Tips Tuesday – Gravatar Bluesky Integration, New E-commerce Clients

Tips this week include:

• 5 new e-commerce clients kicking off their 2025 plans early
• Time to update to WP 6.7.1
• Gravatar offers free domains and Bluesky integration
• When is a site live – sooner than you think!

BlogAid Happenings

It’s been a slow news week, thankfully. So, that means a shorter Tips Tuesday.

And I’m thankful for the slow news week as I’ve been up to my eyeballs in client work.

Besides the regularly scheduled audit checkups, I’ve had 5 new unexpected project requests from folks who want to hit the ground running in 2025.

I’m THRILLED to hear it!!!!!

And most all of them are e-commerce or membership/course related too.

Thank You!!!!!

I want to send a huge shout out to everyone who checked out my Deeper Seeker YouTube channel last week.

And I want to say a special thank you to those who played several videos all the way through and especially to those who subscribed.

I’ve got all kinds of new videos coming in 2025, with a special focus on creating unique soundscapes.

WordPress Tips

Update to WP 6.7.1

Last week I updated all of my sites, and so did my webmasters. We have no issues to report.

So, I believe it is safe for most of us to update to WordPress 6.7.1 now.

That last minor release seems to have fixed most of the big bugs.

I do expect another 6.7.2 release in the coming weeks to get more bugs, but they affected fewer folks.

Gravatar Offers Free Domains and Bluesky Integration

You may want to jump on this offer from Gravatar while it lasts – but read on to ensure you know what you’re getting into.

Millions of folks are abandoning X for Bluesky.

It doesn’t really matter if you like either of them or not, or if your target audience is there or not, it would be best for you to grab your handle on Bluesky sooner rather than later.

Just know that Bluesky uses domains, not handles, for custom names and verification.

So, you could turn a generic handle like username.bsky.social into sitename.info.

That’s why Gravatar is making this offer – to grab up a variation of your domain using one of the lower level extensions, like .bio or .info or such.

And they natively integrate it with Bluesky for you.

The domain is free for the first year.

I’m not a big fan of buying domains through Automattic – which is the parent company Gravatar, which is owned by Matt Mullenweg, not the WP Foundation.

But, you can go ahead and register it with Gravatar now and then before your year is up, transfer it to NameCheap or such – at least I think you will be able to do this, as I have not seen fine print to indicate otherwise.

Here’s the Guide from Gravatar on how to do it all, including Bluesky verification.

Note that you already need to have a Bluesky account first.

When is a Site Live?

I’ve answered this question a few 100 times over the years, but it bears repeating.

There seems to be some confusion over the difference between a new site being live or being launched.

Live Site

A domain is not considered live if it is parked, meaning that you own the domain but it doesn’t point to any hosting package anywhere. If you visit that domain, it will likely bring up the registrar’s splash screen saying that this domain is taken and sign up with them to get your next domain or such.

A site is live the minute the domain points to hosting, even if that is a redirect.

And bots start hitting it within days of finding that live domain. Those are both good and bad bots.

This is specifically why most designers will create a new site for their clients using their own dev environment, and usually that is either hidden or blocked from bots entirely, or it doesn’t really matter if a bot hits it, as it will not be under the client’s domain, and it’s in maintenance mode, so there’s nothing to crawl.

So, if you have a new site on your own hosting, even if it is a sub-domain, and you have it in maintenance mode, that site is live and is subject to both bot crawls and bot attacks.

This is why I insist on setting up new sites for my clients, as the security needs to be done immediately to hide the host’s IP from bots.

Launched Site

When you have everything done on the site and you take it out of maintenance mode, that is considered launched.

And that’s the time to remove the restriction on bots hitting the site (there is a setting in WordPress for that), and time to put the site on Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster tools and submit your XML sitemap to both.

Doing those things will ping all search bots to come re-crawl your site and pick up your actual content.

But it can take months for that to finish and for your content to start getting indexed in search results.

This is why it is far better to have a designer set it up on a dev site if it will be a while before you will launch. Leaving live and in maintenance mode for a long time trains the search bots to totally ignore it.