WordCamp 2007

I barely know where to begin describing the incredible experience that was WordCamp 2007 this past weekend in San Francisco. I’m sure that everyone has been following the live blogging from the conference and the information and trackbacks on the WordCamp 2007 official site and the unofficial WordCamp Report, so you probably know more about […]

Learning Lessons from The Planet Blog

I spotted a press release titled “The Planet Spins into the Blogosphere” and had to check it out. It is an announcement that The Planet web hosting service, claiming to host “more than 22,000 small- and medium-size businesses and 2.8 million Web sites worldwide”, has started its first corporate blog on a free WordPress.com blog […]

Update on My Blogging Tips Book: What Bloggers Won’t Tell You About Blogging

My new book, Blogging Tips, What Blogger’s Won’t Tell You About Blogging, is getting great coverage and is flying out the door faster than we can keep up with the orders. This is a limited printing and with the reduced introductory price, they are selling fast. Get your order in now before we run out […]

Tips From Top Web Designers

Smashing Magazines’ 35 Designers x 5 Questions takes an amazing behind-the-scenes look at answering the most common issues and decisions facing web designers. The five questions were: 1 aspect of design you give the highest priority to. 1 most useful CSS-technique you use very often. 1 font you use in your projects very often. 1 […]

I’m Winning the Battle Against Comment Spam

I’m winning the battle against comment spam. Honestly. Living in the Middle East, I learned to live with the up close and personal issue of life with terrorists and suicide bombers. Among the many lessons I learned was the reality of the phrase “You can’t let terrorists win.” While the United States is still learning […]

One Year Anniversary Review: Reviews of the Reviews

Wow. One solid month of reviews of articles over the past year. What an amazing retrospective, huh? An anniversary or birthday can be a time of celebration as well as reflection, and this past month writing about the past year’s worth of writing has been an amazing step back through time, thoughts, choices, decisions, and […]

One Year Anniversary Review: Web Development

Over the past year, I’ve written a lot about web development, also known as website development and blog development. Web Development is the name for the techniques involved in developing your website or blog. What it really is, well, that’s a lot more confusing. People make a lot of assumptions, so let’s look at what […]

One Year Anniversary Review: Searching and Search Engines

Over the past year, I’ve written a lot about search engines. In many ways, they are the holy grail, the impossible dream, and the unsolved mystery. We are totally dependent upon them. In order to find anything on the web, we must go through a portal of a search engine. It is the epitome of […]

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 […]

One Year Anniversary Review: Keywords

Keywords are words used in the post content area of your blog that help searchers find you on search engines. They are the words that you use repeatedly throughout your post and blog to help search engines categorize you, and people searching with search engines find the right combinations of words to find your blog. […]

One Year Anniversary Review: Tags, Tagging, and Categories

This past year was proclaimed by many as the Year of the Tag as Technorati’s tag services and features roared onto our blogs. By December of 2005, there was barely a blog without some form of tags on display. Panic turned from not getting into Google fast enough to not showing up fast enough on […]

One Year Anniversary Review: WordPress For Beginners

One of the first things I did as a documentation volunteer for WordPress was to help create the popular WordPress Lessons on the WordPress Codex. I believe it is critically important that users get hands-on, step-by-step basic instructions for using the most elementary aspects of WordPress. After all, WordPress is easy-to-use and is proud of […]

Need WordPress.com Help – Ask Nicely

Timethief, an active volunteer on the WordPress.com forums offers this well-written guide for requesting help on the WordPress.com Support Forum: As this is a support forum it doesn’t make much sense to post a support request with a title like (1) can anyone help; (2) help me; (3) or any other titles on the same […]

How NOT to Comment on Comments

I’ve had a few comments on comments, and even discussed mean spirited comments, and now it’s time for a basic tutorial in how NOT to comment on comments. I’m not talking about comment spam comments. I talking about a tutorial on the technique of commenting in the comments on blogs and how to get a […]

Genealogy Blog: The Blog Budget – How Much Does a Blog Cost?

I’ve talked about making a plan and determining which features I will need for my family history blog. Are you overwhelmed yet? In order to determine what you want in your blog, you should start with a plan and that involves asking the easy and hard questions to determine what you want, as well as […]