Friday, October 10, 2008
Google Webmaster Site Verification
Google Webmaster Tools supplies an option to add a“sitemaps.xml” file for each of your websites. To take advantage of all its features, Google requires you to verify the site is yours by either adding a specific file to your site or adding a Meta tag to your index.html.
The file verification option does not work for 110MB websites and I do not have an index.html on my FlatPress blog. I could create an index.html that contains the Meta tag and automatically forward visitors to “index.php”. However, this second option is not something I want my website visitors to endure.
After searching the FlatPress forum, I found the solution I needed. FlatPress has an easy to use user plugin named HeadStuff, which allows Meta tags to be defined. It is simple to setup and use.
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Monday, September 8, 2008
How to: Enabling PrettyURLs
FlatPress Blogs posts (entries) are assigned a unique web address of numbers. These addresses are not too user friendly. To rectify this, FlatPress included the plugin PrettyURLs, which takes these web addresses and creates alternate addresses based on the entries subject.
PrettyURLs web address format:
http://yourwebsite/index.php/year/month/day/the-name-of-the-entry/
The plugin PrettyURL, while included in FlatPress is not enabled by default. To enable it only takes three steps.
Tuesday, September 2, 2008
Making FlatPress Secure
After setting up your FlatPress blog it recommended that you delete “setup.php” and the “setup/” directory on your site. These files are used to setup your blog as well at create your login id. Deleting them will not affect your blog at all. If you ever need them again to redo your setup, you can upload them to your site.
This change will not guarantee the security of your blog site but it will help. To protect your blogs content, it is best to backup it whenever you make changes to it or when new entries/comments are posted. On this blog, I have a post providing step-by-step procedures for backing up to your blog.
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
How to: Upgrade to FlatPress Blog Engine v.804 Vivace
On May 7, 2008, the new version of FlatPress Blog Engine v.804 Vivace was released. It includes many new features making your blog site easier to administer. In order to update your blog to this new version; you will need to create a new blog site, copy over your existing content, and then replace your existing blog. To help in this endeavor, I created these step-by-step instructions for updating your existing FlatPress blog site.
Sunday, June 29, 2008
How to: Backup and Restore Your FlatPress Blog Site
Every Blog Administrator should routinely back up their blog site. This protects their site against data lost from a variety of reasons. For examples; disk corruption, hackers, web host closing, and accidental deletions. Many web hosts offer this service but you can do this yourself. FlatPress entries are text files that can be easily backed up/restored using a FTP client.
