Blog Challenge: Who Is Linking To You?

This week’s blogging challenge is who is linking to you? We don’t need to know the specifics, but I’d like to know how many sites are linking to your blog and if you found some surprises in the process of discovering who is linking to you. To find out who is linking to your blog, […]

Link Referrals – Linking to Site Search Tags

I received notice of an interesting referrer link the other day. Conversations’ Get Started Blogging workshop post, “Whistle Stops”, included a link to Lorelle on WordPress – wordpressdotcom tagged posts. Interesting. Instead of linking to a single post, or even a category, or just to my site in general, he linked to a site search […]

Website Hammered by Hotlinking, Spammers, and Free Loaders?

My main site recently was hammered by Hotlinking, Spammers, and Free Loaders. This can happen to any website, so we all need to learn how to keep an eye on potential abuse of our sites. Hotlinking Images Hotlinking is the technique of linking to images on your site for use offsite. That’s the simple description. […]

Blog Exercises: Spell Checkup on Categories and Tags

Oh no! I was writing out a tag in WordPress and the auto-suggest feature popped up with a misspelled tag name! Yikes! Today’s blog exercise is to clean up your tag and category names to ensure you’ve not made the same mistakes. To review your category names in WordPress, go to Posts > Categories and […]

Blog Exercises: Blog Work Flows

In “A Sample Blogging Workflow” by my friend, Chris Brogan, he talks about the process of blogging with consistency and determination in mind. Your company has decided to launch a blog, and you’re the lucky blogger. Maybe you’ve even asked for this pleasure, suggested it to the boss yourself. Only now, you have to deliver, […]

Blog Exercises: Awesome by Association

In “Two WordPress.com Experts and One Series of Blog Work,” Kinna Reads featured myself and my friend, timethief of one cool site (lowercase intentional). I’m honored and grateful, but more importantly, I’m awesome by association. My friend, timethief, started blogging in 2005. When she switched to WordPress.com, her life changed as did mine and hundreds […]

Blog Exercises: Building Blogger Relationships

During many of these Blog Exercises I’ve talked about the power of linking across the web, especially with bloggers. This blog exercise is dedicated to helping you make the connection you want and need come true. Do you have a blogging mentor, a blogger you wish to get to know better, feel a connection with, […]

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: How to Link to Comments

Do you have brilliantly intelligent and thoughtful commenters? I do. I often find something someone’s left in a post comment worth writing a blog post about and quoting. In this Blog Exercise we’ll look at how to link to comments on your site and how to properly reference them and cite the original author in […]

Blog Exercises: Footnotes

In “Creating Footnotes in WordPress,” the tutorial explains how to use footnotes in WordPress, and applies to other blog publishing platforms. Links are the footnotes of today, linking to citations, references, and resources on the web. Yet, there are still times when footnotes are necessary, especially when the citation isn’t online or if your topic […]

Blog Exercises: How to Respond to a Trackback

In the first blog exercise on trackbacks I explained how trackbacks work and how to respond to trackbacks. It’s time to revisit the concept of how to respond to a trackback. In the exercise, I described the unique quality of trackbacks for tracking conversations across the web. You publish something, someone likes it and publishes […]

Blog Exercises: When Will You Not Link?

There are few people I hate in this world. I think I can count them on one hand, mostly on two fingers. We all have them, people who did us wrong and taught us to disrespect, dread, dislike, and even hate them. As tolerant as we wish we all were, that’s just the way of […]

Blog Exercises: How Many Words in a Link?

How many words should you put into a link? Is there a rule? There isn’t a rule but there are good standards and practices. These state that two words should be the minimum, and only enough words to compel someone to click through to the linked source. The words must also imply the link’s destination […]

Fight Against Trackback Death

I’ve heard the many threats of trackbacks and pingbacks dying over the years, going the way of the virtual dinosaur, but I’m terrified to hear from Andraz Tori that Typepad is killing pingback functionality and stating that WordPress might be considering it, removing the joy of getting a notification that someone online is talking about […]

WordPress Anniversary: WordPress and Evil

As I look back on the ten years of WordPress, there is a dark side to blogging. While many blamed WordPress for the evil, like guns, WordPress doesn’t cause evil, people cause evil. In fact, WordPress, Automattic, and the WordPress Community has fought longer and harder against the evil doers in the world than most […]