On today’s episode, we are going to talk about short codes and checklists right here on Your Website Engineer Podcast episode number 405.

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Hello and welcome to another episode of Your Website Engineer Podcast. My name is Dustin Hartzler. I’m excited to be here with you today, because we’re talking all about WordPress today, and how we can clean up our WordPress site and how we can make sure that we are always blogging or we’re creating those posts that we really mean to, and we’re going through all the steps via a checklist and to make sure that we don’t forget anything when we’re getting ready to publish a new content on our website.

Before we get started with that though, I have three announcements and a plug-in that I want to share with you today. The first thing that I want to share with you is a new website called Welcome.ly or Welcomely. And this is a website that will help you create a brand-new and stunning homepage. It basically is a free homepage builder; it’s designed for you to specifically grow your email list. So, if that’s one of your missions or one of your goals is to get more people on your email list, I recommend checking out Welcomely, they’re Welcome.ly, and see how it works.

Basically what it does is you can customize your homepage or your template to match your brand. You get a live URL instantly, or you can publish to your own site. They’ve got some integrations with WordPress to make that really, really easy, and then you can capture leads and send them to your email service at no cost.

So, sometimes there are page builders that charge you for collecting email addresses, but Welcome.ly does not. If you don’t have an email subscriber yet or an email service yet, you can even sign up or you can keep all your subscriptions right inside of Welcome.ly.

So, this is a cool thing. I’ve taken a look at some of the samples and just to see what you can build with the homepage, and they’re really cool examples, and you can do some really neat things. You can customize. Think about it as like lead pages or an opt-in monster kind of a page-builder type thing, but this is completely free, and it’s a neat way to revamp your homepage if you want to really focus in on creating a funnel for people to come to your home page and then sign up for your email list. So, that is the first piece of news.

The other thing that I see is over from WP Tavern, and it’s talking about a new WP Glossary site that translates WordPress as text speak into plain English. And so, it’s a new website called WP Glossary, and it contains the definitions for terms that people encounter when they’re using WordPress. It was born out of the need to provide documentation for client projects.

So, if you wanna know let’s say for example a 404 page. That’s the first item in the Glossary, and it says what happens when WordPress can’t find the appropriate page for your URL you’re trying to visit. It takes you to a 404 page. And then it breaks it down. It says the number 404 is one of the status codes in the hypertext transfer protocol or HTTP, which is the communication protocol used to transfer pages on the web. So, there’s some great information there so you can learn a little bit more.

If we go back to, let’s see, what else is on here. Breadcrumbs. That’s a good one day you may have – maybe you don’t know what breadcrumbs are. And it says breadcrumbs are a type of navigational element that displays hierarchy of the current webpage. And so, then it gives a little example. It could be home, parent page, child page. And so, it says breadcrumbs are frequently but not always included in WordPress themes. When they are, they’re displayed in conjunction with page title near the top of the page.

There’s also WordPress plug-ins that will allow you to customize the output of breadcrumbs on your site. And so, it’s just got a bunch of cool things on here, a bunch of definitions. If you’ve never really understood or there’s some wonky terminology inside of WordPress or maybe I’ve said something on a podcast, and you’re like I don’t understand what post type means. You can go on over to WPGlossary.net, and you can search, and you can find all of that information there. And you can read all about it. It’s good information to know. So, if you want to know things like that, go ahead and check out WPGlossary.net.

And then the last news item that I have here in the show notes, and I’m not gonna read a whole lot from here, but it’s the monthly recap. Hugh Lashbrooke does this every month, and it’s the August 2018 version. And it basically just says that WordPress 4.9.8 was released at the beginning of the month. It talks about the new editor. The development continues and how that goes. And then it talks about the plans for the next global WordPress translation day. There’s been three translation days since April 2016, and the fourth one is in the planning stages now. It basically is a 24 hour event held online all across the world. It’s designed to bring communities together to help translate WordPress into local languages. And so, if need more information about that, that is in the show notes as well.

And then there’s a bunch of – they’re reading things, and a lot of it has to do with just the different things going on at Gutenberg. I mean I could have filled the entire episode with just Gutenberg-related posts. We’re not going to do that. We’re just gonna hit on it briefly, but if you want to know more, go ahead and check out the link there in the show notes for episode 405.

Alright. Plug-in of the week. Today, I want to share with you a brand-new plug-in. It is one that only has 80 active installs. It was developed a few months ago, but it’s a really neat one, and it seems like something that maybe we all should be using or we should use this on our development sites or when we spin up a brand-new WordPress. Maybe we should run this plug-in first to try to clean things out, and it’s called Lean WP.

And it is a plug-in that’s mostly targeted at companies who use WordPress for company websites. It gets rid of some of the stuff that’s inside of WordPress that you no longer need. It removes some of the things like emojis, distraction-free writer, scroll-free editor, the customizer, if you want to get rid of that. XLM RPC, you can get rid of that. There’s all kinds of things that you can get rid of. And so, this is called Lean WP.

If you need to strip out some of this stuff from a WordPress site, then I would definitely recommend checking this out. You can search for Lean WP in the WordPress repository or, as always, you can search through the show notes for episode number 405.

I probably haven't said this in a while, but if you want to get directly to an episode, you can just go to YourWebsiteEngineer.com/405, and with the power of WordPress, it just will automatically redirect you to the right place. The way that it works is WordPress is smart enough to look at the first couple letters or whatever is put in after the slash, and if there is a post that has the same beginning, that’s where it’s going to redirect you to.

So, I don’t do anything fancy. All I just know is I number every single show note starts with the episode number and then dash and then it fills in the rest of the information. So, as long as I don’t accidentally say I publish 405 twice, then that link should always work when you just put YourWebsiteEngineer.com/405.

Alright. Today, I had a couple ideas that came in via email, and you ever have a question that you want answered on an upcoming show, you can go to the contact form on YourWebsiteEngineer.com. Just fill in the details there or what kind of question that you may have, and I’ll be happy to answer it on an upcoming show.

But the two things I want to talk about today don’t really have anything to do with each other, but I didn’t have enough content for – each one of them wasn’t a full show, so I wanted to go ahead and just kind of talk through both of these.

And so, the first one is we’re gonna talk about removing broken short codes from our website, and then the other thing gonna talk about is how to create a blogging checklist within WordPress.

So, let’s go ahead and will just dive right in. Short codes are those pieces of codes that are generated usually by plug-ins. Sometimes themes have short codes built in and they allow you to do special things within your website without having to create a bunch of code or write HTML or copy HTML blocks or what not. And so, the short codes are basically a left bracket and then some sorta short code. Sometimes there are parameters that you can add to that and then the right bracket.

And we have those things and they’re built into WordPress and they’re great, and if they’re built into the theme, it makes it really convenient until you start using them, but what happens if you change your theme to a different theme? Then what happens? If you go ahead and do that, then it’s like oh well now I’ve got all the short codes and if there’s no code behind the short code to make it work, then it’s just going to have those brackets in the short code.

So, for an example, on YourWebsiteEngineer.com, one of the very first versions that I had was the theme had built in different options for columns. So, if I put bracket, it was called one underscore two, or one-half I think it was. It was one underscore half, and then I put the content and then I closed the short code with another bracket and slash one-half, and then I could do that again and I could have one-half underscore last, and then I could do it again.

And it would basically create two columns on my website, a left column and a right column. And then I had – the short codes had – this was before really responsive design and how you could set it all up with div tags and what not, but that’s kind of the – back in the day, that’s how I ended up doing it.

And when I changed my theme, when I went to change from that original theme that I purchased to one that I had manually created, then all of the short codes were broken, and now I – it was like what do I – what to do. Because if you look at a post, you would just see all of these pieces of code and it wouldn’t make any sense, and the page layout would be all goofy, and that’s just one example.

But there are tons of different short codes that could be out there that may get broken when you change something. Maybe you deactivate a plug-in, and now all of those short codes that you’ve added to post, now those are no longer working.

And so, there’s a couple different ways that we can go ahead and remove those from our post. And some of them make sense, other ones don’t make as much sense, but you can go ahead and do these. These are just ones that I came up with.

The first way is there’s a plug-in called Search Regex WordPress plug-in. And what this is it is the best method if you have a lot of old short codes and you want them removed entirely from post, but you don’t want to – you don’t need to get any information other than or whatnot.

So, what this is is it uses the technology called regex, and it is a searching mechanism and you can go in and you can put in special search patterns they’re called, and what you can do is you can put bracket, bracket short code dot and then an asterisk and then bracket, bracket. And that will replace the short code – it will look for the short code on all the pages within your website, which is pretty cool.

You can do the same thing with buttons or any type of short code that you can search for you can go ahead and use this Regex plug-in. It’s very, very powerful, and you can do some really cool things. So, you can search the pattern or you can replace the pattern. You can get rid of them or whatnot. You can do all of that with this plug-in. Their link for that will be in the show notes.

Another thing you could do. This isn’t as practical, but it would work, is if you have only a handful of – if you only have a handful of posts that you know that the short code is on, maybe you could take all of that text and you could open it up in Sublime Text or some sort of other text editor and you could copy and paste that HTML code from inside your WordPress site into the program, and then you can – there’s different ways, you can control F and you can find it or once you find it inside the Sublime Text you can actually do command or control D and hit that a bunch of times and it will select all of the short code. All of that same selected text, it will select it everywhere in the copy.

And so, you could do that and then you could replace what you need or delete them and then put it right back and copy and paste it from Sublime Text back into WordPress. Not a best option, but you could go ahead and do that.

And then there’s another plug-in that could – is a way to get rid of it. And it is a plug-in called High Broken Short Code WordPress Plug-Ins. And basically, what it does is it just prevents them from being rendered. It’s not the best solution, but if you do something very quickly, maybe you want to do more of this manual approach to go ahead and through every post, maybe you’re updating your website and you want different short codes and maybe you’re adding some new features or you’re formatting things differently. I know that at one point I think I had about 250 episodes and I wanted to redo and I wanted to outline how my show notes were prepared.

And so, I would 10 or 15 posts a week, and I would just go in and I would change all the formatting for those 10 or 15 posts, I would be done for the day, and then I’d move on to the next batch the next day or whatnot. So, if that’s maybe the case, maybe you’re doing some overhauling for all your posts and pages, maybe what you use is you use this High Broken Short Codes Plug-In and from there you can hide them all, all the broken ones, and then you can manually go and you can fix each post.

And then that way, you at least don’t have broken stuff rendering on your website. I do recommend, if you do use this plug-in, to go and manually remove everything, because that’s just extra bulk that you are using or have stored on your website that’s not necessary.

So, those are some of the methods you could remove old WordPress short codes. And so, like I said, the first method was using a regex plug-in or you could do some kind of powerful searching throughout your website.

The second one is copying and pasting your text in and then control find or look through all of your – find and replace inside of a Sublime Text or some sort of Atom or text editor of your choice.

And then the third one is called Hide Broken Short Codes.

So, those are the three methods that you can use to get rid of broken short codes on your website.

Alright. In this second part of the show, I want to talk a little bit about a blogging checklist. And that term is basically just a list of somewhere of everything that needs to be done before you hit the blue publish button inside of WordPress.

And if it was a few years ago, I might’ve recommended just building this right into the WordPress dashboard with a plug-in. There are a handful of them out there, but it looks like they’ve all not been updated in the last couple years. I’ll put a link and show notes for the ones that I found.

There’s a premium one that’s out there that can do much more than just adding a checklist, so I’ll put that one in the show notes as well. But you could also just use Omni focus or Evernote or come up with some sort of checklist that just kind of walks you through the process. I can imagine if I was new to this and I hadn’t been creating shows 400 weeks in a row, that I might have the same process that I want to go through and I would probably create a brand-new object or a brand-new project inside of Omni focus and then just have a template that has the 10 things that I need to do before publishing a post.

I’m making sure I have a featured image. And make sure that before I upload my file to Lipson that I’ve got the ID3 tag embedded in there, and just some things like that. I want to make sure that all that is correct and right.

And so, I wanted to kind of highlight some of the things that we wanna do and make sure that we are checking before we hit publish. And so, the first one would be make sure you have an effective post title and it has characteristics of your keyword and phrases. Make sure that those are in the title, and it is some sort of persuasive or encourages somebody to click. You don’t want to be the click bait and say you’ll never believe what happened this or whatever, but make sure that it’s informative and that people know what they’re gonna get when they click on the link.

You also want to divide your text up into smaller sections with headings. If you’ve ever been to a blog post and just see walls of text, most likely, you’re just going to go back and not actually read the content. So, you want to divide that up so it’s a little bit smaller so people can browse and they can scroll and they can see the useful information that they need right away.

You want to deep link, and what this means is your basically linking to past posts in a new post and so, each time you write a post and you mention a topic you’ve written about before, you can link back to the previous post. It gives your readers more information about your topic, and it also keeps people on your site longer, which is good, because the longer people are on your site, the better. They may purchase something or they may read more. They may sign up for your email list or whatever.

You also – one of the things, and this is a topic – I don’t see it happening as much now in 2018 as it did back in say 2010, but you can always add a question at the end to encourage discussion. I’ve seen a lot of websites do this and then a lot of websites don’t do this.

And so, it depends on how engaged your customers are or people reading your website. If you don’t have a public place for them to ask questions like a forum or a Facebook group or whatnot, then this is probably a great opportunity to add a question at the end of your conversation.

If you want to add your SEO and Ready Images to make sure that they are on brand, they’re ready to go. You want to make sure they don’t say like image 1254.jpg. You want to name it, WordPress this or whatever. You want to give an SEO ready name.

You want to also make sure that your alt text is defined for your images. And so, basically that’s taking your title. Take that title that you have used in WordPress and add that to the media inside the alt text, so that the screen readers know what those images are about.

You want to add that featured image, especially if you’re posting these things out on social, a lot of times whatever that featured image is, that’s gonna be the image that Facebook grabs or Twitter grabs when they show a little preview of your website. Even if it doesn’t work very well or isn’t displayed on your site anywhere, you want to do that.

I know for my wife’s personal block though, the one that she writes and creates recipes and whatnot for that the featured image didn’t really make sense to be displayed inside the theme, but she always adds, because it makes it that much easier to share, and so, they don’t have just general, generic images coming from the website pulling up on Facebook.

And you want to make sure that, I guess the last thing that you want to do is probably proofread. That’s a good thing. To scan through your posts and make sure that you’ve proofread everything and make sure everything looks good.

And make sure that you, depending on your type or your situation in the blog post that you may be putting out, there should be a lot more things that you could add to the checklist. When I’m scheduling a post to go out, make sure that the publish date is correct. I always publish so, it comes out on Wednesday morning, but I normally do it sometimes days or sometimes weeks in advance. I get everything queued up and get ready to schedule.

I also make sure that I have that featured image, but I also make sure that I’ve got the Lipson feed and make sure that that podcast player is going to play correctly. I make sure that my SEO is correct. I make sure that –there’s a handful of little things that I make that everything is working properly. I’ve set thought – do I want it to publicize and send out to Twitter or Facebook or whatnot. And so, all of those things would be perfect for a blogging checklist to make sure yep, yep, yep, I've got all those done, and I can move on and be confident that I’ve done everything.

I know that occasionally I’ve tagged things incorrectly, maybe put them in the wrong category. If I don’t put it in a specific category then it doesn’t show up in my podcast player, I know that – you run into little things and be oh, I've done this once, and I've messed up once, and so, I should put that on my checklist so I make sure that I never do that again.

So, those are some ideas or some things in talking about checklists. Just to make sure you – until you get into a repeatable pattern and you’ve been doing this week after week after week or you’re very familiar with the way that WordPress works, I recommend doing a checklist, creating a checklist, and checking things off as you go through that publishing process and making sure that everything is published perfectly each time and you don’t have to worry about oh did I do this, did I do that. No.

Just set a list, check things off when you’re done, hit publish with confidence, and then be ready to start sharing your post wherever it may be, whether it’s social channels or you’re emailing it out to your list or whatever. Make sure that you can do that with confidence, because you’ve went through and you've checked all these off, and you’re ready to publish your content out to the world.

That’s what I want to share with you this week. I’ve got more great WordPress advice and tips coming up next week. Until then, stay tuned, and we’ll talk again soon. Bye-bye.