Top Blogs in India Honors for ifacethoughts

Abhijit Nadgouda’s ifacethoughts blog is listed by Sudhanshu Rahejta at Gyaan Sutra as one of the Top Blogs in India based on Alexa ranking. Congrats! Abhijit Nadgouda began the evolution of ifacethoughts on WordPress.com before he desired more and moved his blog to his own self hosted, full version of WordPress. He is now moving […]

Echo Chamber: 10 Tips on Blogging Original Thoughts Originally

Chris Pirillo’s written a wonderful article called “10 Ways to Eliminate the Echo Chamber”, which is a great lesson in how an article title can attract attention, but the content not match the intent of the title, as I will be talking about tomorrow. The only reason I clicked the link was because I was […]

Nadgouda’s Iface Thoughts Moving to Full Version WordPress

Abhijit Nadgouda of iface thoughts has moved from WordPress.com to a full version WordPress blog and shares his experiences. The new home is still not completely set, I am working on it but the basics are setup. I will continue to work on the interiors whenever I get time in the coming weeks. Please bear […]

Putting Some Thought Into Blog Categories and Tags

There has been a lot of talk about the differences and similarities between categories and tags, and how to implement their use. I’d like to talk about the process of choosing categories for your posts. But first, let’s take a moment to examine what categories and tags are. What are Categories and Tags? In the […]

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 […]

Blog Exercises: How Long Are Your Paragraphs?

How long are your paragraphs? Have you measured them lately? One of the telling differences between traditional writing and writing for the web is the length of the paragraph. Look at the example below. Which is easier to read? On the left, the paragraphs are huge, long blocks of text. On the right, the paragraphs […]

Blog Exercises: Dissecting Post Categories

In a recent article, Noah Weiss shared his struggle to figure out categories and tags on his personal site. I know many of you following these Blog Exercises have also struggled to figure out your categories, so I thought Noah’s site would be a perfect example, He has gratefully given me permission to rip his […]

Blog Exercises: The IKEA Effect for Bloggers

The Ikea Effect was coined by researchers who found out what we all know but rarely admit, we put too much ownership into our own brainchild ideas and concepts. In other words, we tend to fall in love with our own ideas and creations. If you have ever been around kids, you’ve probably had that […]

Blog Exercises: How to Link to Comments

Do you have brilliantly intelligent and thoughtful commenters? I do. I often find something someone’s left in a post comment worth writing a blog post about and quoting. In this Blog Exercise we’ll look at how to link to comments on your site and how to properly reference them and cite the original author in […]

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 […]

Blog Exercises: Increase Your Thank You Ratio

As a teacher, trainer, social media expert, and advice giver on many blogs, I don’t want to hear your excuses in response to my advice. “Well, if I only had the money…” Really? Since WordPress, the tools I recommend, and the advice I offer is free. What does money have to do with anything I […]

The Secret Recipe of Comment Spam Comments

Mr. Louis Vuitton just sent me a message in my blog comments I’d like to share with you. I share this touching message because it is highly educational when it comes to the art of spam comments, and serves to remind us of why we love having Akismet, the best comment spam fighter, on our […]

Blog Exercises: How to Respond to a Trackback

In the first blog exercise on trackbacks I explained how trackbacks work and how to respond to trackbacks. It’s time to revisit the concept of how to respond to a trackback. In the exercise, I described the unique quality of trackbacks for tracking conversations across the web. You publish something, someone likes it and publishes […]

Blog Exercises: Sex Changes and Age Matters

I often get comments that say “Thank you, sir” or emails through my contact forms addressed to Mr. Lorelle. In France, “Lorelle” is a last name as popular as Johnson in English countries. I understand that “Lorelle” is a tough name to identify with a sex. Not the point. I live online in a world […]