Taiwan Earthquake Disrupts Internet Access

What would you do if a major disaster took out your Internet? A 6.7 magnitude earthquake struck near Taiwan a few days ago. According to Taiwan’s Central Weather Bureau measured it at 6.7 and was followed by an aftershock registering 7.0. While two people were killed, the bigger news has been the disruption of Internet […]

Integrating Google Gadgets Into WordPress Themes

As if you weren’t satisfied with all the WordPress Widgets, you can also incorporate a wide variety of Google Gadgets into your full version WordPress Theme. Google Gadgets are, well, anything. They are services, searches, feeds, games, toys, information, and anything. Basically, they are tools, utilities, and games you can add to your web pages […]

The Bitacle Battle of Blogs

UPDATE: Many years have passed since this article was published. Recently, Jonathan Bailey of Plagiarism Today took a look back at the lessons learned from Bitacle and the battle so many bloggers fought against them. Google now works to prevent and stop such abuse. While the Bitacle model still works, because so many spoke out […]

How To Spot a Splog

After publishing “One Year Anniversary Review: Splogs – The Dark Side of Blogging”, I had several people ask me how to know if a blog is a splog or spam blog. Here are some simple clues to look for. In a Splog, Nothing Adds Up Nor Matches Splogs, spamming blogs, are often little more than […]

Writing Effective, Attention-Getting Headlines and Titles on Your Blog

If it bleeds, it leads. Punchy. Catchy. Attention-getting. Insightful. Instructive. Incentive. Luring. Fishing. Bait. Hook. These are all terms used to describe an effectively written title or headline for an article. The words chosen must provide a powerful incentive to make the reader want to read. To make them want to buy the magazine, newspaper, […]

The Question: What Do You Love and Hate About a Website?

BCC News’ Newsnight is having second thoughts on their web design recently and asked a very important question: Web designers should ALWAYS remember: just because it can be done, doesn’t mean it should be done.” Stung by that challenge we’ve resolved to enter a period of rationalization. Let us know what you love and hate, […]

One Year Anniversary Review: Blogging and Blogging Tips

This is a blog about blogging, as well as WordPress, and over the past year I’ve written plenty about blogging. When I began this blog, Lorelle on WordPress, was meant to be about WordPress. All about WordPress. I quickly found out that you cannot use WordPress without blogging, so the two fit together. I’ve written […]

One Year Anniversary Review: Blog Housekeeping and Maintenance

Remember the old term “home pages” to represent a website? It was used in the earliest days of website design and development and had two meanings. The first was the term “home page” which meant the front or first page of a website. The second reference was to “home pages”, your personal website. In a […]

WordPress.com Custom CSS – All The Styles for the Sandbox Theme

While not complete, here is my first attempt to put all the styles together from within the new WordPress.com Sandbox Theme stylesheet. You can copy the styles from this CSS file. This style sheet does not include the core layout architecture. You choose that from the “skins” after selecting the Sandbox Theme, setting the columns […]

Technorati Relaunched With New Look

Technorati has a new look and feel. It’s Technorati’s birthday present to itself. Happy 3rd Birthday, Technorati. You can find out more details on the new look and feel from the Technorati Blog. A few highlights of the changes are: * We’ve made some major speed and accuracy improvements in core search. * Link counting […]

How to Handle Tough Questions (and Comments) from an Audience

Advertising on Blogs – Affiliate Programs

Use-it’s look at affiliate programs is worth a read if you are considering adding advertising and income sources to your blog. An affiliate program is a way for sites to pay for incoming traffic: when site A links to site B, there is some mechanism for site B to pay a referral fee to site […]

The Top 10 Clues That You Are an Amateur Blogger

This post could be also called “The Top 10 Most Common Writing Errors” or “The Top 10 Mistakes Writers Make”, but I thought “The Top 10 Clues That You Are an Amateur Blogger” was more appropriate. Because, if you want to have your blogging taken seriously, then you need to sit up and pay attention […]

Blogging Tips – Hundreds of Resources for Finding Content for Your Blog

Blogging is great fun. It’s exciting. You start out with great ideas, full of motivation and inspiration. After a while, though, you run out of steam. The muse isn’t so amused any more and you start hunting for content, things to write about. There are two aspects of finding content for your blog. First, it […]

Research: Tips for Surfing the Net for Information on a Deadline

Surfing the Net on Deadline – Staci D. Kramer’s Tips for Reporters, Editors and News Directors is a great checklist and how-to steps for bloggers as well as reporters. Here are some highlights: * Rule #1: Troubleshoot your software when you aren’t on deadline. * Build — and maintain — a bookmark file for your […]