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 […]

Spinning Spammers Steal Our Blog Content

Last week, an article I wrote for the Blog Herald, Blogging Outside of Your Community By Not Blogging in Your Native Tongue, caught the attention of more than just the readers. It caught the attention of the staff of the Blog Herald by attracting a very unusual trackback from a new kind of copyright violating […]

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 […]

Idiot Alert: Don’t Share Your GMail RSS Feeds

While many of us blogging bloggers have been doing battle against splogs and content thieves, Inside Google reminds us that blog feeds aren’t the only feeds out there being used and abused: Okay, this should be a no-brainer, but just because Gmail offers RSS feeds doesn’t mean you should offer them to the public. A […]

Don’t You Know What a Feed Is Yet? Get To Know Your Feeds!

Feeds, something I think are hotter than tags and other gimmicks on the web today, should be the talk of the web. They are, but not as much as you would think. In an article from E-Marketer, “RSS Advertising May Work Around Spam Issues”, they take a look at the perception and recognition of feeds: […]

What Do You Do When Someone Steals Your Content

Having been the target of copyright thieves, and working with writers, authors, and photographers on copyright protection and laws for over 25 years, I thought I’d talk a little about what to do when someone steals your content. First, you noticed that I didn’t say “if” someone steals your content. That was on purpose. With […]

Weekly Digest: Guest Bloggers Galore, Theme Spam, Blog Scraping, and Personal Blogging

It’s been a week and a half of fabulous guest bloggers bringing some color and excitement to Lorelle on WordPress. Wow! And some babble about WordPress Themes with link spam and vulnerabilities that must be addressed, and blog scrapers stealing content from WordPress.com Blogs. And one of my guest bloggers begins a series on the […]

WordPress.com Blogs Feeds Scraped

In the most recent WordPress Wednesday News on the Blog Herald, I reported on the mass copyright violations and scrapings of WordPress.com blogs, as reported by Letters Home to You in “Has Anyone Stolen Your Writing Lately?” and “Please Help Me Get Google to Pull Their Ads from a Blogging Thief”. There is also a […]

Weekly Digest: Recovering from WordCamp, Lots of Interviews, CNet Calls, Two Months of Guest Bloggers, and Too Much More

Well, after writing about how to create this Weekly Digest Post here, and announcing that the next issue would be skipped, returning after WordCamp 2007, I didn’t anticipate being so from civilization on my way up the California and Oregon coast. Without Internet or cell phone access! ARGH! So we’re back on schedule with my […]

Copyright Law Tips from Daily Blog Tips

Daily Blog Tips’ article, “Copyright Law: 12 Do’s and Don’ts”, is a great step-by-step list of the basic things you need to know about copyright law, especially when it comes to protecting and copyrighting your content, as well as using the content of others. I really liked some of the items under the “Don’t” list: […]

How to Know When to Stop Blogging

Blogging isn’t for everyone, and everyone doesn’t need to blog. There are times when you should stop blogging, and there are times to take a rest from blogging. I stumbled across an article on How to Know When Not to Volunteer and it got me thinking. After some consideration, I realized that there needs to […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Blog Exercises: Check Your Site Title Tag

Do you know what the title of your site is? Not the name of your site or the title of your post, but the HTML <title> tag for your site buried in the source code. In HTML, every website is required to have the <title> tag in the <head> of the source code HTML structure. […]