One thing every WordPress site should have is a site icon, also called a “favicon”—the little tiny image that shows up in your browser tabs to let you tell one site from another. Ours at WPShout is a orange circle with a bullhorn inside it, so you which tabs are us. For the more visually-inclined, here’s a relevant summary image of a site icon:

This Quick Guide covers a common question whose lingo may confuse newbies: how do I make a Bash shell alias? For those for whom that sentence was Greek—let start here: Bash is the “Bourne Again Shell.” (There’s not relationship to the Matt Damon movie character, for better or worse. ;p) In the world of “command line interfaces,” Bash has been the go-to standard for decades, and is still the most common “terminal” in use. In the “terminal” world, Bash aliases solve a common problem: wanting to do things quicker and more effectively. So we’ll quickly and effectively walk you through how to make BASH aliases.

It’s a very reasonable question: where are WordPress pages stored? There are a lot of ways to answer it though. Without getting too pedantic, we really need to understand a few different levels of the questions to really give a good answer. In this Quick Guide we’ll cover a few different of the answers you may be seeking.

It’s pretty common for WordPress folks to start looking harder at their page’s HTML from time to time. If you find yourself doing that, you may see this rel="noreferrer noopener" on some links. What’s noopener noreferrer? You’re in the right place to find out. Short answer: it’s a security measure for when you want a link to open in a new tab (or window) for your website visitors. It’s additional security related to target="_blank", if you know what that is. But we’ll get to that in a bit…

WordPress sites have lots of good backup options. But if you’re looking to save money on file-storage (and you already have a Dropbox account) I can’t recommend UpdraftPlus much more highly. It is quick-to-configure and very reliable as a place to keep a backup of your WordPress site. In this Quick Guide we’ll cover the steps to connect UpdraftPlus to Dropbox. Let’s get to it!

If you find yourself working with a lot of images or other media files in WordPress, chances are good that at some point you’ll need to change a file’s content while still keeping links and image placement the same. The best way we’ve found to do this is with a free plugin called “Enable Media Replace”. In this Quick Guide, we’ll teach you how to install this plugin and use it to replace images that already exists or media files on your WordPress site.

Whether you’re writing about technical topics or something even more visually demanding like art, sometimes you just want to make a picture bigger in WordPress. That can mean a number of things, from how it appears on the page to what happens when you click it. We’ll shortly cover the first case, and then spend most of our time introducing using a “lightbox” from the Simple Lightbox plugin to make our images appear over our content in a large size when clicked.

In this week’s Quick Guide we’re covering how to improve your “post lists” screens in WordPress. That is, we’re taking control the look of your “posts”, “pages”, etc lists by changing what appears in those columns. We’ll do that using that Admin Columns plugin (which was called CodePress Admin Columns until fairly recently 😉).

“Author archives” are one of a number of names you might call the page where WordPress shows your (as opposed to other authors’) posts. And by default WordPress will put the /author/ URL segment into your slug. Personally I think that’s a good name for it. But not everyone agrees, and that’s where the Edit Author Slug plugin comes in. In this Quick Guide we’ll explain how you can change your author page URL from example.com/author/david to example.com/this-person-rocks/david. If you want, of course. The point is that the whole middle section can be anything writer, ninja, queen-of-the-world.

From time to time, you’ll need to change the post type of one or more of your WordPress posts. In this Quick Guide, we’ll explain how to change a WordPress post’s post type using a handy plugin called Post Type Switcher.