Adding Technorati Tags to WordPressMU Sites

Note: This article is deprecated. It is no longer valid. You should not be linking your tags to Technorati, but to your own content. Single hosted versions of WordPress now come with built-in tagging and tag clouds. Manually creating a tag cloud is not necessary. WordPress.com users currently only host “global” tags, tags that link […]

Technorati BlogFinder – Add Your Blog

Technoratic’s new Blog Finder has just started and part of Technorati’s new expanded services. Technorati can already be used to search for posts or articles by tag (aka category) similar to keyword searches on search engines, but now they are adding a new feature to help you track the blogs that carry the information you […]

Blog Exercises: May Random Editing Day

May. It’s starting to warm up outside in the north, and growing a bit chilly down under, but it’s that time again. It’s the May Random Editing Day. In this Blog Exercise you will need to edit five random posts from among your thousands – okay, maybe dozens of published articles. What should you look […]

Blog Exercises: Prepare for Summer

It’s Editorial Calender check-in and check up time. May is the shift from spring to summer. From blossoming flowers to green leafed trees casting shade, the weather is changing, bringing warmer days to the northern hemisphere and colder temperatures down under. For those of us living in the Pacific Northwestern United States, we are experiencing […]

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 […]

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: 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 for April

April seemed to fly by in this Blog Exercises series. Have you been able to keep up now that we are done with month four of improving your blog? A lot of the blog exercises this month deal with interactivity and links, tips for building a community with your site. One of my favorite exercises […]

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 […]

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 Are You Talking About Revisited

In “Blog Exercises: What Are You Talking About?” your assignment was to blog about what you are talking about on your site, to clearly define it for yourself and your readers. It’s now time to check in with them to see if you are being heard. Using Polldaddy, Google Drive/Docs (create form), or another poll […]

Blog Exercises: Site Policies and Bloggers Code of Ethics

It’s time to start working on all of your site policies, one by one. So far, we’ve touched on some of these in Blog Exercises: The Don’ts of Blogging, Blog Exercise: Taking a Risk With What You Blog About, Blog Exercises: Comments and The Blog Bullies, and Blog Exercises: Quoting and Blockquotes. The basic policies […]