Blog Exercises: Post-Op Care Content

I recently had some minor surgery and received an extensive list of post-operative care instructions. I was amazed at the in depth detail they went into, so I asked about it. The practitioner told me that they spent a year collecting all the questions people had about each surgery and treatment and created a paper […]

WordPress Security Prevention, Reactions, and Scares

Matt Mullenweg spoke out recently on the recent bogus “SecurityFocus SQL Injection” fear spreading across the web. There is a huge perception today that WordPress is a security risk. This is not true. As Matt discussed, fears of SQL server vulnerabilities and other security issues have gotten out of control, for WordPress as well as […]

Are you a Blog Curator or Caregiver?

In Blogging is About Caring Not Curating, Anne Helmond makes a very good point about how a blog is different from a directory, catalog, and many other “categories” a blog can be dumped into, summarizing it with: A blog is more than a collection of blog posts on a certain topic. A blog is never […]

Raj Dash – Rethinking Blogging as an Income Producing Career

Raj Dash on Performancing has done it again with “Rethinking Blogging as a Career”, a discussion with outstanding graphic visuals that helps you understand the sources of income a blog can produce, directly and indirectly, and explores many myths around blog monetization. What if we’re all looking at this blogging thing wrong? Maybe we should […]

Do You Care Enough To Keep Your Blog Comment Spam Free?

I was researching an article and ran into a blog that might have had the answer I needed, but I ran from it almost immediately. There were 74 comments on the post of which over 50 of them were comment spam. A quick scroll down the list of penis enlargers, casinos, free views of big […]

Biggest Copyright Infringement in the World But Nobody Cares Enough

In an interesting news article on Yahoo News – Experts: Suit Raises Copyright Questions, a company in Philadelphia is suing for copyright infringement the non-profit, Internet Archive, developed to “preserve Web pages that will eventually be deleted or changed” for all time. They currently have more than 55 billion pages stored there. (I’d love to […]

Who Cares About WordPress.com?

I was recently told “Oh, it’s WordPress.com only. Who cares.” Well, at last count on the WordPress.com font page, 146,000 blogs and their bloggers care. People who know better have learned that anything and everything that happens to WordPress.com blogs benefits the whole of the WordPress Community. I’ve watched as the original naysayers, people long […]

Blog Exercises: Prepare for Summer

It’s Editorial Calender check-in and check up time. May is the shift from spring to summer. From blossoming flowers to green leafed trees casting shade, the weather is changing, bringing warmer days to the northern hemisphere and colder temperatures down under. For those of us living in the Pacific Northwestern United States, we are experiencing […]

Blog Exercises: How to Write about Something Someone Else Wrote

In the early development of the web, blogs were classified as echo chambers, vessels of redundant content as every original idea was shared, reshared, quoted, and spread across the web at rapid speed. Some estimates state that less than 2% of all the content on the web is original. It’s mostly regurgitation of the same […]

WordPress Anniversary: Comment Spam Lessons

It’s hard to believe that I’ve learned much from comment spammers over the years. I’ve learned that they are among the most hated folks in the world, yet you have to respect them as well. As I look back on ten years of blogging with WordPress on this 10th Anniversary year, I realized that comment […]

Blog Exercises: Own Your Site and Protect Yourself

I hear it every day. A webmaster, developer, or designer does the site owner wrong and the site owner is victimized, helpless, and frustrated with what to do next. I’ve gotten calls in the middle of the night from people around the world trying to get help recovering their WordPress password because their “web guy” […]

Blog Exercises: Stand Up For Freedom of Speech

There are 400,000 words in the English language, and there are seven you can’t say on television. What a ratio that is! 399,993 to 7. They must really be baaaad. They must be OUTRAGEOUS to be separated from a group that large. “All of you words over here, you seven…baaaad words.” That’s what they told […]

Blog Exercises: Battling Self-Doubt

Self-doubt happens to everyone, even bloggers. You are blogging away, full of inspiration, motivation, and energy, then wham! Something happens in your personal or professional life or you get hit upside the head by some bloggy or social media incident and your confidence is sucked away. Self-doubt moves in, and it doesn’t move in pretty. […]

The Brute-Force Password Attack on WordPress Sites

My mother emailed me and asked if WordPress was under attack. With all the news of last week’s attack of the Boston Marathon, the attacks on WordPress and other PHP-based web publishing sites was low on the priority list for myself and others, but this is something to take seriously. As we get back to […]

Blog Exercises: Site Policies and Bloggers Code of Ethics

It’s time to start working on all of your site policies, one by one. So far, we’ve touched on some of these in Blog Exercises: The Don’ts of Blogging, Blog Exercise: Taking a Risk With What You Blog About, Blog Exercises: Comments and The Blog Bullies, and Blog Exercises: Quoting and Blockquotes. The basic policies […]