Tips Tuesday – EZ Digital Designs, Tutorials Updates, OpenAI o1 Model

Tips this week include:

• EZ Digital Designs & Printables with Google Docs course is live!
• Discount on the AI Images for Profit course
• New Playground AI tutorials
• New Webmaster tutorials and updates
• DIY SEO tutorial update for keyword tools
• 2 Cloudflare settings to change now
• Issues with Mediavine plugins
• Why to reconsider what you’re doing with Mediavine
• Seriously consider dropping ads and make more money with products
• New Progress Planner plugin
• OpenAI launches o1 model, and why I’m concerned
• How AI is a hacker’s dream
• Why you need to be vigilant with every online thing you use now

BlogAid Happenings

This past week I’ve been a tutorial making maniac with a new course launch and updates to existing courses. 

EZ Digital Designs & Printables with Google Docs is Live

WOOT!

I’m so excited to announce that the new EZ Digital Designs course is now live on the eCreators Hub!!

You can easily create anything with Google Docs for free and sell it online.

You get a bunch of free templates PLUS tutorials that show you how they were created.

The templates include:

• Certificate
• To Do List
• Lined paper for notes or stationary
• Monthly calendar
• Kids activity page
• Financial trackers
• And more

In all there are 50+ tutorials including breakouts of each element so that you don’t have to watch a whole template tutorial just to do one thing.

The course also includes tutorials on ways to save, optimize, store, and share your files too.

Your PDFs and templates can be sold on:

• Your site as a tripwire
• Etsy
• Shopify
• Woocommerce
• Gumroad
• Social Media
• Amazon
• any online store

The EZ Digital Designs course is available at a discount for this launch window.

You save $15 and you don’t need a coupon.

So be sure to get in on this deal while it lasts!!!

Discount on the AI Images for Profit Course

One of the caveats of using Canva to make digital downloads and printables is how vague they are about the use of the assets they provide.

You can easily get around that by using your own AI images for all of your page decorations.

So, I’ve included a big discount for you to the AI Images for Profit course in your EZ Digital Designs course too!

Between those images and all of the great shapes you can create in Google Docs, you’ll never run out of ideas for creating new looks using the same template over and over.

That sounds like pure profit to me!!!

New Playground AI Tutorials

Speaking of the AI Images for Profit course, new tutorials have been added for the image generator Playground AI. 

It’s a bit of a cross between Leonardo AI and Canva. 

They have Styles to choose from, like Leonardo. 

And now they have templates to start with, like Canva.

Plus, you can create 15 images a day for free!!

Webmaster Tutorials

There are multiple new and updated tutorials in the Webmaster Training course, including:

• Cloudflare Full Tour with all of the new speed features
• WP Debug for help with finding plugin and other issues
• Change of Address Tool link has been added to several of the Rebranding tutorials

And I emailed a link to a 3rd-party course for training clients how to be safe online so that they don’t do things to compromise their computer or phone or even via email scams and thus bork their site security too.

And, I invited all webmasters to participate in a directory listing with the services they offer. It’s a great way for us to get the help we need for things that are not our speciality while supporting each other.

DIY SEO Tutorials

Google has started a new YouTube channel with tutorials on how to use Google Trends.

I’ve included a link to it in the Keyword Research workshop in the DIY SEO course too. You’ll find it listed in Part 2 with the other Keyword Research tools.

Plus, I’m looking into some AI-assisted automations for automatically bringing trends into your Google Sheets.

That should radically speed up the process of content creation ideas for us.

2 Cloudflare Settings to Change

I sent emails to all of my site audit Hub clients and to my Webmaster Training members for 2 settings at Cloudflare to change now.

One is to help close some security holes – actually, this is updating some things that folks just need to keep current.

And the other is a new beta feature to help with Google’s INP Core Web Vital. It is in beta, and I’m not liking one of the setting choices they made for it. So it needs to be turned off for now.

Plugins Tips

Issues with Mediavine Plugins

During site audits I check for PHP errors to see if any plugins or your theme have problems. 

In two recent audits I found that plugins from Mediavine had significant issues with sending a null thing to the link-template.php file.

One is Hubbub, which used to be Social Pug until Mediavine acquired it and integrated it into their Grow plugin.

So, even though Mediavine recently split it off from Grow and sold it to another company as Hubbub, it still has Mediavine code in it.

We contacted Hubbub support. They acknowledged that it is a problem and they will be fixing the issues in an upcoming release.

The other plugin having a similar issue is Create, which is made by Mediavine. 

We contacted Mediavine support and they said since there is no functional error on the front side of the site, or with using the plugin interface on the backside, that we should just ignore the errors.

Some of those errors are the same null thing being sent to the link-template file that Hubbub agreed is an issue and will be fixing. 

But other entries in the log are warnings that some of the code they are using in the Mediavine Control Panel will be deprecated in a future PHP version. In other words, now is the time to get that code squared away so that it won’t break in the future. Mediavine has chosen to ignore those warnings.

Folks, you’ve heard me say for years that I am not a fan of the way Mediavine codes things. And I got tired of banging my head against the wall with their devs over writing code that may work fine on enterprise-level sites, which is their background, but doesn’t play well with WordPress.

They finally came around to my code change suggestions on some things, but not with others.

And did you notice the stark difference in replies from Hubbub support and Mediavine support?

Reconsider What You’re Doing with Mediavine

Mediavine used to be best in class for running ads on your site. And I wish to heck they had stuck to that instead of getting into the theme and plugin business because that has just been borked from the get go.

In fact, if you’re still using Trellis, God help you with support on it. Contact me and let’s get you switched to Kadence, including removal of all the hard-coded caching and other junk they added to your site outside of the theme.

And now with the release of Journey, which is the lower-barrier-to-entry ad platform, that has been borked too. I’ve heard nothing but folks screaming about it.

If you want in on ads at that level, seriously consider She Media. I don’t know what it pays, but I do know that it runs faster and cleaner than Journey and has better support.

And now that Google admitted they have just been lying to us for the last 5 years about the cookie thing, it might be worth checking to see if you still need to be in the Grow.me program because that is all about Mediavine collecting first-party data on your site visitors. And that plugin has been borked since its release and has gotten worse for speed, especially in the last year or so.

Plus, you are literally selling your visitor emails to a 3rd party and I bet that is not front and center clear when they sign up.

In fact, it took a LOT of complaining for Mediavine to change that plugin so that the emails were both shared with you and/or integrated with your email list because folks thought they were signing up for your newsletter.

Seriously Consider Dropping Ads and Making Products Instead

I started the eCreators Hub with one goal in mind – to help you move away from ad revenue and into the much higher paying product creation revenue.

You can start by simply offering a tripwire on your current optin.

And it’s free to do with Gumroad. They just take a percentage of the sale.

Then you can move on to creating more products and put them into the Shopify Starter plan, which is only $5/mo.

That will give you a way to sell from your site, in your newsletter, and directly on social media too.

Making this move does not have to be a big money or time commitment. 

You can walk into it a bit at a time.

And once you start seeing those sales, you’ll be hooked!!!!!!

I’ve got multiple clients now who have totally dropped ads and are making more money while providing an exceptional user experience to their site visitors and repeat buyers too.

New Progress Planner Plugin

The co-founders of Yoast have a new plugin that gamifies making a plan for your content and getting it done.

While I agree with them that making a content plan and dedicatedly working that plan is the recipe for success, I totally disagree that putting it into the backend of your site is the place to do it.

Here is my one and only qualm with this plugin.

Every minute you are logged into your site, it is chewing up your limited hosting resources because it is constantly autosaving and/or refreshing what you’re working on.

During new client site audits, I can show them those numbers that FAR outweigh the hits from ALL other visitors, including bots, and that they are coming from their own IP.

Log out when you are not actively working on your site.

And don’t just shut your browser down – actually log out.

That way your browser is not keeping an open connection and there will be no access to your site when you use another tab in that browser to do things like email. This is a cybersecurity concern.

There are plenty of editorial calendars and time management apps available. Consider using those instead of doing this in your site.

AI and Cybersecurity

OpenAI Launches o1 Model

The new o1 model has been tested to be far superior at complex reasoning, math, and coding.

Independent testing is going on now to back up those claims, and I believe they will be verified.

I also believe that the new complex reasoning and math skills will open up all kinds of scientific breakthroughs, as those 2 things go hand in hand. It’s the equivalent of “show your work” and how it came to that conclusion. That’s an impressive leap for an AI model.

What I’m deeply concerned about is the enhanced coding skills.

Recently there was an interview with a Google AI exec that got leaked, and then taken down, but not before someone copied it and re-released it elsewhere.

In it, the exec said that in the near future, companies would have “non-arrogant devs” to do anything they wanted done with the code.

The “non-arrogant” part of that statement is the key.

I have long called it the “hubris of the devs” and that icky culture is the main reason I walked away from coding in the late 1990s.

Devs, in general, think that the company execs have no idea what they are talking about, end users are stupid, and that their code doesn’t stink. (Recall my remarks about the Mediavine devs).

In short, they know what’s best and will hear zero arguments about it. 

Remember when I raised an army to complain about the WP Performance team trying to make WebP the default? Over 300 highly skilled and experienced WordPress-related professionals and business owners, like hosts, raised red flags for months to get this stopped. And yet the devs pushing for it blew everyone off. It finally took Matt Mullenweg saying no to get it stopped.

Well, when companies can get rid of those dev personnel problems, they will start shipping code that makes sense to them – from a sales and marketing perspective.

And AI can deliver that.

Here’s the Rub

AI is trained on whatever code snippets it can find online.

The fact is that coding languages evolve, and the overwhelming majority of snippets online are on older versions of that code.

However, most of it will still be functional. And that’s the problem.

If the code functions, then nobody, not the AI and certainly not the prompt engineer, will know that languages evolve due to cybersecurity concerns more than for new functionality, and there could be massive security holes in the app.

These new prompt devs won’t know to continuously scan the code for those holes, or that they need to keep track of the latest attack vectors to find the vulnerabilities before they are exploited in the wild.

Watch What You Use

Y’all have been hearing me say that the cybersecurity situation is bad and has been getting worse all year.

I show it to my site audit clients with the severe increase in bot hits and what me and the host have been doing to keep them from breaking through. That has almost become a weekly conversation, and God help you if you’re on a host that is not taking this seriously and making improvements every week.

I had a site audit pre-check with a new client last week who was on an EIG owned host and still had all kinds of outdated and wrong directives on the site. I have solid liability reasons to refuse to work on sites that are on such hosts.

And now we are going to have to be super careful about which apps and extensions we use everywhere too, including on our computer and mobile devices.

There is going to be zero way to tell which ones were created entirely by AI with zero security scanning happening on a regular basis.

This is a Hacker’s Dream

Some of the AI models are open source and can be downloaded to use on your own computer. (The OpenAI models are not among them, but the powerful ones from Meta and others are.)

Running them locally removes the limitations and safeguards to not create harmful things.

We’re already seeing AI-generated porn sites popping up as well as deep fakes and disinformation running rampant.

And now we are going to see hackers be able to take any open source code and run it through the AI generator to see places where they can exploit it.

Businesses like WordFence pay white-hat hackers to manually do this process on WordPress related code so that they can collect a bounty for finding and helping fix issues before they are attacked in the wild.

In fact, some vendors, like Microsoft, offer hackathons with huge prize money to help keep their software safe.

If those hackers, both white and black hat, can use AI to sift through the code, this whole cat and mouse game is going to explode at a pace we have never seen before.

Be Vigilant

All this year I’ve been dropping suggestions in Tips Tuesday for taking your online activity more seriously.

That includes EVERYTHING you do on your email, computer, and mobile devices too, not just your site.

I have refrained from sharing how bad it is with everything I see each week simply because you are not feeling the effects of it and you’ll start to put my warnings on ignore.

I feel like Jon Snow in Game of Thrones trying to convince the folks in Westeros that the Dead Walkers are coming. It took laying one at their feet. It wasn’t real until they were actually faced with it.

The new hack attack angles will be totally stealth. You will never see most of them.

I’ve worked on sites that had been hacked for months before the site owner ever ran into a symptom of it.

The same will be true of your computer and mobile devices too.

There is a LOT of money to be made by just spying on your activity and contacts and such.

What Are You Doing to Stay Cyber Safe?

Let me know what steps you have taken to secure your online activity this year.

Also let me know what you’ve seen or heard of with your friends, family, neighbors, and online buddies.

I think the more examples of it we can share, the more real the threats will seem to us, and the more careful we know how to be.