Realbasics.com

02/11/2026

Busy day. Quite a long list. As I say at the end

---
Yes, this was a busier day than usual. And yes, there’s more I could have / should have / wish I could have done. That’s what tomorrows are for, I guess.

But it wasn’t that much busier than usual.

What do you need done for your website? Tomorrow, I mean. Or later in the week.
---

After nearly 15 years working with WordPress, and more than 13 years supporting other people’s websites, I end up doing a lot of really cool stuff. So I just thought I’d mention what my workday was like today. So today I… Attended my weekly business networking meeting Moved two sites to new ho...

03/02/2024

From the post: "Real Wordpress is free, open-source, created and distributed by a not-for-profit foundation, and distributed to individual tens of millions of personal web servers around the world. Meanwhile, the for-profit, deceptively named Wordpress.com is a social-media-style company like Twitter or Facebook, with terms of service that let the owners freely collect and sell your information."

Click through to read the rest.

Short answer? Real Wordpress is free, open-source, created and distributed by a not for profit foundation, and distributed to individual tens of millions of personal web servers around the world.Meanwhile, the for-profit, deceptively named Wordpress.com is a social-media-style company like Twitter o...

10/21/2023

From the post: "Everyone knows websites can be important for sales and marketing, sure. But what about recruiting and reputation management?

Early in my career I got a 2nd-hand referral for a surprisingly large B2B company that didn’t have a website. The referral was from a consultant who felt they should have one, even though the owners didn’t think they needed one..."

Short answer? Everyone knows websites can be important for sales and marketing, sure. But what about recruiting and reputation management? Early in my career I got a 2nd-hand referral for a surprisingly large B2B company that didn’t have a website. The referral was from a consultant who felt they ...

10/21/2023

Very cool intro to creating posts for blogs and social media I've quoted in full from a post on Reddit's u/smallbusiness subreddit.

From the post: "In this post, we'll discuss how to boost engagement in your Instagram stories without divulging your private life, without sticking to the same topics, and without spending all your time on [public media]."

Good stuff. Includes a link to the original post. I grabbed the whole thing in case the original violated u/smallbusiness's questions-only rule.

The post is about using Instagram stories but it applies to social media posting in general, and blogging in particular. It’s the full text of an excellent article about posting strategy, from Reddit user Remarkable_Celery709. It was posted in the u/smallbusiness subreddit on Reddit. I almost neve...

10/10/2023

But when I do I… 😂😂😂

09/23/2023

Ran into my friend and fellow Wordpress colleague Cami Shields MacNamara at WordCamp Vancouver. She was smart enough to get a photo.

01/04/2023

Why aren’t website’s contact form messages showing up in my inbox? It’s a common problem. It’s a common question. Here’s an answer.

Why aren't website contact form messages showing up in my inbox? It's a common problem. It's a common question. Here's an answer.

11/11/2022

Cool set of questions that Google looks for when ranking website content.

You’ll often hear people say the best way to boost your ranking with Google is to have great, useful, relevant content. Which to be honest ought to be pretty obvious… but isn’t, given the zillions of ways people come up with to try and game the SEO system. So… what exactly does Google mean w...

07/21/2022

Bogus DMCA Infringement Notices May Be The Product Of “Black Hat” PR Agencies.

First Of All, What They’re Doing
It looks like the actors behind this behavior do this one neat trick
- Identifies a “controversial” or negative post about one of their clients
- Copies the contents and posts it on their own website…
- …using the names of attorneys (at least one) as the authors
- Manipulates the publication date to one day before the original’s published date
- Submits an infringement notification with the alleged lawyer’s name and a phony gmail address.
- …
- Make money
They’ve got a lot of !% # gall, right?

Have you received an email claiming you’ve infringed the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) recently? For people with screen readers here’s the relevant text from the screenshot Cloudflare received a DMCA copyright infringement complaint regarding: realbasics.com The information we received ...

06/24/2022

If you use NinjaForms and got that forced security update in mid June, 2022, your forms may have disappeared from your Contact page or other places on your site. Chances are the site isn’t really broken. Instead the plugin may have disabled the forms by putting itself into “maintenance mode.” Here’s how to fix it.

So, about the WordPress Ninja Forms plugin and missing forms. If you use NinjaForms and got that forced security update in mid June, 2022, your forms may have disappeared from your Contact page or other places on your site. Chances are the site isn’t really broken. Instead the plugin may have disa...

10/07/2021

You might not always be possible to own all your own content but it's ok to try to control it.

In my experience as a WordPress support specialist, Facebook (or Amazon, or Google, etc.) outages are very rare compared to even very well-run individual websites. 99.9% uptime still means about 8 hours of downtime per year, right? So it would be risky to publish only on WordPress as well!

I still recommend that people have their own websites, not because they’re more reliable or more popular but because it’s a great foundation for the COPE/CORE publishing strategy: Create Once Post/Repost Everywhere.

Over at PostStatus David Bisset has a thoughtful post about brushing off the recent Facebook/Instagram/WeChat outage with quips about “own your own content.” Time will tell if Facebook being down on Oct 4th will be the single greatest system failure in tech in 2021. There’s been some good writ...