I commonly see people running a site speed test through GTMetrix or Google PageSpeed Insights and panic when they receive a “bad” score. However, in most cases, the score does not directly relate to how quickly your website actually loads. A great example of this can be seen with the following two sites (site URLs…Read More
How to Script Interactions With a Website
As part of the process for clients signing up for a service for The Blog Fixer, they must create an administrator for us with the correct permissions that allow us to install plugins and take backups. When we do free promotions, as many as half of everyone who signs up for the promotion never end…Read More
Fix Excluded Posts on Search Console Coverage
As of now, my website has ~2,610 pages listed as “Excluded” in my Google Search Console. Excluded pages will not show up in Google search results, and are ignored by Google’s indexing robot. Why are these posts being excluded? Google actually gives the reason, and it’s not your fault – nor is it a bad…Read More
Importing old MailChimp Campaign Emails to a Shopify Blog
A while ago, my Mom (who runs MadeOn Hardlotion) moved from MailChimp to ActiveCampaign, and started using Shopify for her store website. Recently, she realized some of her older blog posts on her WordPress website were receiving a fair bit of traffic from Google searches. Since 2010, she’s been writing newsletter campaigns for her hardlotion.com…Read More
Automatically Setting Merge tags Based on Quoted Recommendations
In order to improve marketing and responses to follow up emails, I created a feature in the Google Sheets tracking software we use to record issues found in a clients website that automatically sets merge fields in MailChimp that can later be used in automated email campaigns. This was done for The Blog Fixer,…Read More
Practicing OOP, Scrum, and Test-Driven Development in a Quick Project
Programming conventions and best practices are continually changing. When programming features for your company’s project, you may be tempted to implement the newest process in the feature you’re working with. Unfortunately, I have often found that with deadlines, or just the amount of refactoring that would be required to implement a new way of doing…Read More
Sending Daily Reports to a Slack Channel from Google Sheets
If you’ve ever done any kind of commission or service work for many people, and at some point started to outsource or hire out that work, you’ve probably experienced the stress that comes with depending on other people to make sure work gets done in a timely manner. There’s always the chance someone will forget…Read More
Using Node Applications to Create Tools and Automate Processes
As part of my job scanning and fixing many WordPress websites, I go through a lot of repeated tasks. Sometimes, I will scan as many as a hundred websites, each website requiring steps for marking down different bits of information. One thing that takes a bit of time that I really want to automate, is…Read More
Using User Stories for Feature and Internal Development
Something that’s commonly used by Scrum teams are User Stories. They’re used as a way to keep development concentrated on solving an issue rather than developing a feature. Often times they result in the same things. For example, a user may want an extra setting in a script for automatically making links in an article…Read More
Using Google Sheet’s Scripting to Create Discount Codes in Shopify
My mom needed 250 discount codes created to go onto product labels as a bonus gift, and they all needed to be unique. She uses Shopify for her online store, and uses Shopify’s product discount codes. It would’ve taken forever to manually generate each code, as each one had to be unique and required some…Read More