Three Tips for Success as Product and Engineering Grow

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Building a new version of your product is an exciting endeavor, but it can also be an overwhelming one. In the earliest days of a startup, there tends to be little formal structure in place, which is usually for the best! Everyone’s wearing numerous hats and just trying to get the product and company off the ground. It’s a time of innovation and creativity. When we built the first version of our product, we didn’t have a dedicated product team. That changed with version two, bringing new opportunities and challenges along with it. 

Through trial and error, we moved through several iterations of workflow, communication, and reporting. The key was balancing input from both the engineering and product teams while also balancing planning and innovation. We learned a lot from this endeavor and, in addition to successfully updating our core offering, gained some important insights about how to set yourself up for success even (and especially) as your company grows. 

Are Recommender Systems Fair? A Critical Look at the Challenges and Solutions

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Recommender systems have become an integral part of our daily lives, powering the personalized recommendations that we receive on social media, e-commerce platforms, and streaming services. These systems are designed to make our lives easier by suggesting products, services, and content that are relevant to our interests and preferences. However, as powerful as these systems are, they are not perfect, and there are concerns about their fairness, especially in terms of how they impact marginalized groups. 

In this article, we will explore the concept of fairness in recommender systems, the challenges involved in achieving fairness, and the approaches that have been proposed to address these challenges.

How Email Marketing Impacts Lead Generation And Customer Retention?

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Email marketing is a powerful tool for businesses to generate leads and retain customers. It allows businesses to communicate directly with their target audience, build relationships, and provide valuable information that can help convert leads into customers and retain existing customers. In this answer, I will discuss the influence of email marketing on lead generation and customer retention.

Lead Generation:

Email marketing can be an effective way to generate leads for a business. Here are some ways that email marketing can influence lead generation:

Increased Awareness: Email marketing can help increase awareness of a business and its products or services. By sending regular emails to a targeted audience, businesses can keep their brand top of mind and introduce new products or services that may interest potential customers.

Personalization: Email marketing allows businesses to personalize their messages to specific individuals. This personalization can help businesses establish a connection with potential customers and make them feel valued.

Call-to-Action: Email marketing can include a call-to-action (CTA) that encourages recipients to take a specific action, such as visiting a website, filling out a form, or making a purchase. This CTA can help generate leads by directing potential customers to the next step in the sales process.

Analytics: Email marketing platforms often include analytics tools that allow businesses to track the effectiveness of their email campaigns. This data can help businesses refine their email marketing strategy and generate more leads over time.

Customer Retention:

Email marketing can also be a powerful tool for customer retention. Here are some ways that email marketing can influence customer retention:

Relationship Building: Email marketing allows businesses to build relationships with their customers by sending regular communications that provide value. By providing helpful information, tips, and offers, businesses can keep their customers engaged and loyal.

Personalization: As with lead generation, email marketing can be personalized to specific individuals. By sending personalized messages that acknowledge a customer's past purchases or interests, businesses can make customers feel valued and appreciated.

Cross-Selling and Upselling: Email marketing can be used to promote additional products or services to existing customers. By highlighting related products or offering special deals, businesses can encourage customers to make additional purchases and increase their lifetime value.

Customer Feedback: Email marketing can include surveys or feedback forms that allow businesses to gather valuable insights from their customers. This feedback can help businesses improve their products or services and provide better customer experiences in the future.

In conclusion, email marketing can be a highly effective tool for lead generation and customer retention. By using personalized messaging, targeted CTAs, and analytics tools, businesses can generate more leads and keep their customers engaged and loyal over time.

How to Fix WordPress Redirecting to Old Domain After Migration

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Do you want to fix the issue of redirecting to an old domain?

When you migrate a WordPress website to a new domain, there is a possibility that users will be redirected back to the old domain.

In this article, we will show you how to fix WordPress redirecting to an old domain after migration.

How to fix WordPress redirecting to old domain after migration

What Causes Redirection to Old Domain After Migration Issue?

When you’re moving your WordPress website to a new domain, it is important to set up redirection. This way, users automatically land on the new location, and you get to keep your keyword rankings and traffic.

However, redirection to a new domain may not work properly, and your visitors would be redirected back to the old domain.

One of the main causes for this issue is that your site URL and home URL values are different in the WordPress database tables. You need to make sure that both these values lead to your new domain.

Besides that, DNS issues can also cause users to redirect to the old domain after migration. If the DNS server is not responding or DNS records haven’t been updated, then your visitors won’t be able to view your new website URL.

That said, let’s see how you can fix WordPress redirecting to the old domain after migration. We will cover different methods, so you can click the links below to jump ahead to your preferred section.

Method 1: Update the Site Address in WordPress Settings

The easiest way to fix this issue is by ensuring that the WordPress address and site address is the same in your WordPress settings.

If your Site Address (URL) still shows the old domain, then users will be redirected to the previous URL after migration.

To fix this, simply head to Settings » General from your WordPress admin panel. After that, enter your new domain under the ‘Site Address (URL)’ field.

Site address URL

Once you’re done, simply save your changes and visit the new domain to see if the problem is resolved.

If, however, the URL fields are greyed out and won’t let you type a new address, continue reading and use one of the other methods to redirect your domain.

Method 2: Changing Site URL in WordPress Database

Another method of fixing the redirecting to the old domain issue is by updating the site URL in the WordPress database tables.

You can easily access the database using the cPanel provided by the WordPress hosting service. For this tutorial, we will be using Bluehost as an example, but the process is similar for other hosting companies like Hostinger, SiteGround, etc.

First, you’ll need to log in to the hosting service control panel. After that, simply click on the ‘Advanced’ tab from the menu on your left.

Bluehost's PhpMyAdmin tool

Next, you can scroll down to the Databases section and click the ‘phpMyAdmin’ option.

You will need to wait for a few seconds until phpMyAdmin opens.

Once it opens, you will need to go to the wp_options table from the navigational panel on your left.

Do note that each hosting service has a different naming convention for database tables. However, the one you’re looking for will always end in ‘_options.”

For example, in this tutorial, we will click the ‘staging_45f_options’ table in Bluehost’s phpMyAdmin.

Open the options table

Next, you will need to edit the ‘siteurl’ and ‘home’ options.

First, go ahead and click the ‘Edit’ button for ‘siteurl’ option.

Enter siteurl

After that, you will need to enter the new domain name in the option_value field. Once that’s done, simply click the ‘Go’ button.

Now, you can return to the main wp_options page and edit the ‘home’ option.

Enter the home field value

Next, you will need to enter the new domain in the option_value field.

After entering the value, click the ‘Go’ button.

Method 3: Flush DNS Cache on Your PC

If you’re still unable to resolve the issue of the old domain redirecting after migration, then you should check the DNS settings.

At times, it can take up to 12 to 48 hours for the change of domain name to take effect. As a result, internet providers that don’t have updated DNS records will redirect users to the old domain.

You simply flush the DNS cache so that it gets the latest information and the new website URL. This also helps resolve the DNS server not responding issue.

For more details, please see our guide on how to clear your DNS cache on Mac, Windows, and Google Chrome.

Pro Tip: Use SEO Plugin to Perform Full Site Redirect

When you manually perform redirection to a new domain, then there is always a chance of errors. As a result, users would still be redirected to the old domain.

An easier way of setting up redirection is by using an WordPress SEO plugin like All in One SEO (AIOSEO). It offers a powerful redirection manager that you can use to redirect your entire site to a new domain without any issues.

Full site redirect in All in One SEO

This tool was built by our team, and it is what we use when we’re migrating websites to a new domain or merging two sites into one. You can learn more by following our step by step guide on how to properly do a full site redirect in WordPress.

We hope that this article helped you learn how to fix WordPress redirecting to an old domain after migration. You may also want to see our guide on the most common WordPress errors and how to fix them and our expert picks for the must-have WordPress plugins for business sites.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Fix WordPress Redirecting to Old Domain After Migration first appeared on WPBeginner.

The Engineering Process

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The engineering process is a series of steps that individuals (engineers, developers, scientists) use to create a product or solution. These products are often used in everyday life, and can solve problems faced by consumers or other users. Students begin by defining the problem and researching it. They then identify requirements that must be met. …

The Engineering Process Read More »

Getting Started With Prometheus Workshop: Using Advanced Queries

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Are you looking to get away from proprietary instrumentation? Are you interested in open-source observability but lack the knowledge to just dive right in?

This workshop is for you, designed to expand your knowledge and understanding of open-source observability tooling that is available to you today.

Chris’ Corner: A Balancing Act

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If you’re a super normal person like me, you’ve gone to war with typographic widows and orphans many times over your years as a developer, trying to ensure they don’t happen and ruin anyone’s day. You know what I mean, a headline with one silly little word that has wrapped down onto its own line. If only you could add a couple of soft returns in there to prevent it. You can, of course, but you know better. A soft return might fix a problem at one particular container width, that break causes an even more awkward problem at another container width.

One technique that is sometimes employed is to insert a   (non-breaking space) between the last two words (maybe even three?) of a headline (or paragraphs, if you’re nasty).

This little piggy went to market

None of us can be troubled to hand-code that if we’re in charge of the HTML of headlines regularly. I wrote my own PHP to split headlines by word and manually insert the non-breaking space on CSS-Tricks a decade or more ago. It can be done in client-side JavaScript too, naturally, but nobody wants to see that reflow.

Finally, along comes the web platform with something that looks like a solution:

h1, h2, h3 {
  text-wrap: balance;
}

Tyler Sticka has an article about this new CSS and offers this clear comparison:

uh oh — at this width, we get an orphan
yay — no more orphan (or widow or whatever, my brain cannot learn which is which) with text-wrap: balance

That “balanced” headline nice, generally a much more pleasing result for multi-line headlines.

But notably, what is happening here isn’t explicitly orphan-fighting. Richard Rutter makes this clear in an article of his own:

What this is not is control over widows and orphans. My previous examples show how the text balancing algorithm in Chrome Canary does indeed prevent a widow (the single word dropped down), and that’s a highly likely outcome. But you have to remember that the balancing job shortens the lines, so this isn’t an approach you would take to prevent widows at the end of paragraphs. In fact Canary limits balancing to 4 lines.

So it works for avoiding orphans/widows, but almost as a side effect of the balancing. In a follow-up article, Richard shines a light on what could be a future answer:

Bit by bit, the CSSWG seems to have been converging on a potential solution. In the current draft of the CSS Text Module Level 4, there is mention of Last Line Minimum Length. …

Amelia Bellamy-Royds took the Last Line Minimum Length idea and proposed a solution with a new min-last-line property. Her proposed property would specify a minimum length for the final line, and a minimum length for the penultimate line once you’d dropped a word or more down to address the short final line.

Ship it. Especially if it works on paragraphs in multi-col.


✨ Outstanding blog post alert! ✨

Future CSS: Anchor Positioning by Roman Komarov.

We only have the most rudimentary way to “connecting” the position of two elements in CSS today. Take an element that has non-static positioning, and you can absolutely position an element within that context. That’s about it. Kinda sad when you think about it — especially as it comes up relatively often. Mostly in the context of tooltips and context menus, where you want an element (of arbitrary DOM position) to be positioned right next to the element that needs the tooltip or context menu.

This positioning challenge is usually done with JavaScript (the cow paths have been laid), by way of getBoundingClientRect and doing various geometric math to make sure the element doesn’t wank off the edge of the browser or in any way become “data loss” as we like to say in CSS. More challenging that it seems. Letting CSS do it seems awfully nice.

CSS tends not to focus solutions on one exact need though, preferring instead to solve the problem conceptually with primitives that might solve lots of use cases. This is where Roman gets clever with things and makes examples like this connecting elements with pointing arrows (involving SVG):

But also some cool demos with a slightly more practical twist, like moving highlight menus:

Jhey Tompkins’ article on this, Tether elements to each other with CSS anchor positioning, covers things from first principles and is probably a better reference for the syntax. But Jhey being Jhey, there are some weird and clever demos as well, like this emoji finger form:

It’s a Pen, naturally.


There is a <meter> element in HTML, and Dana Byerly does a great job of showcasing it. It’s a natural fit for stuff like “You’ve uploaded 47 of your maximum 100 files” in a visually more understandable way. There is some accessibilty stuff to get right though, including using “fallback text” (the text within the element) which is used by some screen readers and will certainly be useful context. Free basic styling is nice:

Live tests as a Pen, naturally.


I like the term “CSS micro-framework” as coined here by Blake Watson.

  • May include classes for building grids, components, etc. Typically limited, though, because of the next rule.
  • Under 10kb minified and gzipped. I feel like you can’t claim “micro” or “lightweight” beyond 10kb.
  • JavaScript is optional and is not supplied by the framework.

Examples:

They aren’t just a reset and they aren’t… Bootstrap. They aren’t necessarily “classless” either, which is a whole other category of framework that only styles things based on HTML selectors.

And then, another possible ending:

As we go deeper down the path of minimal CSS starters we end up at the logical conclusion—you might not need a framework at all.

Achieving Google Ads Certification A Step-by-Step Path to Mastery

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Becoming certified in Google Ads can be an excellent way to demonstrate your expertise in online advertising, gain credibility as a professional, and increase your career prospects. Here's a step-by-step guide on how to achieve Google Ads Certification:

Step 1: Sign up for Google Skillshop

Google Skillshop is a free learning platform where you can find a wide range of courses and certifications related to Google Ads and other Google products. Sign up for a Skillshop account to get started.

Step 2: Learn the fundamentals of Google Ads

The first certification you should aim for is the Google Ads Fundamentals certification. This certification covers the basics of Google Ads and helps you understand the core concepts and terminology used in the platform. To prepare for this certification, take the Google Ads Fundamentals course on Skillshop and review the study materials provided.

Step 3: Choose your specialization

Once you have earned your Google Ads Fundamentals certification, you can choose to specialize in a specific area of Google Ads. The available specializations are Search Advertising, Display Advertising, Video Advertising, Shopping Advertising, and Apps Advertising. Choose the area that you want to specialize in and start studying the relevant course material on Skillshop.

Step 4: Get hands-on experience

To really master Google Ads, you need hands-on experience with the platform. Create your own Google Ads account and start experimenting with different ad formats, targeting options, and bidding strategies. Try running different campaigns and monitor the results to see what works best.

Step 5: Take the certification exams

After you have completed the relevant courses and gained sufficient practical experience, you can take the certification exams for your chosen specialization. The exams are free and available on Skillshop. To pass the exam, you need to score at least 80%. If you fail, you can retake the exam after a certain period.

Step 6: Maintain your certification

Google Ads certifications are valid for one year. To maintain your certification, you need to retake the certification exams every year. Additionally, you should stay up-to-date with the latest changes and trends in Google Ads by reading industry blogs and attending relevant events.

By following these steps, you can achieve Google Ads certification and demonstrate your expertise in online advertising. Good luck!

Scope of digital marketing for small businesses

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Digital marketing offers tremendous opportunities for small businesses to reach and engage with their target audience in a cost-effective and measurable way. Here are some of the ways that small businesses can benefit from digital marketing:

(1) Increased visibility: With digital marketing, small businesses can reach a wider audience than traditional marketing methods, such as print ads or billboards. By using search engine optimization (SEO), pay-per-click (PPC) advertising, and social media marketing, small businesses can increase their online visibility and attract more customers.
(2) Targeted advertising: Digital marketing allows small businesses to target specific demographics, interests, and behaviors to reach their ideal customers. This means that small businesses can reach people who are most likely to be interested in their products or services and avoid wasting money on ineffective advertising.
(3) Cost-effective: Digital marketing can be significantly more cost-effective than traditional marketing methods, especially for small businesses with limited budgets. Many digital marketing tactics, such as email marketing and social media marketing, are relatively inexpensive and can offer a high return on investment (ROI).
(4) Measurable results: Digital marketing provides measurable data that allows small businesses to track their marketing efforts' effectiveness. With analytics tools, small businesses can track website traffic, conversion rates, and other key performance indicators (KPIs) to optimize their marketing strategies continually.
(5) Build relationships: Digital marketing for small businesses to engage with their customers through various channels, such as social media, email, and chatbots. This provides an opportunity for small businesses to build relationships with their customers and improve their brand loyalty.
Overall, digital marketing offers a vast scope of opportunities for small businesses to grow their online presence, reach their target audience, and increase their revenue. With a strategic approach and the right tools, small businesses can leverage digital marketing to compete with larger companies and succeed in today's digital landscape.

How to Install WordPress on Localhost: Step-by-Step From Scratch

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how to install wordpress on localhostYou can learn how to install WordPress on localhost using a few different ways depending on your preferences, skill level, and desired workflow. In this post, we'll show you a few methods to get the job done. The instructions will cover Windows, macOS, and even Linux. This means regardless of your operating system (OS) you'll be able to follow along.