5 Major Differences Between A Blog And Website

Differences between a blog and a website are highly searched in today's online arena. Blogging/blog terms are so intensely used around the net, that many newbies get stuck on the point here. So i thought why not to mention the basic differences between the two ways by which we can publish our content online.

 

To summarize, blog is a type of a website (Web log= Blog). Website is a general term. (site on web=website). You might have heard about those static sites and dynamic sites.

 

 

That idea supports the Blog vs Website theory. There are few technical differences, as to how the data is presented to the readers. We would also discuss couple of reasons due to which blogs are highly considered now days, to present data online.

 

As the saying goes:

‘All apples are fruits but not all fruits are apples.’

Similarly,

‘All blogs are websites but not all websites are blogs.’

However, what some of you might not be aware of is the major difference between the two and how these two make a difference to the global world with their presence. Let me put some light to the major differences between a blog and a website.

And yea, if you are wondering about the eBook series, its not finished yet. In fact we are onto the interesting part. So stay tuned for it in the coming days. Its always better to change some taste. Isn't it?

Blog vs Website - Characteristics Match up

According to Wikipedia, a blog is as follows:
 

A blog (a blend of the term web log) is a type of website or part of a website supposed to be updated with new content from time to time

Examples of blogs are famous news magazines such as buzzfeed, techCrunch, Lifehacker or news sites such as The New York Times, CNN, BCCetc. that publish stories on daily basis. Or even sites ran by individuals on a specific niche such as this blog!

While a website:

A website is a collection of related web pages, including multimedia content, typically identified with a common domain name, and published on at least one web server.

Examples of websites is everything that exists on ! Because a website is the mother term given to all sites that you browse online including the blogs. Whether it may be social media networks like Facebook/Twitter or Ecommerce sites such as eBay, amazon, Alibaba or community forums such as stackoverflow, Google forums or Quora.

 

Blogs are generally more informally presented to the visitors. The language used is often much simpler than on websites. (though its not necessary as many webmasters now have started to use simpler language, to make their view point clear to a wider range of people, around the globe.)

In blogs, there is a feature called "posts", as what you are reading now. Every post have its own page (as the url suggests), but the main page (homepage) of the blog is dedicated to the
series of latest posts in reverse-chronological (latest to oldest) order.

Bloggers often prefer to show around 8-12 recent posts on their blogs main (home) page. Where as there is nothing such in a static website. Even if a website is about tutorials (like Lisa Arby's popular website, 2createawebsite.com). The website was launched years ago, when the blogging wasn't quite into the online world.

She did a pretty neat job with the sequence of the content. Interlinking was perfect. You could take a look to that site, in order to get to know the feel of a static website.

The major difference between the two types, blog and a static website is about the content refreshment. The major content of website remains the same. Though the webmaster could add additional pages to the website to increase the content, but the order by which the information is presented could not be later changed. (isn't changed).

That's where blog have started to gain popularity. Have you ever thought about the way you search internet now days? You either follow a specific blog right away (through bookmarks) or in most cases, you search search engines.

Search engines help you to get to a specific question (like how to add bla bla to blogger). It would take you to the static page, with the best information of the particular topic, either it comes from blog or website. So the content is basically searched the same way as before (through search engines), but blogs provide a different dimension to the way information is presented.

Another huge aspect of blogs due to which people have adopted them, are their ability to get crawled by search engines frequently. As the posts are updated on daily basis (sometimes many times in a day), so search engines crawl blogs many times a day in order to fetch new content. 

Blog Vs. Website: What's The Difference?

These are five ways you can identify a 'Blog' when compared to any website found online.

1. A Blog provides a Commenting System
2. A Blog offers a subscription system to send free email newsletters to readers.
3. Articles inside a Blog are organized through categories and tags.
4. Articles in a Blog appear in reverse-chronological order, latest to oldest.
5. A Blog is managed by an individual author or a team of authors often called the editorial board.

1. A Blog Contains a Comment Form

If you see a comment form at the bottom of a webpage, know that you are reading a blog. Blog comment forms are a great way to interact with the author and share your insights or ask him queries regarding the blog post.

These comment forms could be simple text boxes with fields for Name, Website/Email, Message. Or it can be a third-party comment plugin powered by Disqus, Facebook or Google+.

2. You Can Subscribe To a Blog Updates

Blogs are more like newspapers. Covering a vast variety of topics and publishing several articles each day or each month. Visitors to blogs who want to stay updated with latest blog posts, subscribe to the email newsletter.

Blog administrators use difference email delivery systems such as Feedburner, Awber or mailchimp to send email updates to their readers.

3. Blog Articles are Organized By Categories & Tags

Blogs provide great navigation to its visitors thanks to the use of Categories and tags. Categories classify the blog topics into different groups and tags classify them into sub-groups. Users can then read their topics of interest with the help of these category pages.

If you observe our blog menu at the top, you will find that, we have organized our content into different labels/categories. This helps you to better navigate our site.

4. Blog Content is always Displayed In reverse-chronological  order

A blog will always display its newest blog posts at top and oldest at bottom. This sequence is adopted for both blog posts and comments, so that the readers could reach newly published articles on homepage easily.

5. Unlike a Website, a Blog Can Be Managed by a Single Author!

You don't need a big team to manage a blog. This is one reason why blogs have become the best source of online earning for enthusiastic people who love to share their knowledge with the rest of the world. I started this blog all alone and I am running it for over 8 years without a big team.

You can surely increase the number of authors on a blog to publish content more frequently. Large corporate blogs have no more than 10-15 bloggers on its editorial board, who publish content regularly.

You can

create a free blog on Blogger, Tumblr or even Wordpress. Unlike building a website, you don't need to have advanced technical skills such as web development or knowledge of web hosting or FTP to start a blog. Thanks to free blogging platforms like Blogger, you can start your blog without worrying about the coding part! 

How to Optimize and Use PDFs as Online Content?

As you probably know, PDFs are a very popular document format – mostly due to the fact that they can be viewed on any platform while preserving the document layout and formatting. Because of this universal compatibility they are often used for distributing or printing documents.

The one area where PDFs have traditionally not been very popular is as online content on websites. Although most web browsers can view PDF documents, the misconception that search engines could not index PDF files meant that many people avoided them for quite some time.

 

That myth has been completely debunked now, and Google confirmed that they have been indexing and ranking PDF documents since 2001. Still, it is important to understand that PDFs are a very unique type of content and if you do decide to use them online you will need to optimize them in several ways. This is a friendly A-Z guide on PDF SEO and best practices.

Make Sure the File Size is Low

One of the main issues with publishing PDF documents as online content is that their file size can be very large – which is especially true for long documents that have lots of images. That is far from ideal for online content, as it means that it will take longer to be displayed, which in turn could result in readers clicking away rather than waiting for it to load.

Additionally search engines regard page speed as an important metric when ranking webpages, and a large PDF file that loads slowly is likely to suffer on that front too.

Although there are no hard and fast rules, you should try to keep the file size of any PDFs you intend to use as online content as low as you can. That can be done through several means:

• Avoid creating PDFs that are too long

  Thousand page PDF documents rarely make for good online content, and you’re better off sticking to much lower page counts. Not only will shorter PDFs have a lower file size, but they’ll also retain more readers.
  If you do have a PDF document that is too long, you may want to consider breaking it up into several shorter PDF documents. Alternatively you could extract the important parts and publish them individually.

• Only use images when necessary

  Don’t go overboard inserting images in PDF documents as each image can contribute significantly to its file size. Initially you should only insert images that are essential to the content, and later add others if the file size permits.
  The quality of the images that you add (for JPG especially) can make a large difference to the file size of your PDF documents.

• Compress the PDF files

  When you export PDF files you will often find several options that you can use to compress or reduce the file size of your PDFs. It is worth taking advantage of these options, or using other PDF compression tools to reduce their file size.
  If you do compress PDF files (especially using other tools) you should check to make sure their formatting, layout and image quality is still satisfactory after you do.

If you can get your PDF files as low as 15MB or 25MB it should be fairly good. On the other hand if your PDF files start to approach 100MB or more then you’re likely to want to look carefully at them.

Optimize for Search Engines

Just like any form of online content, you will want your PDF documents to be optimized for search engines. Fortunately that is one area that PDFs are actually surprisingly good at, as they have a lot of components that you can treat similarly to normal HTML documents.

When you want to optimize a PDF document for search engines, you should focus on:

• Descriptive file names

  The file name of your PDF documents should reflect its contents, and ideally contain the main keyword you’re targeting. Generally using the title and separating the words with dashes is the good option.

• Title and description tag

  In every PDFs document properties there will be a title and description tag. Both tags will be used in the same way as their HTML counterparts and represent the text that appears in search results – and should contain keywords, particularly long-tail ones.

• Other document properties

  Aside from the title and description there are several other document properties such as the author, keywords, and so on. While these may not have the same impact, it is worth filling them out regardless as they help contextualize your PDF document for search engines.

• Alternate tags

  It is possible to add alternate text tags to images in your PDF documents, and you should take full advantage of that fact. Just like with webpages, search engines can’t ‘view’ images the same way that people do, so providing them with text that describes the image can help.

If properly optimized, your PDF documents will be able to rank well on search engines. Generally search engines will treat PDF documents in the same way as HTML documents, and so the other factors that influence SEO such as keywords and backlinks will work in much the same way.

In short if you optimize your PDF documents for search engines, you should start to see them get listed and rank just as well as the rest of your online content.

Link To and Link From

As you probably know, PDF documents support hyperlinks – and you should take advantage of that. In particular you can use the hyperlinks to overcome one of the weaknesses of using PDF documents as online content, which is the fact that they tend to be ‘isolated’ from the website they’re published on.

Unlike conventional HTML webpages nowadays that share the same common structure and are part of the Content Management System (CMS) in most cases – PDF documents do not share those elements. When visitors click on a link to a PDF file they are instead ‘downloading’ the PDF document and viewing it in their browser.

While you can’t completely overcome this due to the fact that it is simply how PDF documents work – links can help you to make it less of a disadvantage. In particular you should make it a point to:

• Link to your PDF documents in your website

  Rather than treating your PDF document as a ‘download’ you should link to it the same way you’d like to any normal webpage. If you want you can add a ‘(PDF)’ excerpt of text to the title, to let readers know that they’re about to open and view a PDF document.

• Link back to your website from your PDF document

  Within your PDF document, you should try to link back to your website. If you want you could place hyperlinks as part of the content that links back to relevant pages on your website, but more importantly you should link back to your ‘home’.
  One way to do that is to add a hyperlink in the header of every page of your PDF with the text ‘Back to home’ or ‘Back to website’. That way readers will be able to quickly go back to your website, and the PDF will feel a little less isolated from it.

Another reason to establish a network of links to and from your website and PDF documents is because they will appear more as part of its content to search engines as well. That can help your PDF documents to get indexed faster, and give search engines more information regarding their context too.

Conclusion

As you can see there are lots of areas that should be optimized if you want to use PDF documents as online content. Some of the areas are easy, but others can be a bit more difficult to handle.

If you intend to use PDF documents as online content regularly, you may want to try using a simple PDF editor such as Movavi PDF Editor. It is a basic PDF editor that will let you add, remove, and rearrange pages in PDF documents, while also adding and adjusting images and performing other alterations. In short it is a pretty handy tool that will let you tweak your PDF documents and prepare them for online use.

For the most part it is best to regard PDFs as a particular type of online content. It is by no means ideal to replace all your HTML webpages with PDF documents, but adding a few PDF documents as content can be good.

To be entirely honest, using PDF documents as online content works best when it is an article or document that readers may want to download and save later. In that specific situation, the fact that the content is in PDF format will benefit readers as it will make it more convenient for them.

Post credits: mybloggertricks

Show IP Address & Geolocation Of Website Visitors Via JavaScript

Privacy and freedom are two things no one can compromise for anything. From anonymous web browsing using VPN or proxy servers to anonymous electronic transactions via cryptocurrencies, online freedom is the biggest quest of internet users today.

Achieving complete anonymity online is difficult but not impossible thanks to developers working hard to introduce new tools and apps every other day. I am sure you all know how to hide your IP address using a VPN server, Tor browser or any proxy server but what may seem more appealing to you would be understanding how can you find out your website visitor’s IP addresses and geolocation using plain client-side JavaScript and HTTP API.

What is IP address?

IP address stands for Internet Protocol address which is a unique string of numbers separated by full stops that identifies each computer using the Internet Protocol to communicate over a distributed network.

IP address is a unique numerical address assigned to your computer by your Internet Service Provider (ISP). Every computer connected to internet has a unique IP and its internet activity can easily be tacked through its IP address.

At present you can easily retrieve useful client IP addresses using WebRTC that is supported by browsers such as Firefox, Chrome and Opera. But to fetch full details of a user’s IP address there are tons of free services that provide a public HTTP API.

These APIs  uses a database of IP addresses that are associated to cities along with other relevant information like time zone, region, zip code, latitude and longitude.

How To Show Site Visitor IP address and Geolocation?

I am using the free HTTP API provided by freegeoip.net site. We will make a simple ajax call to freegeoip to fetch the JSON data and parse JSON as text in plain JavaScript. The data is requested from the server using XMLHttpRequest().

You can show this IP table anywhere you want, may it be your blog post, a static page or blog sidebar.Liked it? Let’s learn how to add this cool JS tool to your blogger blog or wordpress blog to show visitors data in real time.

1. Copy the code below and paste it inside the HTML editor of your blog theme or blog editor

    <style> 
           
   #loaderip {margin:10px;padding:20px; background:yellow; font-size:30px; } 
           
   table.custom, table.custom2{width:100%;font-family:helvetica;border-spacing: 0;border: 0px solid #bbb;}table.custom,table.custom th,table.custom td, table.custom2 th, table.custom2 td{border:1px solid #ddd;border-collapse:collapse}table.custom td, table.custom2 td{padding:15px; min-width:100px;}th{padding:7px 10px;text-align:left;font-family:oswald;font-weight:400; font-size:16px;}table.custom tr:nth-child(odd), table.custom2 tr:nth-child(odd){background-color:#f1f1f1}table.custom tr:nth-child(even), table.custom2 tr:nth-child(even){background-color:#fff}table.custom th{background-color:#333;color:#fff;border:1px solid #333}table.custom th:nth-child(even){background-color:#555} 
           
   table.custom2 th{background-color:#7dc733;color:#fff;border:1px solid #6fc415}table.custom2 th:nth-child(even){background-color:rgba(111, 196, 21, 0.75)} 
           
   table.custom2 td:nth-child(odd){font-family: oswald;width: 43%;} 
           
   table.custom2 th:hover {background-color: #6fc415;}</style>
   
        
   <div id="loaderip">Loading your location details, please wait.........</div> 
           
   <div id="demo"></div>  
   
   <script> 
          
   //Show IP address my mybloggertricks.com 
           
   var hideloader = document.getElementById("loaderip"); 
           
   var xmlhttp = new XMLHttpRequest(); 
           
   xmlhttp.onreadystatechange = function() { 
           
       if (this.readyState == 4 && this.status == 200) { 
   
           var myip = JSON.parse(this.responseText); 
   
           document.getElementById("demo").innerHTML = '<table class="custom" border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" width="590"><tbody><tr><td colspan="2"><p align="center"><font size="3"><b>Your IP Address is ➔</b> </font><strong><font color="#008000" size="5">'+myip.ip+'</font></strong></p></td></tr><tr><td valign="top" width="295">Your Public IP</td><td valign="top" width="295">'+myip.ip+'</td></tr><tr><td valign="top" width="295">Country Code</td><td valign="top" width="295">'+myip.country_code+'</td></tr> <tr> <td valign="top" width="295">Country</td> <td valign="top" width="295">'+myip.country_name+'</td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top" width="295">Region</td> <td valign="top" width="295">'+myip.region_name+'</td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top" width="295"> City </td> <td valign="top" width="295">'+myip.city+'</td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top" width="295">Region Code</td> <td valign="top" width="295">'+myip.region_code+'</td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top" width="295">Zip Code</td> <td valign="top" width="295">'+myip.zip_code+'</td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top" width="295">Time Zone </td> <td valign="top" width="295">'+myip.time_zone+'</td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top" width="295">Latitude</td> <td valign="top" width="295">'+myip.latitude+'</td> </tr> <tr> <td valign="top" width="295">Longitude</td> <td valign="top" width="295">'+myip.longitude+'</td> </tr>  </tbody></table>';      
   
           hideloader.style.display='none';     } 
    
   }; 
        
   xmlhttp.open("GET", "https://freegeoip.net/json/", true); 
         
   xmlhttp.send();   
   
   </script>         
   

2. Save your theme and you are all done!

Feel free to use it in your development projects or apps. Do share your queries or feedback in the comment box below.

Easily Create a Custom App With FileMaker Without Coding!

FileMaker is a multi-platform relational database application developed by the FileMaker Inc. It is a computer software company - a subsidiary of Apple Inc. This application assimilates the database engine with the graphical user interface and provides high-security structures and has a drag and drop option which allows the user to make alterations to the database.

This relational database application helps in developing, supporting and marketing an application. FileMaker is quite famous for being user-friendly and its capability of serving the dynamic web pages without the use of any external applications. It comes for both Mac OS and Microsoft Windows operating systems with the main focus on providing the businesses and home-users with the best and high-quality experience.

Its success and popularity lie on the two factors: web companion and amazing business templates which makes it a perfect application for all the beginners. Also, it allows the website administrators to instantly add any database publishing competencies to their already running company intranet or website.

It has several versions released especially for iPhone and iPads such as FileMaker, FileMaker Pro 16, FileMaker Go 16, FileMaker Server 16 and FileMaker Pro Advanced 16.

We have already shared several tutorials on how to code custom mobile apps for a website and I clearly understood how time consuming it is to code an app from scratch when we developed the MBT app for our blog, therefore we will be talking everything about building a custom app but we won’t talk anything about coding because we don’t need coding thanks to Filemaker! :)

How To Create a Custom App with FileMaker?

Creating a custom app with coding is not everyone’s job. It requires lots of efforts and study regarding the programming languages and coding paradigms. Therefore, to ease the burden and get apps ready on the fly, FileMaker came into existence. Creating an app using FileMaker takes less than an hour to bring about the basic picture. The basic steps involved are:

Plan, Create and Deploy

Planning Process

When you start off with building an app, first and foremost, decide on what and how you are going to build it. Figure out all the fields, data and information you need to enter or display and identify all the required items and their types.

Open FileMaker and choose from the given list of databases and finalize a database structure. You can either create your own database using FileMaker or import all the data from the existing database. For instance, if you have the records on spreadsheets or a separate database, drag and drop them on FileMaker to quickly import the data. Once, the database is created or all the data is imported into the FileMaker, open data records and work on the layout. The fields can be added and data types can be changed on the go.

Creation Process

For design purposes, there is no need for the user to be a graphic designer since everything is already built-in and the user just has to drag and drop or choose from the available list of themes from the right panel. All the controls are designed in a way to fit all the screen types and a single click can completely transform the whole app. The attractive design templates, appealing charts and tables, basic reporting and beautiful fonts and designs save up the developer’s time and efforts. All these are customizable and very easily extendable.

After inserting all the data and dragging and dropping the required items of layout and design, the application is ready to share with others within no time. There are two options for sharing the app: either upload it to the FileMaker server or share it with FileMaker clients. Sharing it on the server makes it readily available to a larger number of people thereby helping them in need and allows users to access it using their web browser. However, authentications are required to access it. After all the planning and creation tasks are completed, the custom app is run using the FileMaker Go.

Deployment Process

Once the app is ready to use, if any changes are made while using the app, they are automatically updated for everyone who is using the app be it on the iPad, iPhone, Desktop PC or a Mac book.

The data can still be imported, relationships can be defined, fields can be added, records can be inserted and many more. The addition and updating process keeps going without affecting the already developed custom app.

Where To Host Filemaker Apps?

Hosting the recently built custom application using FileMaker is another grave task which must be done after a thorough research and analysis. Deploying the app using FileMaker is quite an expensive option which might not be feasible for various users. The given options by FileMaker include:

1. FileMaker Pro 12 which costs around $299.00.
2. FileMaker Server 12 costs almost $999.00.
3. FileMaker Go 12 is available for free trial.

Although there are a variety of benefits offered by FileMaker when it comes to deployment the overall cost gets so high that it becomes unaffordable for an average person to use such applications for hosting purposes.

Affordable Solution To Filemaker hosting

As per our research and suggestions, Hostpresto might be a better option for deploying the customs app developed using FileMaker. They offer professional FileMaker hosting services to host even the biggest databases on their most powerful servers. The packages offered by Hostpresto are affordable and specially designed for all the versions of FileMaker. Hostpresto offers two amazing packages for deployment which are:

1. Shared FileMaker hosting: This is one of the most famous services by Hostpresto and is suitable for FileMaker 14 or lower and costs around £15.00 per month.
2. Dedicated FileMaker hosting: This is used for FileMaker Pro 15 which requires a dedicated server and costs £156.00 per month.

Advantages of using FileMaker

FileMaker allows one to create and deploy custom apps for all environments, mobiles and cloud to instantly solve the problems on the go. The benefits of using FileMaker are as follows:

1. Cross-platform: This allows sharing of information among all the FileMaker users using Mac, iPhone, iPads, Windows and the web.
2. iOS Ready: This creates powerful apps for iPads and iPhones which are ready on the go and completely utilizes all the features of the FileMaker. Also, these apps can be used to capture pictures and signatures, scan barcodes and many more.
3. Data security: It keeps the data safe and sound by centralizing all the information on the FileMaker Server and providing authentications to access it. It allows managing user privileges individually.
4. Cloud hosting: FileMaker cloud allows sharing of information with the team over the cloud which is reliable, safe and secure without the hassle of administrating all the processes.
5. Easy integration: Using FileMaker, connections to the already existing databases such as SQL, ODBC/JDBC, XML or more can be made very easily. This allows a user to key an eye on all the processes and creates information views for all the business.
6. Affordable rates: The FileMaker Platform is perfect and quite affordable for all the budgets and is comparatively inexpensive to large enterprises which are providing the same functions at higher rates.
7. Built-in reporting tools: It offers the creation of reports on the spot. It provides a step-by-step assistant to easily create custom reports in a spreadsheet form of format with colorful charts and various styles.

Conclusion

It is by far the easiest custom application solution available since it allows young teenagers to build apps as per their requirements within no time and without knowing a bit about complex programming or coding.

If in case you are looking for a tutorial on how to create a custom mobile app without paying a penny for your websites or blogs then please read these tutorials:

• Part 1: How To Set up the Android SDK for App Development?
• Part 2: Create Your First "Hello World" Android App

How to Setup SSL and HTTPS on WordPress Site

If you are planning to start an e-commerce website or any website and want to improve your user trust level then you must get an SSL certificate to your website. Using https is playing a big role in Google Ranking Factor.

What is SSL?

SSL stand for Secure Socket Layer. It is the standard for exchanging information securely via cryptographic encryption–between a website and the browser.
In short, SSL is a way to establish a trusted connection between the server and a web browser. If it is enabled then the server will encrypt data before transmitting in a way that its recipient can decrypt.

Why use SSL on a WordPress site?

1. Enable secure login for your client on your website.
2. It helps you a lot in your business website. It is very important because your visitors will be more secure and you have more trust from your visitors and it will improve sales and leads.
3. In future, Google will penalize websites and WordPress sites that are using SSL. So it will play a ranking factor for your website.

If your blog or WordPress site still not using SSL then you must start thinking about it.
There are many ways to do it and you can pay a lot for the certificate or you can install a free certificate.
In this post, I will show you to install and activate Free Cloudflare Flexible SSL certificate on your website. If you want Premium SSL certificate or service then you can buy and use that in the same way.

Is SSL enough for security?

Installing and configuring SSL is an important step in securing your user’s data, but it is not enough to secure your site. Every site is as weak as its weakest password.

• To secure your website use strong passwords, keep WordPress and your plugins up to date, scan for malware and botnet attacks.
• All security issue can be covered of course by using a good security plugin such as WordFence, Sucuri.
• Having an SSL certificate on your website will not prevent any of those, as once a malicious script is installed on your site.
• Setting up an SSL certificate and configuring WordPress to use HTTPS is the first step in the process of securing your WordPress site or any web site.

Setting up free Cloudflare Flexible SSL

1. Go to CloudFlare(link) and sign up.
2. Click on Add Site to add your WordPress site. After adding your site click on Begin Scan. Just for now wait until Cloudflare finished scanning your domain nameserver.
3. Click on “Continue Setup” button.
4. When you have registered and set up your domain name, click on your domain name. At the top, there will be a row of icons click on Crypto.
5. There are 3 options but here we are selecting free plan

* Free Security Plan (Free Flexible SSL)
* Pro Security Plan
* Business Plan

After selecting your choice of the certificate, it will take 15 minutes around to issue and activate your certificate.

IMPORTANT – If you are setting CloudFlare Flexible SSL on existing old site 
then in your WordPress Dashboard backend leave your WordPress Address (URL) 
and Site Address (URL) as HTTP. Do not try to change it.'
Only change these two to https if you are using it on newly installed WordPress
Site.

Now we have to install and activate ClodFlare flexible SSL plugin by iControlWP.

Install CloudFlare Flexible SSL Plugin

This WordPress Plugin enables Flexible SSL on WordPress. It prevents your WordPress website from infinite redirect loop when your website loads under CloudFlare Flexible system. So the next step “Configure WordPress Https’s Plugin” is just an optional step only use if you are facing the problem.

Configure WordPress HTTPS Plugin’s Settings

1. Go into the WordPress HTTPS Plugin’s settings.
2. Select Yes for the Proxy setting.
3. Save the setting.

This plugin is not necessary if all of your WordPress Plugins and Web Pages links are already showing HTTPS. Some of the users are facing this problem and this WordPress HTTPS Plugin will change all links to HTTPS.

Configure Page Rules To Force HTTPS for website

You must add rules to work SSL properly for all pages of WordPress.

1. Go to CloudFlare and Navigate to Page Rules
2. Switch on the “Always use https”
3. Write your full WordPress blog Homepage URL within two stars like *example.com*

Change your WordPress Site Address (URL)

Now you need to change Site Address (URL) to “https://”, but make sure you leave the WordPress Address (URL) as “http://”.

**IMPORTANT** If you change your WordPress Address (URL) to “https://” it will 
break your site. If you change the Site Address (URL) to “https://”, without the 
Cloudflare Flexible plugin running it will also break your site.

After all settings, you should see a green lock icon on the address bar when opening your website now. If not then wait for at least 30 minutes, sometimes this may take more than 24 hours to get activates. 

Postcredits: roodex

How To Add Author Gravatar To Any WordPress Blog

Adding Gravatar to your Self-Hosted Website

Gravatar gives you freedom from registering to every site you visit. Your email address is enough to display all your user profile information

What is Gravatar?

When visiting different websites, you may also become aware of that many users and admin of sites have a photo and brief bio next to their name. These photos are called “avatars.” WordPress, however, uses a specific type of avatar called ”

WordPress, however, uses a special type of  name for avatar called “Gravatar“–short for “Globally Recognized Avatar”. When you post a comment on a WordPress site using email address registered with Gravatar then your Gravatar will automatically appear.

How To Add Gravatar in Self-Hosted Wordpress Blog

First Solution: Go and register to Gravatar.com with the same email address that you are using for managing and posting on self-host wordpress.org.
After that, update your Bio and Avatar and it will automatically start showing your Avatar (Profile Photo and Bio) in your self-hosted website.

Second Solution: You can install plugin which will help you to directly upload your custom avatar image instead of registering to gravatar.com.

For example, you can try this: https://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-user-avatar/

Postcredits: roodex