We see a lot of bogus signups on RightBlogger for people trying to abuse our free tier. So I thought I would share some of my best tips and insights.

In this post, I’ll show you how to block disposable emails using JavaScript with a few API calls. Of course no matter your programming language some of the tips here might be helpful.

This method is useful if you want to keep things clean and prevent users from abusing sign-ups with throwaway accounts. Let’s get into it.

Full Code Snippet to Block Disposable Emails

Since you’re here for the code, here’s the full snippet I use to check for disposable emails with a few API calls:

How it Works

Each disposable email API checks the email’s authenticity differently:

• Debounce.io: Detects disposable email providers instantly (free API).
• VerifyMail.io (optional): Confirms whether the domain is known for disposable emails (paid API).
• StopForumSpam: Adds extra checks for known spam emails and IP addresses with high confidence scores (free API).

Using all three helps make sure no temporary email services slips through. I still have seen plenty of ones not on these lists but I will prevent a lot from just using these.

Additional Checks for Users Signing Up

Even with these APIs, people are persistent, so here are a few more tips you can add to your signup flow to prevent bad signups.

Other tips for preventing bad signups:

• Limit Sign-Ups per IP: Allowing up to two sign-ups per IP per week can prevent repeat sign-ups from the same person. This can easily be do this with an Upstash Rate Limit.
• Restrict Dot Variations: Some people create multiple accounts by adding dots in Gmail addresses (like [email protected]). Counting periods and blocking emails with three or more can help cut down on abuse. You can also normalize all Gmail addresses by removing the periods before the @ symbol, but ensure that your login/signup flows factor this in, so no one gets locked out of an account.
• Watch for ‘+’: Users might add “+something” to the end of their email name (e.g., [email protected]). You could strip any “+” and everything after it in the username to get the base email for verification. I wouldn’t outright block + usage since people like to do +yourservice but just something to look out for.

Wrapping It Up

Blocking disposable emails with JavaScript is straightforward with the right APIs. By combining these methods, you’ll have a solid way to prevent temporary emails in your sign-up form, making your user base more authentic and manageable. Best of all, you can offer more usage to trial users since you are warding off spammers.

The post How to Block Disposable Emails with JavaScript (Code Snippet) appeared first on Andy Feliciotti.

That’s why in this quick post I will show you how to grab metadata for a webpage using Node.js and Cheerio. With these tools, you can easily fetch and parse metadata from any web page.

Let’s dive in.

Full Code Snippet

Since you’re likely here for code, here’s my full code for grabbing meta title, description, and og:image using Node and Cheerio.

Why Use Node and Cheerio for Meta Tag Retrieval?

Unfortunately, we can’t use straight vanilla JS to grab metadata of pages because of cross-origin security restrictions. That’s where this script comes in: by using fetch on the server side, we can read a page’s HTML and grab metadata to present it in any way you want for your apps.

Node.js is flexible, efficient, and great for handling asynchronous tasks, making it ideal for retrieving meta tags. Whether you’re using a Cloudflare Worker or a custom app on Vercel, you can use this to grab metadata, which is perfect for web scraping. We’ll also use Cheerio, a lightweight library that brings the familiar jQuery syntax to the server side, making it easy to parse HTML and extract data.

Explaining the Code

Importing Cheerio

First we need to import Cheerio. Cheerio allows us to traverse and manipulate the DOM, making it easier to find the meta tags we’re after.

Validating the URL

Before fetching anything, we need a proper URL. If the URL doesn’t start with “http://” or “https://”, we prepend “https://” to make sure it’s valid. I found this to be a simple way to improve the experience. If you want to be more in-depth you could also use isURL from the Validator package, but I wanted to keep this as simple as possible.

Fetching the HTML

With our URL ready, now we can fetch the HTML content of the page. Using the Fetch API, our request goes out, retrieves the content, and brings back the HTML for Cheerio. Not that some sites may block bots so larger scale apps will likely want to use a proxy or a service like ScrapingBee.

Parsing HTML with Cheerio

Now we can extract the metadata from the HTML with Cheerio.

Extracting Metadata

With our structured DOM in place we can go looking for the page’s meta title, meta description, and open graph image. Here’s how:

• Title: We grab the <title> tag, fetching its text content.
• Description: Next, we sift through meta tags to find the description. The function checks for the standard <meta name="description"> or as a fallback Open Graph <meta property="og:description">.
• Image: The image adds visual flair to a preview. We look for <meta property="og:image">, or fallback to Twitter’s <meta name="twitter:image">.

If the script doesn’t find anything, it will default to an empty string to keep our data tidy and predictable.

Navigating Errors Gracefully

Unfortunately, web scraping isn’t always so straightforward. Errors can range from an unreachable website to an unexpected HTML structure. That’s why the script is wrapped in a try/catch. If the fetch operation hits a snag, we log the error with a clear message.

By catching these errors early, we prevent unexpected breakdowns and can return a consistent, empty metadata object.

Wrapping It Up

As you can see, fetching metadata with Node.js and Cheerio is fairly simple. By handling URLs, fetching content, and parsing, we can easily package essential metadata into previews that capture attention.

Of course, you’ll have to convert this into an API endpoint (which is fairly simple when using something like Next.js). Then, your application can grab from that endpoint and present a preview of any link someone is using in your app.

The post Grab Meta Tags (Title/Description) from Sites with Node.js appeared first on Andy Feliciotti.

Managing a blog can easily take up a lot of time but can be rewarding for growing new & wider audiences. Videos you create have very rich content so it’s such a great idea to convert videos to blog posts.

In this post I’ll show you how to repurpose YouTube videos into blog posts. No matter if you’re a seasoned YouTuber or a beginner this is designed to be an easy step-by-step guide.

Why Repurpose YouTube Videos for Blog Posts

Reach New Readers and Viewers

While you may have an amazing YouTube channel, sadly not everyone’s into videos. Some folks love to read. By transforming your video content into blog posts, you’re opening doors to a whole new audience.

This is especially important if you are working on content marketing for a brand. Posting on social media sites is great but a blog offers you more control of the user’s experience. Once a user is on your blog you can more easily get their email address for future marketing efforts compared to YouTube alone.

Boost Built Search Engine Traffic on your Blog

Blog posts created from your videos can rank on search engines. They can help your website climb those search engine ranks, bringing more eyes to your content. It is also still important to take the extra step of keyword research before creating a blog post. This will ensure you blog post is aligned with a specific keyword before posting.

Picking the Perfect Videos for Your Blog

Not all full videos are great for being converted into a blog post. The content of a vlog for example makes way more sense in a visual medium. Choose evergreen content that keeps on giving and videos that have already won your audience’s hearts.

Evergreen Content

Pick videos that stand the test of time. Ones that keep getting views no matter how old they get? Those are your golden tickets to creating rich blog posts that will rank on Google Search.

Tutorial and How-To Videos

Tutorial videos are ideal for conversion as they provide clear, step-by-step information that can be easily adapted into informative blog posts. Plus you can easily grab screenshots from your videos when making your blog post.

How to Convert YouTube Videos to Blog Posts

Alright, let’s dive into the nitty-gritty of transforming your videos into captivating blog posts using AI.

Step 1: Get The Transcript

First you’ll need to grab a YouTube video transcript. This is where all the rich insights of a video lives and what we will use to create out blog post.

Luckily YouTube offers this for most videos now built in. You can also use a tool like RightBlogger’s transcript downloader with a free account. This will allow you to copy the full transcript in one click.

You can click the more button on any video to find the “show transcript” button. This will bring up a sidebar with the video’s transcript.

After the transcript is displayed you’ll notice it has timestamps for all of the spoken aspect of the video. You don’t want these for what we are doing so we’ll disable the timestamps. You’ll want to click the “…” button and toggle the timestamps.

Once the timestamps are gone you can highlight all of the transcript’s text and copy it. Of course if you just want to use part of the video you can copy the relevant parts. This is great if you have a really long video like a podcast and just want to create a blog post with one part of it.

If a video doesn’t have a transcript you can use a transcription tools like Rev to have one created. Rev is one of my favorite paid services for transcribing videos, especially since they automatically deliver the captions and subtitles back to YouTube.

If you are using a Mac you can also use an app like MacWhisper to transcribe your videos locally. MacWhisper will create a .SRT file you can upload to YouTube or even other sites like LinkedIn. I’ve had great success with this app and find the transcriptions better than YouTube’s auto-captions in my daily use.

RightBlogger also has an AI video or audio transcription tool that will generate transcripts for you as well.

Now that we have the video’s transcript in our clipboard we can head over to ChatGPT by OpenAI to generate a blog post outline.

Step 2: Outline with AI Help

Here’s where AI tools like ChatGPT come in handy. Use them to whip up a blog post outline from your transcript. Here’s a prompt template to use to get you started. In the beginning of the prompt I would also recommend including something like “The primary keyword of my article is [keyword]”. This will require you figuring out what the primary keyword is for your article but if you’re trying to create an seo-optimized post it can help in the long run.

Act as a bloggers who is great at writing. Help we write a blog post outline based on a YouTube Video. I am going to give you the video transcript so you can turn it into an outline for me to write a blog post. Use Markdown so it's easier to read.

YouTube Video Transcript:
[PASTE YOUTUBE VIDEO TRANSCRIPT HERE]

And of course just like that ChatGPT will automatically convert the video’s content into a blog post outline you can use to write your blog post. You can follow up with ChatGPT and ask it to write a post using the outline. Just keep in mind it isn’t best to just copy and paste generated content into your blog. You’ll want to make sure you edit your post.

Step 3: Edit Your Post

Now of course you’ll want to write your post and add your own unique touches. You can easily copy and paste the content from ChatGPT to your blog CMS to get started. Of course you can have AI write each section of the blog outline but this method keeps you on track while also allowing you to use your exact writing style.

Don’t have a blog? learn how to start a blog. A blog is still such a great way to express yourself online. Blogs allow you to customize, grow traffic from search engines, grow an email list, and overall build a deeper connection with your audience while expanding it.

This is the important part, adding in your own voice and style using the outline AI wrote. You should add specific details ChatGPT may have missed, like screenshots and images, and links. Internal links to relevant other posts on your site are essential to creating a successful blog.

I also recommend embedding the video itself into your blog (if it’s your video) so this creates a great alignment in the content between connecting with people who enjoy video and those who want to read.

Google has hinted at that full AI content that is designed to exploit the Google algorithm will be removed from search. This is why it’s essential to read over, refine, and add your personal touches to the blog articles you create.

Step 4: SEO Optimize Your Post

Of course you’ll also want to add a meta title and description to your post. If you use WordPress you can easily use a SEO plugin to do this. There are plenty of other SEO tips I could go into but I wrote a full post of WordPress SEO tips here.

Optional: Using RightBlogger

If you don’t want to deal with everything I listed above, I created an AI-powered tool on RightBlogger that allows you to convert YouTube video URLs to full blog posts. This easily can turn videos into blog posts with just a YouTube URL. This is a super fast way to generate blog posts from your videos using AI.

You can even use RightBlogger to monitor your YouTube channel and automatically get new videos converted to blog posts that are ready to publish.

RightBlogger allow you to select an article length, writing style, language, primary keyword, and even allows you to put in additional instructions. I’ve personally built over 80 tools in RightBlogger designed for content creators who want to speed up their content creation workflows for optimal SEO value.

FAQs about Converting YouTube Videos to Blog Posts with ChatGPT

What if the YouTube video doesn’t have a transcript?

As mentioned in the post if the video you want to blog about doesn’t have a transcript, you’ll need to transcribe it using a third-party service (like Rev or MacWhisper). Likely a video will have an automatic transcript from YouTube but I have realized newly uploaded videos and old uploads won’t have one. However, some services can transcribe videos using just the YouTube link.

How do I make longer blogs?

Creating blogs longer than 800 words with AI can be tricky, but here are some tips:

• Use multiple prompts: generate an outline, then create each section separately. You’ll need to tell the AI the sections you’re writing at a time.
• Add a word requirement in the prompt, like “Write at least 700 words.” This typically works okay on higher powered models but not on weaker ones like GPT-4o Mini.
• Specify an outline and set a minimum word count for each section.

Generating each section separately is probably the best bet at ensuring the post is long.

How do I export blogs to my website?

You can copy and paste the post output from ChatGPT directly to your blog CMS (like WordPress, Webflow or Squarespace). If what you’re writing doesn’t have blog formatting you can add to your prompt “Respond with Markdown so it’s easier to read”. This will ensure there is formatting that you expect.

What if the transcript is too long?

If the transcript exceeds the AI’s context limits, you have a few options:

• Use GPT-4o, which has a larger context window, it’s unlikely your transcript will be longer than GPT-4o’s context window. Claude also offers a massive context window for super long transcripts.
• Only use the portion of the transcript you need.
• Compress the transcript by summarizing it (you can use a tool like RightBlogger’s summarizer).

What are some video to blog tools?

Here are paid and free services to help convert videos to articles.

• Video To Blog: Free video to blog tool to generate articles from YouTube Videos.
• RightBlogger: Paid tool suite for bloggers that includes a video to blog converter.
• RyRob Video to Blog Tool: Free converter to quickly convert videos to blogs.
• Video To Blog AI: Paid service with advanced options like automatic video screenshots.

Conclusion

There you have it! That was the easy way to use AI to repurpose your videos into blog posts. Turning your YouTube videos into blog posts isn’t just smart; it’s a great way to speed up a content creator’s workflow. You can reach more people, boost your online presence, and make the most of every piece of content you create.

So, go ahead and give your YouTube content a new life on your blog!

The post How to Convert YouTube Videos to Blog Posts Using AI appeared first on Andy Feliciotti.

The hex opacity value ranges from 00 to FF, with 00 being fully transparent and FF being fully opaque. This allows designers to control the transparency of elements on a webpage, creating visually appealing effects and enhancing user experience.

Understanding and utilizing hex opacity is essential for creating modern and visually engaging web designs.

Using Hex Opacity in CSS

If you want a background color to be semi-transparent, you can use the RGBA color model and specify the opacity using a hexadecimal value. In CSS, this would look like background-color: #000000AA, where “AA” represents the level of opacity. This can be especially useful when you want to create overlays, fade effects, or blend elements together on your website.

Hex Opacity Table

While it may not be intuitive to find the hex value percentage, here is a handy table to quickly find the opacity to append to your hex color to make it transparent.

So for example if you want your color to be 95% opacity you would append the hex code F2 to your hex color. For example red with a 95% opacity would be #ff0000f2.

Understanding the Hexadecimal System

When it comes to counting and representing values, we are familiar with the decimal system (base 10), where we use digits from 0 to 9.

However, the hexadecimal system (base 16) expands on this concept by introducing additional symbols: A, B, C, D, E, and F. These extra symbols allow for a total of 16 possible values per digit position.

In hexadecimal, a single-digit can represent values from 0 to F, where F is equivalent to 15 in decimal. Once the single-digit reaches F and needs to increase, it transitions to two digits.

For example, valid hexadecimal values include 00, 01, 99, 9D, 1D, CC, E4, and F5. By incorporating letters alongside numbers, the hexadecimal system provides an efficient way to express colors and other data in a concise manner.

Understanding hexadecimal values is crucial for working with CSS styles, where they play a significant role in defining colors and achieving desired visual effects on websites.

Conclusion

Hex opacity in CSS offers a dynamic way to control transparency levels in web design. By mastering hexadecimal values from 00 for full transparency to FF for complete opacity, designers can fine-tune the visual impact of elements on a webpage. Keep in mind that most moderns browsers support hex color notation with opacity.

The post Hex Opacity: What is it & hex opacity table appeared first on Andy Feliciotti.

Full disclosure: I made this free JSON API to simplify the process of getting sunrise and sunset times in applications and web apps.

The best thing about the API is that it localizes the times to the area you are querying. This is actually why I initially built the API, I noticed many other sunset time APIs made finding proper times for locations complex. Using the default settings in SunriseSunset.io you’ll be returned with times at the specific location.

Using the SunriseSunset.io API

Using the free JSON API from SunriseSunset.io is super simple. All you need to do is put in a latitude and longitude and you’ll instantly retrieve sunrise/sunset times for that location. As you can see in the example below.

https://api.sunrisesunset.io/json?lat=38.907192&lng=-77.036873

The API doesn’t require any API key or authentication.

The API also includes additional options for setting the timezone or looking up a specific date. For specifics of additional parameters I recommend reading the documentation.

You can get coordinates for any locations on Google Maps simply by right clicking a spot on the map.

Here is an example using the coordinates of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis. This Javascript queries the SunriseSunset.io API and returns the resulting data in the console log. Of course you can use the data any way you please, like showing it in a dashboard or just using it in another function.

// Coordinates for Gateway Arch in St. Louis
const latitude = 38.624519738607894
const longitude = -90.18581515692256
const url = `https://api.sunrisesunset.io/json?lat=${latitude}&lng=${longitude}`

fetch(url)
  .then(response => response.json())
  .then(data => {
    console.log(data)
  })
  .catch(error => console.error('Error:', error))

Here is a more flushed out example on CodePen that actually shows displaying the sunrise and sunset times on the page and the raw output of the API.

Conclusion

In conclusion, the JSON Sunrise and Sunset Times API on SunriseSunset.io is a powerful tool that can be used to enhance the functionality of your website or application.

Some example usage may include creating a tool for photographers, showing sunset times for a specific location like a business, or just using a user’s location and telling them the sunset times.

By providing accurate and up-to-date information on the sunrise and sunset times for any location on Earth, this API can help you create a more engaging and informative user experience for your visitors.

The post Displaying Sunset Times in Javascript using a Free Sunset Times API appeared first on Andy Feliciotti.

It’s incredible to finally see AI reach a usable point to built web products easily. It all started when I found OpenAI’s GPT-3 API which allows you to submit a “prompt” and get a response from their AI engine. Of course since I built this tool originally in 2022 AI has massively accelerated with the launch of models like GPT-5 and Gemini 2.5 Pro.

Adding AI to Write at Scale

I even started to play around with OpenAI’s API to auto-write descriptions on my site SunriseSunset.io since I had no way to manually write city descriptions for 100,000+ cities.

One of the key things to know about building AI powered tools is how to write prompts that return meaningful results. That’s kind of where the “magic” and creativity comes in. By giving GPT-5 more guidance and relevant information you’ll come out with better results. If you are new to prompts here is a full list of ChatGPT prompts for writers.

After experimenting on SunriseSunset I wanted to build something more useful and luckily my friend Ryan Robinson had the perfect use case.

Building Free AI Tools for RyRob

Ryan needed a blog title generator for his blog which I figured it would be the perfect use of GPT-5. When I built this tool other blog title generators seemed to just auto-fill your keyword into a preset list of phrases (how boring). It’s funny to think about how people expected free web tools to work before AI.

Using GPT-5 (which stands for Generative Pre-trained Transformer) gives you the ability to dynamically fill a user’s need as if a person is replying. It’s really incredible what you can do. For example even if something has a typo the API will return what you expect.

This used to take a lot of engineering to create, but now it feels natural.

While the blog title generator can give you some great ideas for headlines it’s still recommended to modify them or write your own. It’s just kind of a super charged way to get inspiration for your post.

If you are planning on building a web tool with GPT-5 and OpenAI keep in mind it’s usage based pricing. So if you have a large prompt or a lot of users costs can add up quickly. You’ll likely want to add a captcha, accounts, or some kind of rate limiting.

As you expand your AI application you can even add your own training to models with fine-tuning so you get more results you’d want. This is the next step for my learning and the blog title generator. We can feed in headlines and titles we know perform well for the AI to learn from to overall give better results to users.

Try out the blog title generator yourself and let me know how it works for you! I’ve also created 50+ free AI tools for Ryan’s that thousands of people have used.

It’s been amazing to see how AI has changed the web, especially with free tools.

If you’re interested in creating AI tools to embed on your site, I also developed AI tool studio on RightBlogger, which enables you to craft custom AI-powered tools to embed on your site for lead generation.

The post Building a Blog Title Generator with AI appeared first on Andy Feliciotti.

TLDR; Don’t keep any domain of value on GoDaddy, I recommend using Cloudflare as a registrar.

Before I start I just want to preface that Afternic is a company owned by GoDaddy and is a domain name auction platform. I was unfamiliar with this site but it basically functions as GoDaddy auctions but off of GoDaddy. Domain names for sale on Afternic will also show up on GoDaddy auctions and various platforms.

In this post I’ll be going over a couple things:

• How I think the GoDaddy & Afternic domain sale system is broken.
• What to do if you receive a “Action required: Authorize your domain listings.” email.
• General visibility into how your domains can be vulnerable on GoDaddy.

Let’s start from the beginning with the “Action required: Authorize your domain listings.” email from Godaddy and Afternic. To be clear Afternic is owned by GoDaddy so I find this shocking how this system works on their end.

“Authorize your participation in Afternic.” Email

The SmartWP.com domain is in Ryan’s account so all of this happens through his GoDaddy account. We bought the domain in 2019 from GoDaddy auctions for $400.

March 3rd, 2022 Ryan forwards me an email with the subject “Action required: Authorize your domain listings.”. I’m used to getting hundreds of password reset emails or similar emails so nothing was that alarming to me. Typically companies will include a “I didn’t request this” button but this email didn’t have that so I just warned Ryan not to click anything and we’ll just ignore it.

My assumption was that if you don’t click authorize now it won’t authorize.

We were wrong about that assumption.

My second assumption was that if this authorization is approved Ryan would receive a second email.

We were also wrong about this.

We ignored the email (and received ZERO further emails mentioning Afternic).

Fast forward to July 2nd, 2022. I wanted to make a DNS change to SmartWP so I logged in via delegate access. This is where things got funny, I noticed SmartWP wasn’t in his account. Which I figured maybe he moved it or the GoDaddy UI was messed up.

So I sent Ryan a quick text to check if he moved the domain.

So he looked through his account, no indication that the SmartWP domain ever existed in it besides renewal bills he could see.

This is probably the part that made me the most angry, GoDaddy support clearly isn’t trained on this platform or integration. Why wouldn’t their first response be “oh you authorized a sale on X date so the domain sold”.

In the time that GoDaddy response was working to get back to us the person who stole the domain already sold it which is probably the craziest part.

If GoDaddy support had been trained for this we could have cancelled the auction before it ever sold.

This kind of blew our mind at this point, there is no way Ryan authorized this and he checked for any follow up emails.

This eventually lead us to give up and get SmartWP.co as a backup.

Later I’ll go over how we recovered the domain but first I want to go over what to do if you get this email from GoDaddy.

What to do if you get the “Action required: Authorize your domain listings.” email?

If you get an email from GoDaddy Authorize your participation in Afternic I highly recommend calling them right away. Of course don’t click anything in the email but you’ll want to call them and 100% confirm that this “integration” isn’t connecting to your account/domain.

I am convinced after you get this email an attacker is trying to social engineer GoDaddy support to authorize the domain from under you. I have check all of Ryan’s account logs for his email and GoDaddy account and see 0 suspicious logins.

How We Got the Domain Back

I’m not sure if everyone will be as lucky as we were. Ryan spent over 5 hours with support unable to resolve this until someone at GoDaddy saw his tweet and pushed it up to the office of the CEO.

So for most users I sadly don’t think this will be a path forward.

On July 8th Ryan make this tweet below after he realizes the domain is gone from his account. We also see that it’s on sale for $65,000 on Afternic.

Ryan got a bunch of useful leads from this email and eventually the director of education at GoDaddy reached out to him and pushed the issue up the chain.

After a few days we learned that the office of the CEO was dealing with the issue and we waited. They said they’d reach out on July 15th with details.

And just like that Ryan got an email saying the domain is in his account and a call from the CEO office. They weren’t able to give us any more details which I assume is to prevent a lawsuit but we’re happy with the outcome.

We spent 3 years building content and backlinks to the site so it would have been a shame to lose the domain.

Changes I’d Love to see GoDaddy Make

Here’s some feedback for GoDaddy about their Afternic platform. I came to these conclusions after I tried to list a domain using this integration so I could see the inner workings.

Basically ANYONE can signup for Afternic and list YOUR domain for sale. The tricky part come in with their “instant transfer” feature. If the seller (which doesn’t have to be connected to your GoDaddy account) opts into the instant transfer feature GoDaddy will send the authorization email noted above to the corresponding GoDaddy account.

This means you can in theory bulk spam people authorization emails in hopes that someone accidentally approves it. Worse I am assuming a scammer can call GoDaddy and convince them to authorize it.

Ideally they should simple remove Afternic from their products, they have an auction platform currently so I am not sure why it it even exists. Afternic is basically designed in a way to help scammers, the user who uses it to sell your domain can have a separate contact, separate payout, and completely different information from the domain holder’s account.

That being said here’s some small changes I think they can make to the Afternic authorization system that exists after testing how it works currently.

1. Send multiple emails for every step of the process. I tried authorizing this process on my end and it only send ONE email, the initial email listed above. There needs to be a “You Authorized Afternic” email that follows up the connection. This would give someone the change to realize something is happening to their domain.
2. Second the GoDaddy UI doesn’t note ANYTHING about Afternic. If you have a domain authorized for sale in Afternic your domain will still appear “locked” and not listed for sale on GoDaddy auctions. Meaning you won’t even know that your domain is for sale if you check your GoDaddy account frequently.
3. I would love if they had an audit log of approvals like this. After searching the UI there is no indication you approved such a thing, which is insane considering it basically hands your account over to anyone.

Thanks for reading! I really hope this doesn’t happen to others.

From my research, I can tell this happens to others. Since posting this article, I’ve had many reach out and say the same thing has happened to them. As you may know, DNS records can remain the same as domains are for sale, so most users won’t even know this is happening as their domain is sold out from under them.

If you are looking to move your domains I highly recommend using Cloudflare as your registrar.

The post How a Domain Name was Stolen on GoDaddy’s Afternic Platform appeared first on Andy Feliciotti.

Everyone wants their content shared on social media and WordPress offers a massive selection of social sharing plugins.

I stumbled across Social Warfare and Social Warfare pro while trying out social plugins.

Here is my review of Social Warfare.

What is Social Warfare?

Social Warfare offers a simple way to add share buttons to your WordPress site. This review is based off the Pro version but you can find the free version on WordPress.org which offers limited options.

Best of all it offers support for things like ‘click to tweet’ buttons and pulling social share metrics.

https://drawne.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/social-warfare-social-networks.mp4

The free version of Social Warfare will feet most people’s needs but if you need support for Reddit, WhatsApp, Pocket, Buffer, Email you’ll want to get Social Warfare Pro.

In addition to more social networks Social Warfare Pro offers pin buttons on images, button designs, and a lot more in depth options.

Social Warfare Features:

• Automatically add social share buttons to your posts
• Support for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Mix
• Display home many times content has been shared on social

Additional Social Warfare Pro Features:

•  Additional social networks
• Button design options including color schemes
• Pin it buttons on images in articles

Reasons I use Social Warfare over other Plugins

I have used plenty of social share plugins for WordPress and I have found that most of them cause formatting issues or just add a lot of bloat to pages. One of my favorite things about Social Warfare is how little it affect page load speed and the simple yet effective button design.

The pro version of the plugin offers plenty of button design options. I have found the default square colored buttons to be the most familiar and pleasing but if you want to heavily customize you can. This includes modifying button shape, size, and color schemes.

Need Color Inspiration?
View: Best Color Palettes

One feature I have never seen in any other social sharing plugins is the ability to set a custom Pinterest image. This is huge if you plan on getting traffic from Pinterest. While editing a post you can set a custom image and text to go along with it for when the user hits the pin button. If you want a high traffic blog I recommend adding a tall Pinterest image to all of your longer posts.

In addition to share buttons you can also embed ‘click to tweet’ widgets that give a user a call to action to tweet something from an article. It’s also super simple to add them to your article since it adds an embed button to the WordPress editor (and a block for Gutenberg users).

Social Warfare also adds social share counts to your articles in the WordPress dashboard. I have found this feature to be extremely useful since you may have articles being shared you were unaware of. Best of all if you are an advanced WordPress developer you can use this metric in custom search algorithms for sorting.

The plugin lets you select display options based on post types. So if you only want share buttons on your single blog posts it’s simple to do. If you’re a developer you can manually add the Social Warfare buttons anywhere in your theme. Additionally if you want to place the share buttons in the middle of an article like this:

[social_warfare]

you can simply use the Social Warfare shortcode.

Social Warfare Frustrations

With all of the benefits of Social Warfare there is one main downside for my site I have found using the plugin.

First of all you can’t use the share buttons for archive pages. So for example if your blog revolves heavily around category and taxonomy pages you can’t add share buttons to those even programmatically. You can have share buttons show up for each post on those pages but not the archive page specifically. Much of my site AwesomeStuffToBuy revolves around archive pages so I wish it offered a way to include those buttons for the actual archive page. It is quite frustrating since the share buttons work so well!

Additionally Social Warfare lets you set Twitter/FB share images for posts. This is a great feature but I wish it would detect if you are using Yoast SEO since the UI for selecting a social image in the plugin is quite large in the editing screen (since I would rather use Yoast to set these).

Another feature of Social Warfare Pro is pulling twitter share counts using third party services. This is out of the control of Social Warfare since Twitter removed share counts but I have found the third party services they integrate with to be hit or miss in grabbing numbers.

Is Social Warfare Pro Worth It?

If you need social share buttons on your blog I highly recommend Social Warfare pro. The additional options offered by the Pro option is well worth it. I still don’t think this is the perfect option but it’s the best social share plugin I have found for WordPress.

4/5 The Best Social Share Plugin for WordPress
 4/5

Get Social Warfare Pro

The post Social Warfare Review: Social Sharing WordPress Plugin appeared first on Andy Feliciotti.

Page builders have taken WordPress by storm. There are tons of choices for page builders, Beaver Builder, Divi, Themify, Cornerstone, and loads more.

After testing out a lot of the WordPress page builders I have found Elementor to be the best page builder for WordPress.

Here is my Elementor Review.
(based on Elementor Version 3.0.6)

What is Elementor?

Elementor is a WordPress page builder that lets you build pages and posts using a simple drag and drop editor and best of all it’s compatible with all WordPress themes.

Elementor also offers the ability to build headers, footers, and even popups using its drag and drop editor. This is an incredible addition to any WordPress site since you can build complex pages easily.

https://drawne.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/using-elementor.mp4

Loaded with plenty of useful widgets and widely supported by developers Elementor has quickly become the most popular page builder for WordPress.

Main Elementor Features:

• Lets users build pages using an easy to use drag and drop editor.
• 30 widgets to include in your pages.
• Compatible with all WordPress themes.

Elementor Pro Features:

• Fully customize your theme using the Elementor editor for your header and footer.
• Form builder with popular marketing integrations including Mailchimp.
• Design popups for email capture forms (or any other use cases).
• 50+ additional widgets to use in your Elementor pages.
• Add Custom CSS to Elementor pages.
• Advanced Custom Fields integration which lets you display ACF fields in Elementor pages (love this feature).
• Additional WooCommerce support

Elementor Features & What I love About It All

If you’ve ever built a WordPress site from scratch either using a custom theme or a premium theme you know how it can be frustrating at times.

Many themes become unsupported overtime, are hard to learn when first installing, or worse don’t end up meeting your needs.

Since Elementor is separated from your theme you don’t have to worry about being locked into one theme which is simply incredible to me. I have found myself using Elementor with WordPress theme WP Astra for all new sites that I create.

This makes Elementor a great addition to any site looking to developer stylish pages. Best of all if you’re a developer there are plenty of hooks and actions that will make customizing WordPress with Elementor nearly limitless.

I have also been massively impressed with Elementors updates and the amount of new features they have added just from the few months I have been using the plugin.

Elementor Pro includes a header and footer theme builder so you basically can overwrite all of the default elements of a theme. Things like colors and fonts are primarily controlled by the theme while Elementor can modify the design of everything else. Plus if you know CSS you can manually overwrite any element as you see fit.

The basic set of elements in the Elementor page builder include useful ones like a text editor (similar to the classic WP editor), headings, buttons, social icons, shortcode embed, and more. 

This makes the free version of Elementor very useful out of the box, especially since you have access to all of the Elementor layout options for columns, rows, etc.

Oddly enough one of my favorite features of Elementor is the ability to right click elements. This is one tweak I have never seen in another page builder including Gutenberg and it makes building pages quickly a breeze. No longer am I constantly clicking elements to figure out what to select, the right click gives me the most important options I need at a glance. Especially if you are building multiple pages, you can simple click copy and paste whole sections of pages into another Elementor page.

Elementor includes most of the options you need to build awesome pages. But sometimes you want to get under the hood and modify a page’s CSS. Elementor Pro includes a simple to use CSS editor to perfectly modify pages as you’d like. You can add global CSS for all pages or specific CSS to elements on the site. Plus you can add classes to any element making this bridging most gaps you’d want to manually control.

Out of all of the page builder I have used the responsive options in Elementor just seem more thought out. Elements involving margin, padding, font-size, etc all have options to set them manually for device size. This has become extremely useful when building a responsive web pages.

Additionally like many page builders you can view the entire page in a responsive editor. This make it great for quickly fixing mobile or tablet issues on your site. A lot of designers miss out on viewing the mobile experience which is the primary way people visit sites now.

Some of the responsive options are extremely helpful like reversing the order of a column when viewed on mobile. So if you have a photo on the right hand side of a row you can have it appear on top on mobile.

Elementor Pro also offers the ability to create headers and footers using its editor. This means you can create complex headers and footer easily using the Elementor editor. You can also select what pages the header/footer shows up on so if you have one part of your site that you’d like to use it on it’s easy to do that.

I can’t stress how much I love this feature.

Being able to overwrite everything in your theme and use Elementor’s editor is incredible.

In addition to creating headers and footers you can also create pages for custom post types.

I found this extremely useful if you need to setup a custom post type page to display custom fields for example.

Additionally the ‘text’ widget lets you pull any custom field (ACF supported) from the post so you can easily make pages for portfolios, video viewers, store location pages, etc. Anything where you have data in custom fields and want to display is easily. Best of all it’s beginner friendly when previously you needed a developer to modify a page like this.

When you create a theme page for a post type you have the ability to set when it’s displayed as well.

You can also overwrite archive pages using the Elementor editor which you can see an example of a page I’ve done on the IGDC Podcast page. I didn’t just want to list posts like a standard archive page so I used the feature to include details to the podcast, links to download, and a list of the podcasts dynamically pulled from the post type.

One of the newest features to Elementor is Popups.

Now that you have a grasp of all of the widgets in Elementor they all can be used to create popups. Email capture, promos, cookie noticies, just about anything can be made.

After designing a popup or using one of their templates you can pick when the popup is displayed. Either using a button, or on page load, or loads of other options.

Now that you have see the majority of features in Elementor the good news about all of it is that they have hundreds of templates for everything. Headers, pages, footers, pop ups, all have pre built templates.

So if you’re not too keen on what an about page should look like you can start with one of their templates and tailor it to your liking.

One thing I appreciated is the fast performance of the Elementor plugin as well. Many page builders I have used in the past felt sluggish. I typically use WP Rocket on my sites and achieve an under 1 second load time on Elementor pages using Pingdom.

I hate to sound overly positive but I really haven’t found anything that hangs me up about loving Elementor.

[social_warfare]

How Much Does Elementor Cost?

Elementor is free on WordPress.org but if you want to get the most out of this page builder I highly recommend upgrading to Elementor Pro.

The free version of Elementor is great since it lets you get a feel for the Element editor and it includes most of the useful widgets.

Elementor Pro costs $49 a year but if you build a lot of websites like I do you can get an unlimited licence for $199 a year. Which for me is a steal since I can use it on all of my sites while at the same time learning more about Elementor.

If you’re managing many client sites using the Elementor unlimited license can quickly speed up your workflow while making your yearly costs predictable.

Get Elementor Pro

Is Elementor Pro Worth It?

As I said at the start of my review I HIGHLY recommend Elementor and Elementor Pro.

The additions that Elementor Pro brings to the Elementor builder is well worth the cost in my book. Whether you have a simple blog and want to create a stunning homepage or have a business site Elementor will meet all of your needs.

The fact that Elementor Pro also offers an unlimited use license also makes it fantastic if you build a lot of sites for clients. This way you are mastering one tool and can quickly work when building new sites.

5/5 the Best WordPress Page Builder
 5/5

Get Elementor Pro

The post Elementor Review: The Best WordPress Page Builder in 2020? appeared first on Andy Feliciotti.

Blocks can include includes embedding videos, buttons, testimonials, and more advanced elements like restaurant menus.

In the future WordPress plans to use the Gutenberg for editing widgets and menus which will put even more functionality into Gutenberg.

To get you a jumpstart on using Gutenberg I have listed some of the most useful block libraries. A lot packs include similar blocks so it’s best to install one that meets most of your uses.

Here are some awesome Gutenberg blocks to get you started:

Ultimate Addons for Gutenberg

If you’re looking for a robust set of blocks for Gutenberg Ultimate Addons offers a huge selection of useful blocks.

Blocks included

• Advanced Heading
• Content Timeline
• Icon List
• Info Box
• Multi Buttons
• Post Layouts
• Restaurant Menu
• Social Share
• Team
• Testimonials

Download Ultimate Gutenberg Blocks

Atomic Blocks

The Atomic Blocks team has been working on Atomic Blocks for a while quickly becoming one of the most popular Gutenberg plugins.

With popular blocks such as testimonials and call to action blocks it’s a must have for any blog.

Blocks Included

• Post Grid
• Container
• Testimonial
• Inline Notice
• Accordion
• Share Icons
• Call-To-Action
• Customizable Button
• Spacer & Divider
• Author Profile
• Drop Cap

Download Atomic Blocks

Ultimate Blocks

Whether you’re a blogger or a marketer Ultimate Blocks offers a large set of blocks tailored for both that will help you create better content with Gutenberg.

Blocks Included

• Review (Schema Markup Enabled)
• Table of Contents
• Tabbed Content
• Call to Action
• Content Toggle (Accordion)
• Feature Box
• Notification Box
• Number Box
• Testimonial
• Click to Tweet
• Social Share
• Countdown
• Progress Bar
• Star Rating
• Button (Improved)
• Divider

Download Ultimate Blocks

Easy Blocks

Easy Blocks offers some simple lightweight blocks that can be useful for just about any site.

Blocks Included

• Testimonial Block
• Alert Notification
• Call To Action
• Card Image and Text
• Image Content
• Heading & Sub Heading
• Blockquotes
• Testimonial Slider Block
• Click to Tweet Block

Download Easy Blocks

Advanced Gutenberg Blocks

If you need WooCommerce specific blocks Advanced Gutenberg Blocks offers some unique options such as embedding products or add to cart buttons.

Blocks Included

• Notice
• Post
• WooCommerce Product
• WooCommerce Add to cart button
• Banner Ad
• Text + rectangle Ad
• WordPress Plugin Card
• Website Card preview
• Testimonial
• Google Map
• Click to Tweet
• Table of contents
• Subhead

Download Advanced Gutenberg Blocks

Elementor Blocks for Gutenberg

If you use the Elementor page builder you most likely won’t need Gutenberg since it includes a lot of the same functionality. But if you want to use both this block lets you embed a template via a Gutenberg block.

This is perfect if you have a call to action you want to embed into multiple posts and edit in one place. As Gutenberg gets integrated into widgets and menus this could potentially be a powerful combination.

Download Elementor Blocks for Gutenberg

And of course if none of these fit your needs there are loads of other block collections.

If you’re a developer or have access to one you can learn to code your own Gutenberg blocks here.

Not a fan of Gutenberg? Enable the Classic Editor plugin to restore your site to the original WordPress editor.

The post 6 Useful Gutenberg Blocks & Plugins for New WordPress Editor appeared first on Andy Feliciotti.