Will Stopping Overseas Online Gambling Payments Impact Bloggers?

There is a lot of news out today about the new US legislation passed to help end Internet Gambling within the US border. According to stock market reports, the international gaming companies are losing money as their share prices drop after the announcement that the US House of Representatives and Senate approved a bill this […]

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 […]

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: Current Events for February

Every month in this series of Blog Exercises I will ask you to check the news and report on something in the news that relates to you and/or your site’s purpose. It may directly relate or indirectly. The first Current Events exercise was in January. It’s another month and time to blog the news and […]

Maria Langer: Celebrating Eight Years Blogging

We make jokes about Renaissance men, but I’d like to introduce you to a Renaissance woman in the truest sense of the reference. Maria Langer is a lot of things, in addition to a dear friend. Even before we were on a first name basis, she was a mentor and inspiration to me. In honor […]

Security and Protection: Understand the Social in a Crime Network and How to Protect Yourself

While the following is a bit off-topic, my head is spinning with all the layers and networks I’ve uncovered within this recent experience. A friend of mine called this a combination assembly line meets Wikipedia of crime social networks. It begins with my car being broken into and my purse stolen a few months ago, […]

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” […]

Dreams Can Come True: Meeting Alan Dean Foster

I’m in Arizona after a very exciting and busy series of conferences, including the very successful WordCamp Netherlands, WordCamp Phoenix, and PodCamp Arizona, visiting family living near one of my favorite authors in the world, Alan Dean Foster. During WordCamp Phoenix and PodCampAZ, I shared with my audience that I was too excited to just […]

How to Report Abuse to WordPress.com

By Jonathan Bailey of Plagiarism Today NOTE:: The following article is a guide on how to report copyright issues, complaints, spam blogs, and other abuse issues to WordPress.com. Issues regarding sites using the self hosted version of WordPress require reporting directly to the site owner as they have nothing to do with WordPress nor WordPress.com. […]

A Blogger’s Life: Why Blog and When Do You Stop Blogging?

Dr. Johnson’s Cat asks “So: Why Blog?”, a question that plagues many bloggers, wanna be bloggers, and wish-they-weren’t bloggers. Why do we keep on blogging when the fun drains away. And what keeps bringing us back. Googling the phrase “stop blogging” gets 171,000 hits: Ten Reasons Why I Should Stop Blogging; Should I Stop Blogging? […]

Want to Help Google Clean Up Splogs?

In response to Matt Cutts’ request on how Google should work on web spam, a friend of mine gives him a very good summary of how Google can put an end to one the biggest blights on the web: splogs. In A big free clue for Google, he points out: Like many bloggers I can […]

Protecting Your Content on WordPress.com

By Jonathan Bailey of Plagiarism Today Users of the self-hosted version of WordPress have always had a lot of tools for protecting their site and their feeds. They have always had a variety of plugins for protecting content, including anti-scraping, content theft detection and much more. Even the ability to edit themes and the core […]

Why is Your Blog Unsuccessful?

Vandelay Design offers “Common Reasons a Website is Unsuccessful”, ten basic bits of advice for websites and blogs to determine their success or failure. The list includes: Lack of a Purpose Lack of Focus on the User Little or No Significant Content Poor Marketing Strategy Bad Choice of Niche or Industry Infrequent Updates Lack of […]

Weekly Digest: Catching Up, Speaking San Francisco, Future Post Mixup, Talking to Blogger Talks, and More

Yikes, it’s been a rough few weeks. Along with some nasty business stuff, which is actually normal in my line of work, I was supposed to be on my first real, non-working vacation in 14 years, which turned into a workation. What should have been normal was much less fun than usual as my husband […]