Mandar Apte

UI/UX Designer from Mumbai, Maharashtra, India.

Category: Open Source

In production and development, open source as a development model promotes a universal access via a free license to a product’s design or blueprint, and universal redistribution of that design or blueprint, including subsequent improvements to it by anyone.

  • The complete guide for maintaining and optimising WordPress websites for optimum performance.

    Introduction

    I have been using WordPress for almost more than five years now.

    In the post below, I will explain the step-by-step procedure for hardening, securing, and optimising WordPress for best performance and security.

    So, First things first,

    Introduction to WordPress

    What is WordPress? WordPress is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) based on PHP and MySQL. Its features include a plugin architecture and a template system. As of January 2015, over 23.3% of the top 10 million websites used WordPress. WordPress is also the most popular blogging system on the Web, with more than 60 million websites using it.

    As we know today, WordPress is offered in two different formats: one is managed and hosted by the team at WordPress.com, and the other is self-hosted by the user using a downloadable installable package available at WordPress.org.

    Difference between WordPress.com & WordPress.org

    The following things differentiate WordPress.com and WordPress.org from each other

    1st Difference
    WordPress.com: The user provides the content & website is managed by the team at WordPress.com.
    WordPress.org: Content provided by the User & Managed by the user itself.

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  • Fix the WordPress.com Jetpack error: ‘Website needs to be publicly accessible to use Jetpack.’

    As we know, the WordPress community exist on wordpress.com & wordpress.org

    WordPress.org is a downloadable CMS (Content Management System) distribution for self-hosting used by web designers and developers.

    Being a CMS lead developer, Automattic wants its wordpress.com experience to be available to its wordpress.org users. So, they developed plugins like JetPack for WordPress self-hosted websites.

    JetPack Error:
    Your website needs to be publicly accessible to use Jetpack: site_inaccessible
    Error Details: The Jetpack server could not communicate with your site [HTTP 404]. Ask your web host if they allow connections from WordPress.com. If you need further assistance, contact Jetpack Support: http://jetpack.me/support/

    Your website needs to be publicly accessible to use Jetpack- site_inaccessible Error Details- The Jetpack server was unable to communicate with your site HTTP 404
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  • Using the Sticky Navigation Bar to increase the page views per visit (session) ratio for any website.

    It is a well-known, tried-and-tested method to have a sticky navigation bar at the top of a responsive website design and layout.

    A fixed navigation bar at the top helps mobile or desktop website users have a fixed area where they can find navigation icons and links through which they can browse and navigate the current website. Having a fixed navigation bar at the top helps webmasters increase page views, i.e., it helps webmasters increase the page views per visit ratio.

    Yes, it occupies space at the top, but it helps the user have navigation links handy whenever he wants to browse the website. Space constraints only refer to mobile devices with small screen sizes.

    The following is the code that helps you have a fixed navigation bar. Copy and paste the following CSS code in your style.css

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  • How to fix WordPress Automatic Update Error.

    Background:

    When WordPress.Org releases a new update to its WordPress standalone CMS (Content Management System), you may have set your website to get your installation updated automatically, or you may like to do it yourself at your preferred time.

    But because of server load on the part of your web host, you may get an error something like this with a screwed-up blank website with the following error printed on the screen:

    Warning: require(/nfs/domains/your-domain-name.com/html/wp-includes/session.php) [function.require]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /nfs/domains/your-domain-name.com/html/wp-settings.php on line 122

Fatal error: require() [function.require]: Failed opening required '/nfs/domains/your-domain-name.com/html/wp-includes/session.php' (include_path='.:/usr/local/php-5.3.27/share/pear') in /nfs/domains/your-domain-name.com/html/wp-settings.php on line 122

    The actual cause of the above errors:

    As mentioned, errors are generated because of interrupted WordPress updates, primarily because of heavy load on your web host’s online server. As the update fails, all files mismatch with consistent version numbers, so some old source files remain as it is & only the remaining few get updated with the new version. So, it is a problem of source code version consistency.

    How to fix this:

    Error 01: [function.require]: failed to open stream: No such file or directory in

    Error 02: Fatal error: require() [function.require]: Failed opening required & (include_path=’.:/usr/local/php-5.3.27/share/pear’)

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  • Fix Google PageSpeed Error ‘Eliminate render-blocking JavaScript and CSS in above-the-fold content’ for WordPress Website.

    Here is how you may want to tune up your WordPress website performance, i.e., how long it takes to download your website from the server to your visitors’ computer, mobile or tablet.

    In the era of responsive design, we tend to embed more than one Javascript or CSS file, such as Bootstrap CSS and JS file bundles.

    If you have integrated third-party advertising into your website, vendors like Google add their own Javascript file through their AdSense ad code that you can’t control.

    But here is a simple way out of this problem.

    Important Note:
    Compressing, Minifying, or Deferring Files may harm the website’s functionality because of dependencies, so first, do the following steps on your local server. If everything looks to be working fine, you can update the duplicate files on Live servers—just for safety and security purposes.

    When you ‘Analyse’ your website on Google PageSpeed, you get a warning something like this:
    Your page has 4 blocking script resources and 8 blocking CSS resources. This causes a delay in rendering your page.
    None of the above-the-fold content on your page could be rendered without waiting for the following resources to load. Try to defer or asynchronously load blocking resources or inline the critical portions of those resources directly in the HTML.

    Solution 01:

    The safest way of Deferring JavaScript ‘JS’ would be the following

    Step 01:
    Add the word ‘async’ at the closing tag called ‘</script>’, So your code will not block loading any other resources.

    Step 02:
    Add the same line of code just before closing the footer tag so your code is already asynchronous (async). After moving the same code to the footer, it will load after the website loading.

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  • How do you change the color opacity or transparency in CSS?

    There are instances when you think it would be a great idea to change the opacity of the background color of a div without affecting the text, image, and other web properties present inside the same div of HTML and CSS.

    Answer:

    What you usually do is specify background color in CSS using hex, i.e. Hexadecimal values like this:

    .navbar {background-color: #ffffff;}

    But if you use RGBA to specify background color in CSS, you can utilise its feature called alpha, i.e. RGBA is a short form for Red – Green – Blue – Alpha

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  • How to enable HTTP persistent or HTTP keep-alive connection feature for your WordPress website.

    As Wikipedia explains:

    HTTP persistent connection, also called HTTP keep-alive or HTTP connection reuse, involves using a single TCP connection to send and receive multiple HTTP requests/responses instead of opening a new connection for every request/response pair. The newer SPDY protocol uses the same idea and extends it to allow multiple concurrent requests/responses to be multiplexed over a single connection.

    Note: I assume you have adequate knowledge of handling your server and server settings and are well-versed in your field.

    You can put the following code in your .htaceess file, which is in the root of your server’s html folder.

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  • How to enable Gzip Compression for WordPress.

    If you want to increase your website’s performance and speed by reducing its load time on clients’ (i.e., visitors’) machines, then this tutorial will help you.

    Something About WordPress:
    WordPress does not offer a mechanism to compress the blog’s HTML output. The Apache-enabled web server normally provides this feature.

    As the Apache Website Defines, The mod_deflate module provides the DEFLATE output filter that allows output from your server to be compressed before being sent to the client over the network.

    Here is how to enable gzip compression via .htaccess
    If you prefer to allow or fine-tune output compression with the Apache server, then copy and paste the below code into your .htaccess file:

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  • How to disable WordPress Pingbacks & Trackbacks.

    Let’s Know What is Pingback?

    A pingback is a type of comment created when you link to another blog post where pingbacks are enabled. The best way to think about pingbacks is as remote comments:

    1. Person A posts something on his blog.
    2. Person B posts on her blog, linking to Person A’s post. This automatically sends a pingback to Person A when both have pingback-enabled blogs.
    3. When Person A’s blog receives the pingback, it automatically goes to Person B’s post to confirm that the pingback originated there.

    Let’s Know What Trackback is.

    Trackbacks are a way to notify legacy blog systems that you’ve linked to them. If you link other WordPress blogs, they’ll be notified automatically using pingbacks; no other action is necessary.

    Think of trackbacks as the equivalent of acknowledgements and references at the end of an academic paper or chapter in a textbook.

    To send a trackback, add the trackback URI from the other blog post to the Send Trackbacks module in your blog post before you publish it. A trackback URI from a WordPress blog will end with /trackback/.

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  • Jetpack Related Posts not working or displaying – appearing on WordPress Self Hosted Website Domain or Subdomain, Here is why it is happening & how you can fix it.

    With JetPack for WordPress, Automattic is releasing wordpress.com features for WordPress self-hosted websites.

    One feature in that release is ‘Related Posts,’ where you can activate this inbuilt plugin-like functionality to scan your self-hosted website and display the desired number of related posts under each blog post.

    This feature helps users discover and read related post category content more easily. It also increases the website’s click-through rate, i.e., the Average number of pages visited by each website visitor.

    It sometimes doesn’t show any related posts under any blog post, but there is a reason why it acts up that way.

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