A 9 Year Old Blogger is Censored and Changes Thousands of Children’s Lives

I think of all the good that is done in the name of WordPress and blogging, and a 9 year old humbles me. A couple weeks ago, a 9 year old food blogger attracted attention for the photographs she’d taken of her “uninspiring school cafeteria lunches” in Scotland. Local officials ordered her to stop taking […]

Building a Tourist Community Website With WordPress: Navigation and Usability Rules

By Amir Helzer of ICanLocalize In Building a Tourist Community Website With WordPress: Content Rules, I described how our new tourist community website, Baripedia, has made the decision to hire a writing professional to rewrite and edit all the content on our site to make it professional, web-friendly, SEO-friendly, and easy to read. My decisions […]

Stop Annoying Twitter Usage Trends

Wendy Piersall, CEO of SparkPlugging just published The Five Most Annoying Twitter Usage Trends, and I’m cheering. I probably added about 700+ new people to follow – and it was really interesting to go back to my email inbox and see my Twitter emails folder stuffed with Direct Messages (DMs) from these people thanking me […]

Bloggers Share Step-by-Step Tips for Increasing Blog Usability

Twenty Usability Tips for Your Blog — Condensed from Dozens of Bloggers’ Experiences is a great step-by-step guide on how to improve the usability of your blog, and improve your visitor’s experience. I’m particularly fond of the About Page point. But I also have long been a fan of “Archive by Topic Not Date” and […]

Modern Crusader: Plagiarism Today with Jonathan Bailey

When you look around the world today, especially in the blogosphere, do you find many serious crusaders? I have, and Jonathan Bailey of Plagiarism Today is one of my modern crusader heroes. When it comes to defending copyrights, few are better at digging into the truth and destroying the myths than Jonathan Bailey. While admittedly […]

One Year Anniversary Review: Accessibility and Usability

In “Usability Isn’t Expensive. It’s Practical. Usability is Useful.”, I explained the differences, and similarities between accessibility and usability: Accessibility is the development of a website or blog to be accessible to everyone. This means that the design must meet web standards and pass a range of validation tests in order to be compliant with […]

Creative Usability with WordPress.com Blogs

Taking a few notes from a recent article I wrote on Usability Isn’t Expensive. It’s Practical. Usability is Useful., Abhijit Nadgouda @ iface decided to take his WordPress.com blog, a blog with no control over the look of the WordPress Theme or any core programming files, WordPress Plugins, or templates, and put into practice what […]

Website Accessibility is Now Getting Serious in the USA

The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect. Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the World Wide Web As a long time advocate of website accessibility and meeting web standards for accessibility, I was amused by the San Fransisco Chronicle News story about […]

Usability Isn’t Expensive. It’s Practical. Usability is Useful.

456 Berea Street tackles “Usability Testing Without a Budget” is a prime example and explanation defending usability. It doesn’t have to be expensive. In fact, it’s practical. It’s the difference between a successful, and potentially money making website, and a dud. The truth is, Usability is useful. And worth it. Even larger projects can often […]

Blog Exercises: May Random Editing Day

May. It’s starting to warm up outside in the north, and growing a bit chilly down under, but it’s that time again. It’s the May Random Editing Day. In this Blog Exercise you will need to edit five random posts from among your thousands – okay, maybe dozens of published articles. What should you look […]

Blog Exercises: How Long Are Your Paragraphs?

How long are your paragraphs? Have you measured them lately? One of the telling differences between traditional writing and writing for the web is the length of the paragraph. Look at the example below. Which is easier to read? On the left, the paragraphs are huge, long blocks of text. On the right, the paragraphs […]

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: The Search for Like Minds

I tat. My 95 year old grandmother-in-law taught me almost 20 years ago. Tatting is 17th century lace making based upon island and coastal women looking for something to do besides fixing fishing nets for the men of the village. They got creative with their netting shuttles to make fine lace doilies, scarfs, edging, table […]

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: The Royal We

People who refer to themselves as “yours truly.” What kind of grandiose crap is this? Some even speak of themselves in the third person. Athletes and entertainers are big on this demented shit: “I’m going to do what’s right for Leon Spinks!” I think people like this are mentally ill. And you can include those […]