Category: Blogging

Blogging Tips and Tricks

WordPress: Disable 404 Redirect to Homepage

If you don’t know what 404 error is, It is an error displayed on when a user requests a web page that couldn’t be found on their server (i.e. the requested webpage is not available). In this case, If you are redirecting (302 redirects) to home page then it is confusing for end user. Definitely, you should avoid 302 redirecting for non-existent URL. Probably you don’t want to send a low quality signal to Google and other engines if they are testing how 404’s are being handled by requesting a noexist page. The best solution is to create custom 404 page having search box saying “Did you mean …?”

In this post, we will see how to prevent 404 Redirect to Homepage in WordPress.

HTTP to HTTPS Migration, WordPress and SEO

Before I start this article, I would like to ask one question to you, How many HTTPS links do you see in first page of Google search result? Generally, I get more than 50% for my search queries and major top links belong to HTTPS. It is self explanatory how important HTTPS and SSL is. As SSL is mandatory for safely processing transaction e-commerce website, but here I am not going to talk about security and safety, my concern is SEO. The web is moving toward using HTTPS encryption by default and it is encouraged by Google with announcement HTTPS as a ranking signal in 2014. Chrome and Firefox browsers started to display warning for HTTP (Non secure) websites. So you decided to move on HTTPS. Hold a minute and see the challenges. you will get many examples on Google saying huge drop in traffic after moving HTTPS if not implemented properly. So you must aware of the challenges. In this post, we will move a WordPress website to HTTPS, Setup free SSL and update dependencies to meet SEO guidelines. It is assumed Apache server is used in Ubuntu server.

How to Load Disqus Comments on Click

On searching Google, I got many articles on this but didn’t find any way to do if official Disqus comment system WordPress plugin is used. So, decided to write on it. This post explains how to setup Disqus on your website to load on-demand (on click on any button or link) and not automatically. It is assumed you’ve registered your website with Disqus before get started.

Get Social Media (Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google+) Followers Count Using PHP

Each social media provides their own widget to display followers count, but their user interfaces are different and so much javascript in the code. So I decided to get the count on server side using PHP, cache it and show it as I want. This post explains to get Twitter followers, Facebook fans, YouTube subscribers and Google+ page/profile followers count, to cache the results and generate HTML to display them.

How React.js is good for SEO (Server-side React with ASP.NET)

The problem with the javascript frameworks is that they are NOT perfect search engine friendly. Although Google can crawl and index Ajax content but it is not so reliable and need to follow the guidelines. The advantage of React.js is that you can run it on the server and the virtual DOM will be rendered and returned to the browser as a regular web page. In this post, we will implement a sample in ASP.NET to pre-render the initial state of your React components server-side and the outcome is already rendered page of markup. So it will be indexed just like any other static page by search engine.

If you are new to React.js, I strongly recommend to read following tutorial:

React.js: Introduction and Hello World with ASP.NET MVC 5

Received Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Award 2012

Microsoft MVP logoI am happy to inform you that Microsoft has awarded me the ‘Most Valuable Professional (MVP)‘ award (in ASP.NET/IIS category) which is a great honor and given to a very limited number of professionals. In the first week of October, I went to Bangalore for official work and got mail from Microsoft during traveling:

Add Social Slider (Facebook like box, twitter and Google+ Widgets) in Your Website

Today, Social media is a great way to promote websites, blogs, apps and events. For a website, Facebook, Twitter or Google+ widgets become must have parts to get public interaction, generate traffic. If you add Facebook Like box, twitter status and Google+ widget in your web page, it takes too much spaces and it makes webpage too complex. So, alternate is to use icons only and on mouse over display corresponding widget. To attract user, make these icons fixed floated.