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Yasmani's Web Portfolio, NE, Washington D.C., DC (2026)

Feel free to message me if you'd like to discuss upgrading your website or ways in which you can monetize your hobbies.

02/16/2022

Today I am going to write about arguably the most important topic to date. Resilience.

I felt particularly compelled to write this blog because it means so much more than fixing a bug. The entire experience describes the reason why I decided to and have stuck with (to be frank) web development. Simply put, my desire to solve problems.

Now let me set the picture. Here I am minding my own business one day when I decided to add an rss feed to my affiliate coffee website, Brewing Alpha. I thought, man what a great way to add some outbound links for SEO. If you are not familiar with RSS feeds they are a really fun and interesting tool for developers.

Well. That's where we encountered the issue. I noticed that trying save some of my settings was causing a bit of a mess. And then eventually after a few minutes I started to receive an “Error 500” message from WordPress. This meant that any changes I was making were not being saved. I was simultaneously working on an article and coincidentally the changes I was making to the blog were saving (but the ones I was making to the homepage were not).

I of course started by looking up what the hell an “Error 500” message even meant. Now in the element of full disclosure I hate these types of problems. The moment I have to Google search what something even means, is when I begin to feel the existential dread of actually having to program. The results of my search is that an Error 500 is typically reserved for server side functions. Bro wut?

A little bit more digging led me to a step by step guide on whittling your Error code options down. One of these suggestions was to isolate the problem by disabling all the plugins and enabling them one at a time in order to see where the issue was. Well. When you mix explicit directions like that with my destructive personality you end up with a pretty big mess on your hands. Boy did I deliver!

I actually ended up disabling my ssl certificate plugin cloudflare and completely disabling my HTTPS encryption. This now made it so that any time I tried to make a change on my website the page would reload and suggest I don't visit because it did not have a secure connection. JFC. Talk about snowball effect. You can read more about getting your website a free ssl certificate via cloudflare and updating your GoDaddy DNS settings here.

Ok. So understanding that my issue was on the server side I decided to log in to my GoDaddy Cpanel and see if I could figure out where we were getting jammed up. After waiting hours to chat with a tech I was finally able to explain my issue. They “checked their servers” and saw no issues. Except for my ssl certificate. Which the tech kindly gave me a link with instructions on how to upload your ssl certificate directly to go daddy from your cloudflare account. NOPE!

Soon as I did it all hell broke loose with the ssl certificate. Heads up, if its working don't mess with it, or as I’ve stated in other posts just get yourself a host that provides this service for free.

In the end after reinstalling my ssl certificate and changing my DNS settings the tech said it would be 1-48 hours before the changes take affect. Well, that did not happen and it turned out to be a tremendous waste of time.

My next move should’ve been my first all along. When lost on the internet, consult the internet. So I joined Reddit r/WordPress and got some great advice. I started by logging into my cPanel once again on the server side (meaning GoDaddy). On the cpanel menu when you scroll down you should see errors. Clicking on this icon will take you to a page that displays the error logs for the website in question.

I had two error logs. In order to make sure they were for the same issue I had to crosscheck by attempting to make a change on my homepage and saving it. When I checked back to the error code log there was a new entry. Bingo! From here I summoned a GoDaddy tech again. I explained that the errors were logged and I asked them to pull any additional php error codes in case I wasn’t seeing them. Next thing I knew the tech popped back into our convo and asked me to try and save my work again. Boom. Problem fixed!

When I asked what was done in order to correct the issue the techs response was, “Awesome we just added few files to hosting, like User.ini file.”

So while I actually had very little to do in terms of coding, I still had to diagnose the problem and find it and point a specialist to it. I think I got lucky this time, but this is exactly why it is important to keep these occurrences logged so we can always come back and have a reference point.

And while the original (and second ssl certificate) problem had been solved, we encountered a new issue. When we posted the error codes on Reddit one user pointed out a bit of code that should never exist on WordPress. You can read the full breakdown on that issue after the jumpoff…

02/11/2022

If you find yourself wondering if your business could benefit from an upgraded website geared toward SEO, try this:

Google the service your business provides and see if your business populates in the top search results...

or

Google your entire name and see if you are the top result

If the answer to either of these is No, then lets talk about how we can boost your ranking on Google search results and create an organic stream of followers/customers for your business or side project

Think about the money that's being left on the table. The numbers add up. If you capture 1% of the market share of a $700m industry thats STILL $7m!!!!

02/07/2022

Every hobby/project/business idea has a social media account.

Your webpage should showcase all of your content across all social media platforms in one centralized place. By doing so, you actually start to use FB, IG, Twitter, Pinterest etc. as engines that drive traffic to YOUR site.

Once the Google algorithm starts to track that they will begin placing your webpage higher and higher on search results. This is organic SEO and exactly what I can help you achieve.

If you have a social media audience that you would like to bring to your website lets talk!

The screenshots below are some of the examples of layouts we can use to showcase your social media platform on your website.
images courtesy of:
www.trapequities.com
www.brewingalpha.com

02/05/2022

For our first blog I wanted to take a second to discuss ssl certificates. This probably means very little to you, but by the end of this article you’ll understand it is something very small that makes a significant impact in the context of Search Engine Optimization SEO. Before we dive in however, let’s have a quick recap of what SEO is and how it works.

I went on a date with an industrial designer recently. Our conversation breached the subject of the internet. She was very adamant that the evolution of the internet has come by way of aesthetic design principles. I only partly agreed and that's why I felt compelled to write a series on SEO.

See, here's the thing. Companies like Google and Microsoft that run popular search engines have an obligation to their users. You, the searcher, need to get the closest results to your query as possible, because otherwise, what's the point? If we can understand this we can understand that as Google and Bing and Yahoo evolve they evolve to become better at getting those answers right? Ok, cool.

So it becomes obvious where I am going with this. The more precise and relevant your content is marketed the better job that search engines can do in order to match you with potential followers or customers. As a result of that, the search engines promote websites that meet their standards for security and purpose. Meaning, Google wants to send people to your website that are explicitly looking for that product or service. They don't want to send you someone who will leave your website…

I think from here you can see the opportunities from search engines to monetize their product, or more accurately, collect ad revenue. So it stands, search engine algorithms help shape the landscape of the internet by promoting websites that adhere to certain standards, and those standards are not uniquely aesthetic or design oriented… Though design works from success so in a way it is cyclical but that's waaay too meta right now.

Perfect, so now that we understand what SEO actually does lets talk about the topic of this article.

You've seen it a million times. When you put in a web address at the top of your browser, or when you click on a link and you get taken to that address. That lock that pops up in green on the left hand of that address bar. I’m sure you’ve noticed that almost all the websites you come across have it and it is “locked”. Let’s examine what that means though.

Essentially it just means security. It means that your interaction with that website is secured through encrypted content. Ok, in layman's terms. When you buy something on that website you can be sure that your private information is secure.

On the backend, meaning from a website owner or developer standpoint, it means that your website hands the information off to another website that is basically like an armored truck that delivers your data to the final website for processing. That’s really as simple as it gets.
So you might be wondering, ”Why should I care?”

Great question. If you reference the context of SEO, we can start putting together the right pieces of the puzzle. Search engines are more likely to promote your website when it has an ssl certificate, especially if you sell products/services, over others that don't. And it is only recently in the past couple of years that it has become a part of Google's algorithm.

Most web hosts provide ssl certificates for free. Some like GoDaddy do not. The majority of the time neither you nor your developer will have to think about this. But for those of us (I have two websites hosted by GoDaddy) it's a pretty frickin big deal. Because this is how we remain relevant in the fast changing landscape of ecommerce.

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