If you used Fantastico, Softaculous, cPanel’s script installer etc. They all have an easy delete button. Use it. This by the way is in your cPanel or your web host‘s control panel. You cannot delete WordPress by logging into your WordPress site itself.

If it was installed manually or you don’t know how it was originally installed, then follow these steps for web hosts that run cPanel.

Step 1 – Find out your database name and user by reviewing the wp-config.php file.

Step 2 – Delete the MySQL database and user. Be careful when deleting user that it is not being used by another script.

Step 3 – Delete all the WordPress files in your public_html folder.

For more detailed, step-by-step instruction, watch this video to see how I do it.

The time has come for May Madness again. Woot! We have put up a special too. It is a 2-day intensive class for those who:

• Need guidance setting up a WordPress site or,
• Anyone who wants to develop WordPress sites F-A-S-T without FTP, HTML or CSS

Everything we do from set up to editing fonts, colors, backgrounds and even creating custom layouts is all point-and-click using the browser.

Designing HTML emails is not really that difficult. I’ve done it several times myself but it can sometimes feel like an impossible task if you want to make the email appear exactly the same on different email readers. If you think cross browser site design is challenging, wait till you try creating for emails.

Why is it so difficult?

For starters, email readers are not as sophisticated as browsers. Yes, even though some are web based like Yahoo and Gmail, they still modify your code to suit their interface. You cannot get fancy with CSS and there are a few things you should do for consistency like use good old fashioned tables for the layout and using HTML breaks and not paragraphs to create the illusion of paragraphs.

The other reason, like browsers, each email client reads HTML differently and there are a lot more ways to read email than there are browsers. Windows Mail, Outlook, Mail (for Mac), Yahoo, Gmail, Hotmail oh and don’t forget the numerous mobile devices from iPads to all sorts of smartphone brands.

Third – your newsletter service provider. Lately, I’ve been working with 1ShoppingCart on this for a client and the bottom line, their HTML email newsletter editor suck. It’s so bad, it makes me want to put a fist through the computer. The reasons are plenty but the bottom line is, they do not seem to understand email HTML is quite an animal of its own but the tools provided are created for web-based HTML. That’s not good.

Also, because of the delicacy of the HTML code, one small delete in the HTML editor can mean big difference in the email. There is no way from keeping the client out of those areas except to educate them about basic HTML – not always pleasant.

What can make it easier?

Start with an HTML email blueprint. If you are buying templates, make sure the designer understands how tricky HTML email can be to get right across the board and have coded tweaks for popular email readers and mobile readers.

Reconsider your provider. Aweber has recently released a beta of the new HTML email designer where you can create a ‘master’ layout where you can fix elements that appear on every email and identify which elements can be edited when writing the email. This is great when working for clients or even yourself because then, you keep the rest of the design consistent and won’t mess it up with a fat finger.

I don’t normally send elaborately designed HTML emails, my HTML emails are text based (to make them look like text emails) but so far, I’ve not had as much grief with Aweber.

One idea (thanks to Susanne Myers of Daily Affiliate Tasks) is to re-use the content in our autoresponders. You can record them as audios or create PDF reports with them. The not so easy part especially if you’ve been in the business for a while is, to get all that content out of your autoresponder account. Some of our lists have been in existence for years and we have many lists. Big headache.

We use Aweber. One great feature they have is the ability to export all your autoresonpder and broadcast messages too. The not so great part – you have to re-download regularly and there is no way to only download in increments. So you get the entire archive every time. If you are a prolific emailer, you’ll find your archive set getting outdated pretty quickly. Good thing there is another option and oh such a wonderfully simple one it is. Ready?

Just subscribe your Evernote account to your lists.

Inside each Evernote account, you can create your own private email address. Simply log in. Click on your account settings.

In your Account settings tab, towards the bottom, you should see a spot that says Email notes to and a unique email address. Copy that. (Hint – save this to your address book too so you can quickly save email messages into Evernote anytime later).

Once you have that email address, you can either subscribe yourself via your web form

Or, you can add yourself to your list via your autoresponder control panel

From now on, you will receive your own autoresponder message as well as all your broadcasts in Evernote. You can access this information anytime, on any device with an Internet connection. Plus, you get to leverage its fantastic search and tagging capabilities.

There’s only one small gripe I have. Emails to Evernote by default are sent to your Evernote inbox. Normally, you can add special commands to your email subject line so it will automatically get moved and tagged. With this method, I will have to manually tag and move them to an appropriate notebook.

Perhaps, you could subscribe yourself using a regular address, create a filter to automatically alter the subject line and forward to Evernote… Something to explore but for right now, this setup works for me.

It’s much better than emailing the messages to myself or creating a separate email account because:

1. We sure don’t need yet another email inbox. Sure, it’s not an address you check regularly but it’s there and eventually fills with spam.
2. We have a habit of deleting emails. I think we’re kinda conditioned to want to get rid of all ‘new’ emails and do something with them.

Now… to get to work re-purposing the content from those email messages.

Photocredit:Yutaka Tsutano 

There’s a really good chance, this won’t be a decision you have to make – good for you. Most marketers I know, sell their digital content via a third party system like 1ShoppingCart, eJunkie or Clickbank. If you ever wished you could drop that monthly payment, perhaps you might reconsider after reading this post. With that said, I’m writing this not to convince people to stay nor switch to a third party system, merely to pose the question to all – a question that we have perhaps never worried too much about until now.

Why now? Because, in the last 6 months (and I predict going on into the future), we’ve seen more hacking and site breaches. These are beyond the normal defacing and uploading of malicious content. Those are bad enough but this is even more scary, ranging from domain hijacking to outright stealing of customer databases.

These types of attacks, rob us of our brand, business, credibility and trust. Things that are much tougher to fix than cleaning up a site and getting it back on into the search engines. They also leave small businesses very vulnerable to law suits. Just one case could end our business and perhaps leave us in financial ruin which is why it’s important to set your company up with the right structure. That however is another huge topic for another day.

Given this scenario, I’m actually re-considering a 3rd party shopping cart.

True, it is another monthly expense but having customer information stolen from them vs. stolen from you is a huge difference. You may not be off the hook completely but depending how the breach occurs, customers could even be sympathetic. Have information stolen from you and there is absolutely no room for any excuses. Zero. At this point, we are only talking about data like name, email address and perhaps a telephone number. Not about storing credit card data and other more sensitive information. Few people I know actually store that kind of data. Yet, name, address, emails and phone is still plenty depending who you talk to.

What do you use? Does this post make you look at your monthly shopping cart payments in a different light? Does it make you want to switch to a 3rd party system if you use a self hosted cart – this by the way includes WordPress carts and membership systems. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

You go upgrade your WordPress site using the usual one click upgrade and BAM! It fails. Ugh.

Maybe you’re equipped with the skills to manually upgrade it and you do it, you click the database to update and everything should be good right? Noooo… you had to get this error

“An automated WordPress update has failed to complete”

WHAT? How can that be? You just manually upgraded it and it went OK how do you get this message off?

Here’s how.

Fire up your FTP program or log in to cPanel. Find the upgrade folder found inside the wp-content folder and remove it. Then, inside the same folder wp-config.php is found, you will likely see a .maintenance file. Get rid of that too and the error will be gone.

The problem with images is, you only have so many of your own you can use, it can get uber expensive to buy stock photos for every single post. So most of us will go search and use images from Flickr or similar places. Free images usually require a link back or credits – small price to pay really.

Sadly, by default WordPress captions don’t allow links. It will strip them out and you can add photo credits that link back to the photographer, I often had to relegate it all the way to the bottom which is OK I guess but rather disjointed. I could make the image clickable but I don’t think that would give a good user experience because people just don’t expect that when they click on the image.

Then, I found out links in captions will be supported in version 3.4. Yay! So I downloaded the 3.4 beta to test. Here’s how it works.

When you add images, you won’t notice anything new in the interface but now, you can enter anchor links in HTML directly into the caption field.

If you are not good with HTML no matter, after you add the image to your post, you can simply highlight the caption text you want linked, then click the Insert/edit link button in the Visual editor. You’ll get the familiar popup to either enter your URL or choose to link to one of your old, published posts. Nice!

The end result will look a little like this.

Keep in mind, your theme will use its own styling so the final design will depend on your theme but otherwise, links in caption works great! Looking forward to WP 3.4

Here are two places to learn more about it.

Sucuri

iThemes

Photo credit: David Singleton via Flickr

If you are using aMember version 4 and getting ready to pay affiliates, you may find there are no commissions to pay. The good news is, it is not a bug but a setting. By default, aMember sets commissions to be delayed by 31 days. So any sale that is less than 31 days old is not included in the report. If you had no commission-able sales older than 31 days, aMember assumes no commissions are to be paid.

To protect yourself, a 30 or 31 day delay on commission payments isn’t such a bad idea. There have been merchants who lost a lot of money on fraudulent sales. The fake sales were made using stolen credits cards through an affiliate URL. So the merchant is already out of the money from the stolen card but since they had paid the affiliate their commissions, it’s a double whammy.

Of course, if you have an established affiliate program and change your payment terms, you will want to give your affiliates a good explanation and some time to get used to the idea.

Anyhow, in aMember, changing the delay to 0 will allow you to generate commission payments.

Photo credit: Johan Larsson via Flickr

So what are the apps that can be found on my mobile devices that are also on the laptop and desktop?

On the phone (Android)

1. BizCalendar by Mikado I love love love the many calendar widgets.

2. Navigation – this is turn by turn GPS directions that came with my phone. LOVE IT! Great when visiting new local clients in unfamiliar territory.

3. FlexT9 – I can actually ‘write’ instead of type and something else called trace or swype. You don’t type but you just trace the words with your finger this is fantastic. Unfortunately have not been able to find similar app for my husband’s iPhone. Of course with Android I can talk instead of type – it’s just… I’m not a talker.

On the iPad

1. WordPress

2. Air Sketch like a whiteboard with the option to stream your whiteboard over Wifi. Great for presentations or webinars.

3. HoursTracker – Time Sheet & Time Tracker. Very helpful for tracking jobs for clients or even your own projects so you know exactly how much time (and money) you spend on a project.

On both the phone, iPad, laptop and desktop

1. Evernote

2. Dropbox

3. Roboform

4. GQueues – Project and task manager – this is not exactly an app but a web based app you access via the browser yet behaves like an app. I’m becoming quite attached to GQueues so this is essential.