Using WordPress in Your Domain Name? Don’t!

Update: After many discussions with Matt and the WordPress Community and staff, it is official. It is a violation of trademark to use WordPress in your site’s domain name. You may use it in the title and in blog posts, however, please note that using WP or WordPress in the site title implies the site […]

Genealogy Blog: Choosing a Blog Title and Domain Name and URL

Deciding what your blog name and title should be might be easy for you. If your blog is about cats, then you can call it the “Cat Blog” or “About Cats Blog” and have the domain name/URL (address) be http://www.catblog.com or http://www.aboutcats.com. If your name is Sally Smith, you might want to call it http://www.sallysmith.com […]

Looking for a Great Domain Name?

Marcus Vorwaller’s How to Find a Great Domain Name is a great find if you are looking for a domain name and you are stumped. He lists a wide variety of resources and tools that will help you find and choose a great domain name. Resources and tools include: Dislexicon JustDropped – expired domain names […]

Domain Name Humor

Okay, I have to admit that the little kid in me snickered at this. Alright, I did more than snicker. Check out Creative Domain Names from Awis/Alexa. I’m not going to show them here, but I do expect a giggle reaction report when you check them out. Know of any other good domain names that […]

Google Page Rank Uses Domain Age to Score

As reported in my post on how Google ranks websites, Link Building Blog reports that Google does indeed pay close attention to the age of the domain. It seems Google has intensified the ranking factor of one key data point that is very tough to manipulate: the age of your domain name. I have been […]

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: Make an Elephant Out of a Fly

G.I. Gurdjieff said, “We have made an elephant out of a fly.” A friend of mine and fellow college professor, Mark Smith, is a dedicated follower of George Gurdjieff, a Russian spiritual leader. He’s been sharing some of his teachings with me. This one caught my attention and immediately had to be added to these […]

Blog Exercises: How Much Does Your Blog Cost?

How much does your blog cost? It should be a simple question. Do you have an answer? The costs associated with a blog are the costs associated with any website. There is the cost of the domain name, if you choose to have a custom name. In general, it is about USD $15 a year, […]

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 […]

Blog Exercises: Trackbacks

Trackbacks are like an invitation to a party. It is also like legitimate gossip. Trackbacks are notes telling you that someone is talking about you. Trackbacks are part of the important connections that form the true sense of the “web” on the Internet. WordPress and most modern publishing platforms generate trackbacks automatically. As common as […]

Blog Exercises: The Don’ts of Blogging

Did you know there is a Blogger’s Code of Conduct? It’s on Wikipedia. Initiated by Tim O’Reilly, it is as follows: Take responsibility not just for your own words, but for the comments you allow on your blog. Label your tolerance level for abusive comments. Consider eliminating anonymous comments. Don’t feed the trolls. Take the […]

Blog Exercises: What is the Name of Your Site?

What is the name of your site? In WordPress, every site has a title and a tagline or subtitle. What is yours? Choosing a name for your site can be a challenge and your next Blog Exercise in this year-long series of exercises to help you improve your blog. Sometimes choosing a name for your […]

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 […]

Blogrolls Gone in WordPress. How to Save Your Links.

For the past few months, rumors were flying that WordPress was going to remove the Links/Blogroll feature of WordPress. As of August 2012, it is now gone from many WordPress.com. MacManx, Happiness Engineer at WordPress.com, recently stated: The Links section was removed from the core WordPress.org software, which means that it will probably be removed […]

201 WordPress Books

As part of my project to bring WordPress into colleges nationally, I did a quick survey of how many books have been published about WordPress. I was asked by several major publishers to publish the first book in English on WordPress but had to decline due to my traveling schedule and work load, so it’s […]