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Turbocharge your WordPress Search with Algolia

Turbocharge your WordPress Search with Algolia

I’ve just switched the search feature of this website to Algolia and the improvements are staggering! Feel free to give the search feature of this website a test and you’ll see that results are now instant and more accurate than ever.

Algolia is the search-as-a-service platform that enables companies of all sizes to deliver fast and relevant digital experiences that drive real results.

algolia.com

Algolia has a Free plan which allows you to have up to 10,000 search requests a month so you too can turbocharge the search feature of your website to give your users a good search experience.

Today I’ll be writing a guide on how you can do this for your WordPress powered website.

A Quick Note:

Algolia used to have an official WordPress plugin but it has been discontinued as of May 2, 2019.

Thanks to the power of open source, a developer called WebDevStudios stepped in, forked the plugin and they’ve committed to continue maintaining and developing the plugin called WP Search with Algolia.

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How to install Elasticsearch 7 on CentOS 7

With the latest version of Magento, Magento 2.4 removing the MySQL search capability and forcing the use of Elasticsearch 7.x, many users may be frantically searching for the latest guide to install Elasticsearch in your server.

As most of the guides around the net are either outdated or may not work well in a CentOS 7 environment with cPanel/WHM installed, I hope this installation guide will be helpful to those of you running CentOS 7.

(more…) “How to install Elasticsearch 7 on CentOS 7”

How to get MailChannels Inbound Spam Filtering for Free!

How to get MailChannels Inbound Spam Filtering for Free!

I recently came across a blog post by MailChannels which announced that they are now available as a CloudFlare App, which allows their service to be added to CloudFlare in a few clicks.

The biggest highlight in the blog post is the following:-

MailChannels created a special free plan for Cloudflare customers looking to add better spam filtering for a single domain.

For $0/month, you get commercial-grade spam, virus, and phishing protection for up to 5 users.

This is great news for CloudFlare users if you have less than 5 email accounts for your domain and want to use MailChannels professional inbound Spam filtering service.

MailChannels Inbound will remove Spam, phishing and virus from your emails before sending them to your mail or web hosting server.

Besides that, it will also hide or mask your actual mail server IP address which means that attacker will not know the actual mail server IP and thus not able to attack it directly.

(more…) “How to get MailChannels Inbound Spam Filtering for Free!”

How to forward emails to Gmail the right way

How to forward emails to Gmail the right way

You may want to forward emails from your custom @yourdomain.com email address to Gmail or another email service like Outlook for easier email management or so that multiple users will receive the emails.

If your email address is created with your web hosting provider, it may be tempting to use their Email Forwarder feature available in their hosting control panel (like cPanel or DirectAdmin) to forward some or all of your emails to another email service like Gmail.

Let me stop you right there with a warning that this is an extremely bad idea!

By forwarding your emails to Gmail, you are also forwarding Spam emails sent to @yourdomain.com to Gmail as well.

From Gmail’s point of view, they are receiving Spam emails from your domain and your email server!

If this continues over time, Gmail will categorize both your domain name and your email server IP as a source of spam, which means that any future emails that you sent will either end up in Gmail’s Spam box or get rejected outright!

Is there a better way to achieve this?

(more…) “How to forward emails to Gmail the right way”

What is using up all of my inodes?

What is using up all of my inodes?

Did you receive a notification from your web hosting provider about something called “inode”? What’s an inode anyway? Are you not within your Disk Space limit?

An “inode” is the data structure in a file system that describes a file-system object such as a file or a directory. To put it simply, each and every file and directory in your account is considered to be an “inode”. If you have 100 files and 20 directories, you have 120 inodes.

Most web hosting providers will have set a limit to the number of inodes each hosting account can have, which is generally between 200,000 to 300,000. The limit is set to ensure optimal server operation as every storage drive has a fixed number of inodes limit which should not be exceeded. Besides that, having a high number of inodes in a server will significantly slow down the time taken to complete a backup.

What files and/or directories are using up your inodes?

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