Category: Blog

Hey folks!

My name is Meredith, and I go by a lot of titles, depending on who I’m talking to. If I’m talking to another business owner, I usually call myself WordPress Developer. If I’m talking to someone who may not be all that tech savvy, I just call myself a programmer. But, if I’m talking to other techy types, particularly other web pros, I get real honest:

I’m the website unfucker.

Yeah, I know, I’m not you’d call squeamish around strong language.

Here’s the thing: WordPress is the most popular CMS in the world. This means that everybody everywhere knows at least a little bit about how to use it. This means that most geeks out there have a specialty technology, and they also do WordPress, too, and most employees of companies that have WordPress sites can do quite a lot of tinkering with their existing site. Most of the time, this is just fine, but sometimes, this can lead to all sorts of problems.

It also leads to business owners across the world screaming “Please, someone unfuck my website!”

And that’s where I come in.

It turns out that, while WordPress developers are in high demand, what people need more is advanced website support. Clients don’t necessarily need developers to code up projects for them, they need someone with all the same skills as a developer to dive into their existing site and unfuck it up. Clients have often already invested large sums of money into their website, and they would rather fix what’s broken than spend all that money all over again. And, increasingly, they’re coming to me.

WordPress unfucking is bit more complicated than you might think, and this is why you really need a skilled developer to do it. Most of the time, the problems are in the theme, so you need someone who speaks PHP reasonably well, is fluent in all current and deprecated WordPress functions, who understands HTML, and who can word with CSS. Sometimes it’s not, which usually means more PHP and frequently means that the problem is in the database, so you need to know MySQL and you need to have an understanding of how WordPress uses it’s database. These aren’t wildly uncommon skills, they’re all useful for a developer, but they’re all critical for a successful website unfucker.

Here’s where I get to brag a little. I’ve unfucked leading news and information site SmartBlogs.com, I’ve unfucked best-selling author Patti Digh’s website, 37Days.com, I’ve unfucked the site of leading strategy and consulting firm, EblinGroup(.com), and I’ve unfucked marketing and brand expert Mary Ellen Slayter’s site, RepCapitalMedia.com.

If you like, I can unfuck your WordPress site as well. I’m available! Just fill out the form here, and I’ll get in contact with you. Fair warning, I charge $90/hr, and I don’t offer discounts. Don’t let that scare you, though, one of the reasons I can charge that much is that I can get a lot of unfucking done in an hour.

 

I am working on a WordPress podcast site that uses a shortcode to display the mp3 player in the content area. This normally isn’t that big of a deal, but the shortcode was causing the atypical player code to show up in the feed itself, resulting in weird media inclusions from the player, and causing the podcast description in iTunes to break entirely.

The solution I found was adding this code to your functions.php file:

function bd_shortcode_killinfeed( $atts, $content ) {

if ( ! is_feed() )
return apply_filters( ‘the_content’, $content );

return ”;

}
add_shortcode( ‘killinfeed’, ‘bd_shortcode_killinfeed’ );

Once you add that, all you need to do is wrap whatever content you don’t want in the feed in [killinfeed] tags. Once you do that, your problems disappear. From your feed.

The cool part is that this code totally works in reverse. Say you want to encourage people to subscribe to your RSS feed, and as an incentive, you tell them that there’s exclusive content in posts on the feed. Add this code to your functions.php file, and you’ll now have a shortcode [addtofeed] that will publish content exclusively to your feed, and vanish on your blog.

function bd_shortcode_addtofeed( $atts, $content ) {

if ( is_feed() )
return apply_filters( ‘the_content’, $content );

return ”;

}
add_shortcode( ‘addtofeed’, ‘bd_shortcode_killinfeed’ );

Easy as pie. This is based on the code posted by Jason from DesignPX. Thanks dude!