The New WordPress Swag Store Opens

It took several years of requests and patience, and it’s finally here. Welcome to the new WordPress Swag Store. Now, WordPress logoed t-shirts, hoodies, iPhone skins, jackets, sports bottles, and even baby onesies and t-shirts can be yours for very modest prices, considering their speciality. Once only available at WordCamp and WordPress-related events, you can […]

Holiday Season Request: Open Your Internet Access Points

I’ve made this an annual request for the past few years: Please Open Your Internet Access Points During the Holiday Season. No matter where you live in the world, the next couple months are filled with some form of traditional, cultural, or religious holiday. Family members will be taking time off from work and their […]

Searching for Blogs and Blogging Resources on DMOZ-Google Open Directory

While I wasn’t looking, it appears DMOZ, the “largest human-edited directory on the web” is now in the hands of Google. Still, it’s a fascinating place to explore and search for all kinds of information and resources in a directory catalog form rather than just searching. Like a phone book, your search begins by categorized […]

Google Releases Tesseract OCR Open Source Software

SearchEngineWatch announces “Google Opens Tesseract OCR Software”, which is exciting news for those of us who scan or want to covert a lot of documents to text: The Google Code Blog announced that Google has “re-released” the Tesseract OCR software to the open source community. OCR, optical character recognition, is the technology for converting text […]

How to Exercise Your Brain By Opening It Up

Wiki E-How’s Exercise an Open Mind is a great how-to article for bloggers. Simply put, all one needs to grow his/her brain is to do unique, random, different, and ridiculous things as often as possible. One hour of increased brain activity via thinking a lot or experiencing new stimuli can make you smarter, more energetic, […]

Huge List of Free Open Source Programs

Wikipedia is an amazing resource and someone has compiled a huge list of free open source programs at List of Open Source Software Packages. The list is broken down by type including math, finance, word processing, assisting technology, file manager, games, media, internet, networking, education, and so many more. If a link is in red, […]

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: Current Events for May

Been watching the news lately? It’s time to blog the news and current events for May in our Blog Exercises. Have you enjoyed blogging the news? I’ve only asked for one newsworthy blog post a month. Some of you have gone a bit overboard, while others still struggle to find something from the news to […]

Blog Exercises: Writing Poetry and Recipes in Your Blog

Do you publish poetry on your site? Feature many quotes? Share recipes? Addresses? If so, you may need to learn how to publish content with single lines instead of double. In WordPress and other publishing platforms with a WYSIWYMG interface, hit the Enter (Return) key and a wide or double space will appear. Each line […]

Blog Exercises: Comments Policy

We started with the Bloggers Code of Ethics in our blog exercises on site policies, starting you off on the right foot by knowing where you will draw your lines in the sand when it comes to your rights and responsibilities as a blogger. In this Blog Exercise, we are going to tackle the next […]

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: The Search for Like Minds

I tat. My 95 year old grandmother-in-law taught me almost 20 years ago. Tatting is 17th century lace making based upon island and coastal women looking for something to do besides fixing fishing nets for the men of the village. They got creative with their netting shuttles to make fine lace doilies, scarfs, edging, table […]

Blog Exercises: Battling Self-Doubt

Self-doubt happens to everyone, even bloggers. You are blogging away, full of inspiration, motivation, and energy, then wham! Something happens in your personal or professional life or you get hit upside the head by some bloggy or social media incident and your confidence is sucked away. Self-doubt moves in, and it doesn’t move in pretty. […]

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 […]