January 18: Join Reddit in a National Blackout Day of Protest Against SOPA

On January 18, join Reddit and the country in protesting SOPA. Reddit announced they will black out their site January 18 for 12 hours in protest of the US government’s pursuit of the horrible SOPA act: The freedom, innovation, and economic opportunity that the Internet enables is in jeopardy. Congress is considering legislation that will […]

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 […]

DuckDuckGo: The Search Engine You Need to Meet

Recently, DuckDuckGo has been turning up in my referrers list. Curious about the name, and thinking it was a spam site, DuckDuckGo needed investigation. Seems I’ve been missing out on what could be the major competition to Google as a search engine. Here is a quick summary of what I learned about DuckDuckGo. It is […]

This Site Will Blackout Against SOPA and PIPA

I’m joining Wikipedia, Reddit, and millions of other concerned web users across the United States to blackout my site on January 18, 2012. WordPress is even against this. Traction is happening. SOPA appears to be dead in congress but PIPA is still alive and just as bad. When you land on Lorelle on WordPress on […]

Disclosure Now Required on Blogs, Twitter, and Other Social Media Sites

With the news that the UK is cracking down on those blogging and tweeting for pay without disclosure, and California law making online impersonation potentially illegal, social media and blogging are taking a hit. In summary, if you pretend to be someone you aren’t, famous or not, or blog about a product or service for […]

Blog Bashing: Beware Complacency

In “5 Ways to Rid Complacency From Your Blog” on Daily Blog Tips, Bob Bessette writes about how to mix things up in the new year on your blog: If you’ve owned a blog for a while there’s a good chance that complacency may have already set in. Dictionary.com defines complacency as “a feeling of […]

WordPress 3.1 Beta Unleashed on WordPress.com

WordPress.com has just released WordPress 3.1 Beta on more than 15 million blogs across the network. WordPress has used WordPress.com as their proving ground since the beginning, relying upon the feedback of the many bloggers from around the world, all using different types of computer hardware, browser types, operating systems, and blog setups to test […]

Testing Readers: Survey, Polling, Rating, Testing, and Reviewing WordPress Plugins

Polls, surveys, ratings, tests, exams, and reviews expand the native interactive nature of blogs with collaboration between the reader and the blogger. They help the blogger to ask specific questions and get a measurable response. Ratings WordPress Plugins come in two formats. One which allows the reader to rate a post or its content and […]

Social Bookmarking Submit Links on WordPress Blogs

Want more attention for your blog? Then ask your visitors to help you. As part of the ongoing series on WordPress.com Blog Bling, let’s add some social bookmarking links to your WordPress blogs. Submission Links or Social Bookmarking Links are a series of links found on many blogs today which “help” the visitor add the […]

Monitoring Your Blog’s Topics and Industry

Cameron Olthuis of Pronet Advertising has a list of 10 things you should be monitoring, a great step-by-step list of the things within your industry you should be monitoring and instructions on how to monitor them. The list is excellent. In brief: Company Name Company URL/Domain Public facing figures (key people) Product names Product URL/Domains […]

One Year Anniversary Review: Social Bookmarking Boom

If you don’t know what social bookmarking or “Web 2.0″ is, you’ve missed the current web fad boat. In a nutshell, social bookmarking is the process of letting the online social network of users judge online content as worthy. If you are prowling the web and find an interesting article or post, you can “submit” […]

When the Blog Breaks: Fixing Your Broken Blog

In Part One of this two part article series, we explored how to determine when your blog or website is down and explored various monitoring and notification methods. In this part, we will look at what may break a blog, and offer suggestions on troubleshooting and fixing your broken blog. What Can Bring Your Website […]

When The Blog Breaks: Site Monitoring

A few months ago, it seemed like every two or three hours, my main site, Taking Your Camera on the Road, would go down. Eventually, with the help of my fabulous WordPress friends, we discovered that my host server changed their database monitoring security method to prevent abuse by putting a limit on the number […]

Editing the Edit This WordPress Template Tag

For those of you just reading WordPress blogs, there is a part of the blog, just under the title, that you can’t see. If you are the administrator, owner, or chef-cook-and-bottle-washer of a WordPress blog, and logged in, you see it. It’s called the Edit Post Link Template Tag. Once you are logged in, the […]

Power Blogging: Web Browser Blogging Tips

WordPress and many other blogging tools require you to interface with your blog through your web browser, be it Firefox, Microsoft Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari, or whatever you are using. While I’ve used any browser I could find on any public and private computer to access my blogs, and I declare Firefox to be the […]