Person reading while sitting on RSS feed symbol
Posted on Tech Notes

Using the WordPress Feed to Display Posts on Your Website

WordPress is a great stand alone solution for blogging.  You can quickly adopt themes and launch a blog site in under an hour.  However, sometimes you will want to provide access to your content through another website or application.  You can provide this content quickly with the WordPress feed using RSS.  We will walk through an example in PHP that can have you linked to your blog in minutes. The WordPress Feed First, let’s verify you can see your feed.  You access the feed through a simple change of your regular blog address.  Add “/feed” to the end of the address in any browser.  For example, our feed address is  http://develpreneur.com/feed.  The format of the feed varies depending on which... Read more

Swap Drive Common EC2 Problems
Posted on Tech Notes

Adding a Swap Drive to your EC2 instance

If you are using Amazon EC2 instance to run WordPress, then one of the biggest challenges you will encounter is running out of system memory.  The server works fine for vanilla installs, but issues typically arise once you add some plugins.  For instance, these system memory problems can manifest themselves in the form of database crashes or system downtimes.  Luckily, this is an easy problem to fix without having to deal with expensive hardware upgrades.  Instead, all you need to do is add a swap drive in order to increase the memory available for your applications. What is a Swap Drive? When a computer runs it’s system and user applications will use up memory.  However, the operating system treats this memory differently... Read more

Posted on Tech Notes

Using Bootstrap – Get your site responsive quickly

Building websites used to be an easy task.  We only had a handful of browsers we needed to test to ensure our websites would display correctly.  Unfortunately, nowadays there are more devices and ways to view a website then every before.  Which means there is a greater chance that your website will not display correctly.  To avoid this problem we need to turn our static pages into more responsive ones.  One way to do this is by using Bootstrap.  Bootstrap is one of the most popular HTML, CSS, and JS frameworks designed to make websites responsive on virtually any device.  Let’s look at what it would take to use Bootstrap. Getting Started Before we begin using Bootstrap, you will need... Read more