Bell South Angered at New Orleans Free WIFI System – May Penalize The City

According to a story in the Washington Post, Angry BellSouth Withdrew Donation, New Orleans Says, an agreement to donate a BellSouth building to the city, for the police force, courts, and other city offices, has been nixed due to the announcement that the city of New Orleans will launch a free wireless network to encourage […]

To Blog Free or Paid – It Might Matter

WordPress.com is one of the many free blogs available on the web today. But should you go free or paid when it comes time to create your blog or website? I’ll talk about this more, but to introduce you to the concept and the choices you need to consider when choosing paid or free blogs, […]

Free Text Only Editors for Templates, PHP, HTML, CSS, and More

Over and over again on the WordPress Support Forum and WordPress Codex, I and other volunteers keep saying “Use a TEXT ONLY editor to edit your files.” A text editor is one that only works with raw text. But what does that really mean? When you are working with Word, WordPerfect, or any word processing […]

Huge List of Free Open Source Programs

Wikipedia is an amazing resource and someone has compiled a huge list of free open source programs at List of Open Source Software Packages. The list is broken down by type including math, finance, word processing, assisting technology, file manager, games, media, internet, networking, education, and so many more. If a link is in red, […]

Free Alternatives to Macromedia and Adobe Software

I’ll be listing some great free tools soon for web design and development, but I thought I’d tease you now with some other free software. Vinterstille – Free Alternatives to Macromedia and Adobe Software lists Bluefish Open Office as a replacement for Macromedia, among others. To replace Adobe software, consider Gimp. Other great free software […]

Taking the Steps – Becoming a Freelance Website Developer

Garret Dimon’s Steps to Becoming a Freelance Web Developer is worth reading, whether you are or are not willing to give up your day job, or add a part time job to your resume as a freelance website developer. There are tons of similar articles on the web, but what I like about Dimon’s offering […]

Just a Reminder About Freedom: Blogging Comes With a Price

It is common knowledge that China has spent billions of dollars on creating the “Great Firewall of China”, known in official circles as the “Golden Shield”. This is essentially the blocking, mostly by keyword, of information the Chinese government feels is “unhealthy” for its citizens. This can range from political dissent to pornography. Within the […]

Freedom of Speech – Bloggers Legal Rights

Bloggers have rights. Did you know that? You do. Bloggers also have limits to those rights and freedoms. The Electronic Frontier Foundation – Bloggers Legal Rights outlines what your rights are and what work is being done to protect them. Like all journalists and publishers, bloggers sometimes publish information that other people don’t want published. […]

What to do with your free wordpress.com blog

After the first post or two, many wordpress.com blog users who worked so hard to get an invite to wordpress.com for their own free blog, have no idea what to do with it. Some do, and plow into it with enthusiasm, but I’m seeing a lot of posts from new users who 1) don’t know […]

Website Hammered by Hotlinking, Spammers, and Free Loaders?

My main site recently was hammered by Hotlinking, Spammers, and Free Loaders. This can happen to any website, so we all need to learn how to keep an eye on potential abuse of our sites. Hotlinking Images Hotlinking is the technique of linking to images on your site for use offsite. That’s the simple description. […]

Blog Exercises: How Does Your Blog Make You Money?

In an interview with Daniel Scocco of DailyBlogTips, he asked me how long a blogger should wait to monetize their blog. Ha! Forever! I do not think bloggers should monetize their blogs. I think that people who want to get into the business of blogging must make a business plan on how they will use […]

Blog Exercise: When Was the Last Time You Got Personal

I walked into a friend’s home and found the fridge covered with refrigerator art from her seven year old. The traditional home often features such childhood artwork but this was extremely precious as the child has learning disabilities and drawing. The artwork was beautiful. I stood there transfixed at the crude scribbles, trying to find […]

Blog Exercises: Are You Setting an Example for Others?

A milestone in personal rights seemed to have been achieved recently when US basketball player, Jason Collins declared publicly he was gay, hopefully setting an example for others that it is now “safe” to come out of the closet. The news in and around his announcement has me thinking about heroes, mentors, and risk-takers, those […]

Blog Exercises: Spell Checkup on Categories and Tags

Oh no! I was writing out a tag in WordPress and the auto-suggest feature popped up with a misspelled tag name! Yikes! Today’s blog exercise is to clean up your tag and category names to ensure you’ve not made the same mistakes. To review your category names in WordPress, go to Posts > Categories and […]

Blog Exercises: Blog Work Flows

In “A Sample Blogging Workflow” by my friend, Chris Brogan, he talks about the process of blogging with consistency and determination in mind. Your company has decided to launch a blog, and you’re the lucky blogger. Maybe you’ve even asked for this pleasure, suggested it to the boss yourself. Only now, you have to deliver, […]