Blog Exercises: Does Your Site Look Spammy?

Does your site look spammy? How would you know whether or not your site looks spammy? It’s time for a spam check. Web design is hard, especially if you aren’t an expert. Yet, in many ways you are an expert if you are a fan of the web. You’ve seen enough sites to know the […]

Blog Exercises: Backlinks

Known as incoming links or referrer links, backlinks are links pointing from an external site to your site, directing their readers to you as a resource. Timethief of “one cool site blogging tips” describes backlinks as: Backlinks to your content are like votes for your blog. The more backlinks your blog receives the higher it […]

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 […]

Writing Better Blog Post Titles

I’ve written a lot about writing and creating powerful, effective, and attention-getting headlines and post titles on your blog, but more needs to be said on the subject, especially for blogging teachers and students. The following are not effective nor attention-getting post titles: March March 2006 March 17, 2006 Today’s News Homework Today’s Homework In […]

Preparing for the Annual “What I Want Gone from the Web” Post

It’s almost time for my annual Things I Want Gone from the Web post. I had quite a list last year, and I’ve been collecting whines, rants, and nags over the past year, but this year, I want to know what you want gone from the web. Let’s make this a community whine, rant, and […]

Ask Yourself How You Should Get Me to Read Your Blog

In How to Get Me to Read Your Blog, Thord Daniel Hedengren tells us how to convince him, and others, to read your blog. Chances are I’m not reading your blog. That’s not because I don’t like you, most likely I don’t even know you exist, and that’s your fault. Yes, you heard me. Your […]

How to Turn Off Snap Shots Link Preview on WordPress Blogs

Snap Preview Anywhere, known as Snap Shots, Snap Shots Integrator, mShots, and many other names, is considered by many as one of the most annoying “gimmicks” on the web, continues to be enabled by default on WordPress.com blogs. Many new bloggers are still “testing” this gimmick which allows a thumbnail preview or feed view of […]

Are You Trying Too Hard With Your Blog?

Bad Language’s How To Blog Like a Pro is a great list of tips to help you blog your best. * Contribute to the conversation. There are an awful lot of sheep on the Internet. With nearly 60 million blogs in existence,you really want to try and be a sheepdog. In my opinion, it’s important […]

WordPress Plugins for Blog Layout, Formating, and CSS Designs

If you want to change the look of your WordPress Theme, you can edit the Theme’s stylesheet. There are a variety of tools to help you. I’ve featured a lot of them in this Month of WordPress Plugins series, including: WordPress Plugins for Images, Photographs, and Graphics WordPress Plugins That Play With Paper and Documents […]

Are Web Page Link Previews Here to Stay?

According to Read/Write Web’s article, “Browster is Gone, But Are Web Previews Here to Stay”, the first company to produce programming to preview web pages is now gone, but there are many others battling for popularity on the web. I recently made my opinion very clear that I find Snap Preview Anywhere exceptionally annoying on […]

Things I Want Gone from the Web in 2007

Here are a few things I want gone from the web in 2007 – and forever – along with a few things I want you to do to make the web a better place in 2007. Kill All Popup Windows In every shape and form. Out-of-control Advertising Web pages, specifically blogs, are now looking more […]

WordPress.com, Please Stop Using Snap Preview

It appeared that without warning, and WordPress.com blogs have been hit with one of the new blights on the web: Snap Preview Anywhere. Planet Mike just pointed out that my blog is now littered with Snap Preview Anywhere link page previews. When you hover over any link on my site, it loads a preview of […]

Airline Weather Drama: Handling Emergency Announcements on Your Site

Our reliance and dependence upon the Internet is clearly growing, as evidenced by recent weather dramas around the world. In England, British Airways website “crashed and burned” as passengers got online to find out whether or not their flight had been canceled due to extreme fog conditions. Thousands of passengers were stranded when British Airways […]

The Future of WordPress Comments with Ajax: Comments Attached to Content

Jack Slocum has come up with “WordPress Comments System built with Yahoo! UI”, a method of creating comments which attach themselves to specific content areas within a post. I think it turned out to be a perfect example of what can be done in a very small amount of time with Yahoo UI and YAHOO.ext […]

Wrapping Text Inside PRE HTML Tags

Tyler’s “Wrapping Text Inside PRE Tags” is a life saver bit of CSS for those like me who include code markup in your blog pages. The <pre> HTML tag wraps around text and makes it look like typewriter text. It also has an annoying feature to display text EXACTLY as it is written. Lines break […]