WP-SUPERCACHE ATE MY WEBSITE! - It's EVIL!

Whatever you do, BE CAREFUL if you are using the WP-SUPERCACHE Wordpress plugin..

I'll explain the problem: My site was having speed issues, so I investigated alternative cach plugins. I settled on Quick-Cache.
So, I disabled Supercache, which then argued, in BIG RED LETTERS at the top of the dashboard, and advised me to visit it's settings page, as caching was off. I didn't want to do that, so I hit "deactivate" again.

BANG!. The site was dead. Not only that, but it was displaying the contents of the WP-CONFIG file in plain text on the frontpage!!! Including database login details, password, etc.. DISASTER!

I was heading home on the train as all this was unfolding, so I got the support guys at Unlimited Web Hosting to shut down the site, which they did, instantly.

We then spent most of the night, on and off, trying to get the site back up.
Unlimited showed me a neat trick to disable all Wordpress plugins without access to the site.. I'll be posting about that later..

Anyway, I decided that wp-supercache had corrupted something, probably wp-functions, so I reloaded Wordpress over the existing files (after configuring wp-config).

Jackpot! The site came back up. I then re-enabled the plugins, one-by-one. (they were all disabled from earlier).

DELETED WP-Supercache, and installed and enabled Quick-Cache.
I suggest you do the same.

Eliminate 404 errors! | Conserve Link Juice

Earlier today, I saw, and was impressed by a brilliant idea:
Why not trap all 404 errors (wrong URL), and redirect to a page related to what was typed in?
So there is no "404 error" page, and search engines don't think there's a dead link.

Initially, I thought "redirect 404 errors to homepage". That'd work, but the visitor would probably not get what they were looking for. Search engines would be happy, though.

So I thought: why not redirect to a page related to what the visitor typed as the URL? You could use tags and categories to help in this.

There's a PAID-FOR plugin that does this. It costs $97 for a multi-site license! :(

So, I had a look around, and found the "Smart 404" Wordpress plugin.. Which does exactly what I described above. It misses *some* keywords, but it's pretty damn good, and it's free.

All my main sites now use it..