DuckDuckGo: The Search Engine You Need to Meet

Recently, DuckDuckGo has been turning up in my referrers list. Curious about the name, and thinking it was a spam site, DuckDuckGo needed investigation. Seems I’ve been missing out on what could be the major competition to Google as a search engine. Here is a quick summary of what I learned about DuckDuckGo. It is […]

Blogrolls Gone in WordPress. How to Save Your Links.

For the past few months, rumors were flying that WordPress was going to remove the Links/Blogroll feature of WordPress. As of August 2012, it is now gone from many WordPress.com. MacManx, Happiness Engineer at WordPress.com, recently stated: The Links section was removed from the core WordPress.org software, which means that it will probably be removed […]

What You Most Need to Know About WordPress

At the recent WordCamp Portland 2012, I was asked by several attendees to cover the basics of WordPress and we came up with What You Most Need to Know About WordPress. Here are the “notes” from that unconference presentation. The Difference Between Categories and Tags I hear this question at WordCamps, from readers, students, and […]

7 Blogging Steps Even Veteran Bloggers Forget

Originally published in Blogger and Podcaster Magazine and updated. I write for a variety of online and offline magazines. They’ve graciously permit me to republish my articles. Participating in a recent multiple guest blogger event, I edited and review posts by many top bloggers before publishing. I was rather stunned to find that even veteran […]

WordPress Theme Panel at WebVisions 2012

Webvisions is in Portland, Oregon, May 16-18, 2012, and I’ll be there presenting “Crank WordPress to 11” featuring four top WordPress designers and developers showcasing how they have pushed WordPress beyond traditional limits and taking your questions about how they do it and if WordPress can take it. Friday, May 18, at 1:30PM, I’ll be […]

What are the Essential WordPress Plugins You Can’t Live Without?

In my WordPress session at Barcamp Portland this past weekend, one of my favorite questions started the discussion: What are the most essential, must-have WordPress Plugins? My answer? None. Okay, not really. My honest answer is one: Akismet. Spam is the bane of our web experience. It comes in our emails and site comments. While […]

Defying Brute Force Attacks on WordPress Logins

Sucuri, the web security specialists, published “Brute force attacks against WordPress sites,” an in depth look at not just the importance of a strong password but the brute force nature and anatomy of login and registration access attacks. There is a technique known as brute-force attack. Like the name implies, access is gained to your […]

Happy Birthday, Matt Mullenweg

As I prepared my annual public “Happy Birthday, Matt” post for Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress (with a lot of other amazing people), I spotted the birthday greeting by Jane Wells of the WordPress Foundation. She thanks Matt for all the ways her life has been changed since meeting him, a perfect way to say […]

Creating a WordPress and Blogging New Year’s Resolutions List

Small Biz Trends released “5 Website Resolutions to Put on Your List for 2012,” by my friend, Shashi Bellamkonda, with some great ideas on what needs to be on your New Year’s resolution list for your business this year for building content, web communications, community building, and embracing and integrating technology. I’d like to add […]

18+ Things You Can Do on the WordPress Comments Panel

The WordPress development and UI team put a lot of work into WordPress comments. Did you know there are 18 features to a single WordPress comment not counting the comment content itself? Rarely do we stop to consider these powerful features in WordPress, so let’s take time now to understand all the different features and […]

Tips for Blogging September 11 Ten Years Later

Over the past few weeks I’ve listened, read, watched, and pondered a quilt of stories around the World Trade Center attacks of September 11, 2001, as the world celebrates/honors/remembers the event 10 years later. There are first hand stories of those who were in the buildings, rescuing people or escaping; stories by watchers, waiters, victims, […]

WordPress Tips: Exploring the WordPress Text Widget

One of the most unappreciated widgets among the WordPress Widget collection is the Text Widget. There are many Widgets that come with WordPress, and many more you can add with Widget WordPress Plugins. The Text Widget is not a WordPress Plugin, it comes with the basic installation of WordPress and WordPress.com. The Text Widget helps […]

Managing Multiple Authors: Managing Writers in a Multiple Author Blog

In this series on managing multiple bloggers in WordPress, I want to now focus on the content, specifically managing the editorial voice and purpose of a site with multiple bloggers. There is a huge caveat to this topic. Every blog is unique, as are all the voices within it. It is often that uniqueness that […]

WordPress 3.2 Released: Faster, Prettier, Powerful

WordPress 3.2 has been officially released, this time after a fairly short testing time period. To upgrade, use the built-in automatic upgrade. According to the announcement, this is the 15th major release of WordPress. Wow, that just doesn’t seem possible, and yet it also feels like too few. How far WordPress has come since 2003, […]

Managing Multiple Authors: Author Lists in WordPress

As I continue on with my series on managing multiple bloggers in WordPress, it’s time to explore how to feature your authors in author lists in sidebars and Pages. They’ve done such brilliant work for you, you want to show them off, right? An author list is either a single Page that lists all the […]