Monitoring Your Blog’s Topics and Industry

Cameron Olthuis of Pronet Advertising has a list of 10 things you should be monitoring, a great step-by-step list of the things within your industry you should be monitoring and instructions on how to monitor them. The list is excellent. In brief: Company Name Company URL/Domain Public facing figures (key people) Product names Product URL/Domains […]

Buzz Monitoring: Keeping Track of Your Industry

Web 2.0: Buzz-Monitoring and Tracking from Smashing Magazine mentions my list of hundreds of resources for finding blog content and adds some new updated resources and methods for tracking the buzz of your industry. You’d like to improve the link popularity of your site. Or maybe to keep track on the latest web buzz. It […]

When The Blog Breaks: Site Monitoring

A few months ago, it seemed like every two or three hours, my main site, Taking Your Camera on the Road, would go down. Eventually, with the help of my fabulous WordPress friends, we discovered that my host server changed their database monitoring security method to prevent abuse by putting a limit on the number […]

Monitoring Blog Comments

Nostrich.net highlights 3 comment trackers, online programs which track comments you’ve left on blog’s as well as the comments in general from blogs you follow. The review of comment monitoring services isn’t promising. First came coComment, which I used briefly before dumping it because it couldn’t track comment threads I wasn’t participating in. Not long […]

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: What is Your Posting Response Assessment?

A few years ago, the US Air Force created the Air Force Web Posting Response Assessment (PDF), a flow chart that takes their Public Affairs Agency and other agencies involved in web publishing and social media through a step-by-step evaluation of how to respond to comments and interactivity on social media sites. The steps flow […]

Blog Exercises: Feed Readers

Without the feed reader, my blogging life would be seriously hard work. Feed, commonly misidentified as RSS, is the proper name for the contextual version of your site as distributed through various feed types such as RSS, Atom, XML, etc. They are basically your posts stripped of your website design, read like articles in a […]

Blog Exercises: Comments and The Blog Bullies

No matter what we do or say, there will always be bullies and mean people. Some are mean intentionally, some can hurt unintentionally. And then there are those moments when we read the black letters on the white screen too much in-between the lines and come away feeling sick to your stomach. Welcome to the […]

WordPress 3.4 Green is Good to Go

WordPress 3.4 is out, named “Green” in honor of jazz guitarist and composer Grant Green. Green is a great nickname for this hot release of WordPress, bringing with it some excellent new features and improvements. As with all WordPress upgrades, it is recommended you backup your full WordPress site, database and all files, before upgrading. […]

Do Not Delete Comment Spam. Mark Spam as Spam.

Is comment spam one of the things that gets you down? Are you taking it personally? Are you confused by comment spam and how to handle it? I’ve been speaking at a variety of meetups lately on web publishing, blogging, and podcasting, and the topics often turn to managing comments and comment spam. “I’ve started […]

Managing Multiple Bloggers: Author Content Management on WordPress

In the last article I talked about what’s most important to the author and their readers, covering recognition when it comes to researching and developing a website design to accommodate multiple bloggers. In this article, I want to cover the research you need to consider when it comes to content management, which represents the “Aggregation” […]

Mind Blowing WordPress Plugins

In Dallas, August 29, 2010, at OpenCamp I presented “Mind Blowing WordPress Plugins.” Here are the WordPress Plugins and more features during my presentation. Let me first define what my qualifications for a “mind blowing WordPress Plugin” were, as I had to sift through thousands of Plugins and then filter down to include the following […]

Social Web: The Art of Voyeurism

As I’ve been developing my ongoing series on the Blog Herald called “Exploring Social Media,” I’m constantly intrigued and nauseated at the new voyeurism that is sweeping our world and our online social life. It’s freedom of speech and expression meets voyeurism, changing the word-of-mouth gossip world forever. With the recent announcement of a new […]

WordPress Themes: Start With a Solid Framework

Why I Created a WordPress Theme Framework by Justin Tadlock is a good look at the reasons why WordPress Theme designers and developers should work with a framework when designing a WordPress Theme. A strong Theme framework creates a solid canvas upon which to build your WordPress Themes. If you are or considering building WordPress […]

CSS Development Tools, Forms, Layouts, and More

If you are a WordPress Theme designer, or want to dig into your WordPress Theme’s design, check out Blog Oh Blog’s “Rapid CSS Development Tools” article with a list of CSS tools that help make coding and designing easier. The article include forms, layouts, frameworks, optimizers, and more. For more CSS and web design tools, […]