I recently discovered that the Google crawler was throwing a redirect error on certain pages in our YLF bbPress forum (bbPress 1.0.2 at time of writing). These URLs had one thing in common – the were encoded to handle special characters. Here is an example:
http://youlookfab.com/welookfab/topic/your-favourite-80%E2%80%99s-music-bands
The “%E2” in this URL is an encoded version of the [...]

Like most systems that require password authentication, Wordpress will help you out if you forget your password. Clicking the “lost your password” link at the login page will take you through a sequence of steps that ultimately sends a new password to the email address associated with your Wordpress account.
But what if your Wordpress installation [...]

During July our traffic from Google, which had been growing steadily since we launched YLF in 2005, suddenly dropped more than 50%. To combat this I installed the All in One SEO Pack plugin, removed meta descriptions altogether, and resubmitted the sitemap.
Well, something worked. Our traffic returned to pre-plunge levels a few days ago. Courtesy [...]

One part of setting up the YLF forum development server did not run very smoothly: replicating the database. I wanted to get a full version of the current YLF forum with all 20,272 posts by 1214 users. There is no backup or import/export functionality currently built in to bbPress (or available as a plug-in), so [...]

This is filed under the heading “I don’t know why the solution works, but it does, and that’s good enough for me”.
The YLF forum is currently based on bbPress 0.8.3 (great forum system, more on that in future posts). I was setting up a development server to test some new features and hit a strange [...]

Today I needed to set up a staging server to do some experiments with our YLF theme. After setting up the database and installing Wordpress, I wanted to import the current contents of YLF to this new site. Since 2.2, Wordpress has had the ability to import and export the contents of the blog database [...]

Our traffic from Google organic search is still way down at youlookfab.com. About 3 weeks ago it dropped more than 50%, and has stabilized at that level. Pretty alarming, given that this represented more than half of our organic search traffic.
Since the plunge I have…

Installed the All in One SEO Pack plugin. Google’s content analysis [...]