WordPress 3.1: Features, Tutorials, and Pure Joy

WordPress 3.1 is now out. YEAH!!! It’s named after one of our personal favorite jazz musicians, Django Reinhardt. My sneak preview of WordPress 3.1, one of the most eagerly and long awaited versions, barely did the new features justice. The WordCast team and I gathered up all of our research and dug deep into Trac […]

Responding to Insult Against WordPress Plugin Authors

After all these years on the web, you would think I wouldn’t get fired up over pure stupidity and selfish meanness. You’d think I’d have thicker callouses. When it comes to trashing the WordPress Community – ooooh, my shackles rise. Darnell Clayton wrote “Why WordPress Bloggers Need To Choose Premium Plugins Over Free” on BloggingPro […]

WordPress 3.1 Beta Unleashed on WordPress.com

WordPress.com has just released WordPress 3.1 Beta on more than 15 million blogs across the network. WordPress has used WordPress.com as their proving ground since the beginning, relying upon the feedback of the many bloggers from around the world, all using different types of computer hardware, browser types, operating systems, and blog setups to test […]

Mind Blowing WordPress Plugins

In Dallas, August 29, 2010, at OpenCamp I presented “Mind Blowing WordPress Plugins.” Here are the WordPress Plugins and more features during my presentation. Let me first define what my qualifications for a “mind blowing WordPress Plugin” were, as I had to sift through thousands of Plugins and then filter down to include the following […]

WordPress Plugins News: Coffee2Code Plugin Marathon, Plugin Podcast, Plugin Developer Center, Plugin Checklist

As most of you know, I’m extremely passionate about supporting and encouraging WordPress Plugin authors. I’ve written a love letter to WordPress Plugin authors, spent a month writing over 36 posts on nothing but WordPress Plugins, published extensive tips on how to install, configure, and use WordPress Plugins and another guide for finding Plugins, “Where […]

Exploring Social Media Tools Series

In October of 2008, I started a series called “Exploring Social Media” on the Blog Herald. The challenge was to dig into the myriad choices and options to dance the social dance online, to network, share, inform, and educate with the various tools available. I began by asking people to define social media, since it […]

The Ghosts of WordPress Past

Ozh of PlanetOzh has released “A Journey Through Five Years of WordPress Interface.” It’s an amazing step back in time for WordPress fans exploring the changes in the WordPress Administration Panels. For a long time, the Administration Panels, the interface or UI often misnamed the “dashboard”, stayed basically the same. Slowly, the WYSIWYG editor was […]

The Art of the Fan-Based Blog: Continuing to Fight the Good Fight

By DB Ferguson of the No Fact Zone Now, if you’ve been following my series on The Art of the Fan-Based Blog, you’ve got a blog, you’ve got readers, you’ve got content. Have I forgotten anything? Oh, yeah. Burnout and how to keep fighting the good fight for your celebrity, readers, and fellow fans. Here […]

WordPress 2.8 Survey: What Do You Want in the Next Version of WordPress?

Have you given much thought to WordPress 2.8? Well, the WordPress development team is and they need your help and input. With WordPress 2.7 released, work is ongoing for WordPress 2.8 and WordPress wants your feedback. In “Prioritizing Features for WordPress 2.8,” Jane Wells invites people to take a poll on what are the top […]

The Art of the Fan-Based Blog: Community Wins

By DB Ferguson of the No Fact Zone I can promise you, your site won’t be much fun at all unless you start building a community of loyal readers to interact through comments and help enrich the blogging experience for all of your readers, not just yourself. A huge part of the fandom site experience […]

The Art of the Fan-Based Blog: Content, Content, Content Part II

By DB Ferguson of the No Fact Zone So you’ve finding all kinds of content for your fandom based upon our previous discussions. You’ve found a trough of information to flow into your blog. Now what? How do you get all that information into your blog, and should you? Do you need to publish everything? […]

Blog Struggles: Trackbacks Count

At a blog conference recently, I overheard the following exchange over a laptop as part of a blog review exercise: “For your blog to be successful, you need more comments on your blog posts.” “I have plenty of comments on my blog. See, this one has 14 comments.” “That post has only one comment. The […]

WordPress 2.7 Upgrade Tips

WordPress 2.7 has been released, and in addition to the information I provided in “WordPress 2.7 Available Now,” here are some tips to help you make the transition to WordPress 2.7. Reports on the WordPress Support Forum and around the web are that WordPress 2.7 is the easiest upgrade ever. There are only a few […]

Blog Struggles: I Just Need Two Seconds of Your Time

How often have you been asked for “two seconds of your time” in purpose, email, or chat? I’m asked every day for those precious two seconds, and every day I struggle to say no. My day begins at five in the morning. I used to make time for exercise but more and more my work […]

WordPress 2.7 News

There is a lot of news flying around about the upcoming HOT release of WordPress 2.7, the version featuring the new Administration Panel interface, part of a long project to make WordPress more usable and accessible. Originally scheduled for November 10, 2008, they’ve pushed back the release by at least two weeks in order to […]