problem and trying to communicate that to an individual I guess can sometimes can be difficult.

So hopefully this video will demonstrate exactly what’s going on. Point out where the problem lies and  what they need to do to fix it!

The question is how much should I charge a software designer for fixing his issues.

So what we got here is the AmpforWP plugin. It’s great and it functions pretty much 99% except for one big issue. We are going take a look at this page here.

This is the front page on one website. As you see here there is a graphic there on the front of this page. This is a page now and this is a graphic there, the featured WordPress graphic!

Now here is a blog page the same feature graphic is there. We go over to the AMP PAGE, here is the exact same page! What is it missing is the featured image.

Now we go to the blog page here is the featured image.  Going back to the page and looking at the view source, right in this area, here  is where the title is and there is the title.

Notice what you see there or what you do not see!  Let us highlight all this there! What you see now, if I go over to the blog post and come to this area right here, there is the amp featured image!

This is what is missing from the PAGE, the featured image is not being called in the software! It is a software design issue, somewhere somehow it is disabled on PAGES, yet it works perfect in the posts but not on the PAGES.

There are individuals on the WordPress support website that are saying it’s obviously people don’t know what to do, they are giving it a five-star rating.

Obviously these guys are running basic wordpress blog. They have not used for WordPress to its full functions and capabilities, like a lot of people do!

So there you have in a nutshell, this is an issue thats there. If we look at the actual thing it is set to the Swift template.

Without it being set to the Swift template you will not get to use all these fancy layouts. You will be stuck using the default design one, two, or three!

If you pull up design three the featured images work just fine on the PAGES and but they do not work on the SWIFT PAGES which you need, to get the other templates.

I do hope to get this issue solved and then we can see if it’s actually worth the price!

Yoast Destroyed My Website after 7.6 update!

After a long weekend on Tuesday I sat down to work on one of my websites. I logged in and  found that there were several updates needed for the website CMS, Yoast 7.6 was one of them.

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTYrvCe7hJ8&width=560&height=315&centervid=1[/embedyt]

One of those updates was Yoast 7.5.3 to Yoast 7.6. So of course I dutifully and I should say blindly clicked on the links. I proceeded to update the plug-ins. And then set out to continue working.

After a few minutes I noticed that one of the programs Yoast, which I just updated to the 7.6 was no longer displaying on the sidebar.

Nor was it displaying all of the data below the posts.

Then to my horror. I discovered that just about all of the URLs were no longer functional with one of the older plug-ins.

The plugin was for URL redirects. The website in question is quite old and many of the links which had a lot of back links to them needed the redirects.

So after the updates screw up, which was a simple rollback in the description size… I had to make a decision, keep the URLs and trash Yoast.

That would mean I would have to go back and now rewrite 5 to 600 page titles and descriptions or re-create hundreds of URL redirects.

So after about 36 hours and redirecting a lot of URLs, thanks Yoast. Now I get to sit back and wait to find out how many of the pages which ranked in the top 10, now no longer rank.

Are we as bloggers getting lazy. Should we take back more control of our websites, dump the plugins and do it manually? Or should we instead of allow plug-ins to do it for us? Yoast 7.6 was a complete disaster for my older website but works fine for new sites.

Give me your feedback what do you think leave a comment below or visit the video and leave a comment there.

Mollum is gone so now what? Try CleanTalk

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P2CWT-cjYIk&width=450&height=253&centervid=1[/embedyt]

Now that Mollum has entered it’s end of life what’s next?  What is an effective solution? Mollum is gone, now what? Try CleanTalk!

Comment spam can make a life of a webmaster horrible. Having to sift and sort through all of those comments on a daily basis just drags you down and gets very tiring.

But if you’re like me, you continue to look for effective solutions out there, that are effective, and work. And it’s pretty difficult to find something that truly works in today’s society.

Far too many engineers and designers well they are just plain lazy. They produce crappy products and they don’t get the job done.

So I was pleasantly surprised when by chance one day when I stumbled across a little program called CleanTalk. I was actually looking for an SSL to convert all of my websites to https, and I found CleanTalk.

CleanTalk has been a godsend. My wife’s blog gets thousands of comments per month. And most of them are spam. I just looked at my stats and since February it’s had five true comments and about 900+ spam comments.

Spam comments that I did not have to sort through.

So no matter what you do, or how you look at it spam is here to stay.  They figured out robots are cheap and they can just keep spamming and spamming over and over again.

Sometimes you’ve got to laugh at some of the comment names, that they actually make up when they’re writing their spam comments. Or the titles that they use when filling out your comment forms.

It’s like are you really that stupid, and sadly most of them are that stupid.

Like I said, when we started out, Mollum is now gone. So take a look at CleanTalk it’s reasonably priced and I can tell you from personal experience it’s very very effective.

Oh, you and your visitors will love the no captcha forms or comment sections.

 

MAMP Pro Will Not Display Pages But Will Display Posts.

Some times the least obvious things will cause us the most grief while building or modifying our websites. I like running WordPress using Thesis as the foundation behind the site. I had decided to convert one of my sites still running Thesis 1.8 to version 2.6. I had built this site many years ago and had converted it from a purely static site to WordPress.

I had literally stopped writing on that site (over ten years ago) due to the constant content theft which came from a top ranked site. And it had been quite awhile since I had used and setup MAMP. I already had this site (GlennBurks.com) installed in MAMP Pro and thought it would be a simple process to get my other site (Network-Marketing-Works.com) installed and ready for the update along with a new and much cleaner template.

Getting setup on MAMP Pro was straight forward, created the folder, setup and downloaded the database from the live site. Of course my version of MAMP was a few behind, so I updated to MAMP Pro 4.3 and then Mamp Pro 4.4. After all the update was when I discovered the issue, with over 200 static pages non of them would display with MAMP. Oddly the blog posts would display just fine on MAMP. I had the live site temporarily running Thesis 2.6 and everything worked fine there.

Yet, on the local site MAMP Pro would not display any of the pages. I began the search for the solution for this interesting and bizarre problem, if you can call it that! After about 5 hours of searching and trying many different solutions I had an epiphany!

The latest version of Mamp Pro 4.4 was running PHP 7.2.1, while I had seen this it never dawned on me that this could be the problem. Back over on the server in enabled the info.php page, low and behold the server was running PHP 5.6.27. Diving back into the MAMP PRO app I quickly set the version of PHP to match the server’s version. Now finally after many hours of frustration MAMP Pro would display pages and blog posts, I could finally get back to work.

So to make it short, if you’ve setup MAMP or MAMP PRO and cannot display pages, take a look at the version’s of PHP you are running.

IOS 11 Just Another Disaster

Are Apples glory days numbered? What was their marketing department thinking rolling out the iPhone 8 and the iPhone X?

To top it off IOS 11 has rapidly gone through 11.01, 11.02, 11.03 to 11.1 with each one bring new problems that I’ve never had before.

For example with 11.1 my iPad pro when plugged in will occasionaly show that it is no longer charging. Thus you have to remove the cable and replug it in.

Which then brings us to the Apple store. Everyday you have updates, before IOS11 they just updated and everything worked. Now you have to shut it completely down and restart or the App updates just sit there spinning. It kind of reminds me of Microsoft before XP, are you moving backwards APPLE?

It’s not really a big deal but come on we expect better from Apple, after all they are the 800 pound gorilla of the tech world. But if they keep their current direction they will lose their market dominance, maybe this is intentional!