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: Are You Setting an Example for Others?

A milestone in personal rights seemed to have been achieved recently when US basketball player, Jason Collins declared publicly he was gay, hopefully setting an example for others that it is now “safe” to come out of the closet. The news in and around his announcement has me thinking about heroes, mentors, and risk-takers, those […]

Blog Exercises: Become Your Own Fan Blogger

Fan blogging is one of the most challenging types of blogging. Fan blogging is blogging about a celebrity, television show, movie, sports team, sports player, criminals, or other groupie subject. Today’s blog exercise examines the art of fan blogging and how to learn from fan blogging to create your own fan club around your blog. […]

Blog Exercises: Memorial Moments

Today, the United States celebrates Memorial Day (not the movie). The day is dedicated to remembering those who died while serving in the United States military services. Originally known as “Decoration Day,” the holiday started after the American Civil War (1861-1865). While the dates are debated, the first Memorial Day observance as a holiday was […]

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 […]