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 […]

The Secret Recipe of Comment Spam Comments

Mr. Louis Vuitton just sent me a message in my blog comments I’d like to share with you. I share this touching message because it is highly educational when it comes to the art of spam comments, and serves to remind us of why we love having Akismet, the best comment spam fighter, on our […]

Blog Exercises for March

March was a busy month in my Blog Exercises series. Wow, are we already done with the third month in this year long series? The participants explored a wide variety of blog exercises on editing, blogger identity, content organization, and web writing. There were exercises to motivate and inspire you, and help you inspire your […]

Blog Exercises for February

We’ve completed the second month of Blog Exercises in February. Are you still with me? Here is the list. Blog Exercises: Taking a Risk With What You Blog About Blog Exercises: Honor the Past with Anniversaries and Birthdays Blog Exercises: Your Byline Blog Exercises: Comments and The Blog Bullies Blog Exercises: Backlinks Blog Exercises: Category […]

Blog Exercises: Clean Up Your Most Popular Posts

“It’s dated 2008. It must be useless.” This was the response to an article I tweeted out recently. Yes, the article was dated 2008. Did that mean it wasn’t a valid, timely, and invaluable resource? It was, but that’s not the point. Some people equate old with useless. With the aging population gaining the majority […]

Blog Exercises: Weekly Link Roundups

Many bloggers publish weekly or monthly link roundups, highlights of some of the interesting sites they’ve found on the web. Most use a variety of automation techniques to generate this link list, bookmarking the web pages to a bookmarking program that helps them generate this list and release it once a week. It’s a lazy […]

Blog Exercises for January

We’ve completed the Blog Exercises for January. Here is the list. Blog Exercise: Category Brainstorming Blog Exercises: What is the Name of Your Site? Blog Exercises: What’s Your Site’s Tagline? Blog Exercises: New Year’s Resolution Blog Exercises: What Do You Do? Blog Exercises: The Editorial Calendar Blog Exercises: Check Your Dates Blog Exercises: The Don’ts […]

Peace on Earth: Help Me Fight Terrorism in My Community

Update: This story is starting to go viral. Thank you to everyone for your support for the Portland and Clackamas, Oregon, Community in their time of need. I hope we fill the Clackamas Mall, and every mall, with as many people as possible to let all terrorists, domestic and international, know that we will not […]

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 […]

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 […]

WordPress Summer College Course at Clark

The Summer Quarter at Clark College starts in July and now is the time to register for the Introduction to WordPress course, the world’s only full-credit college course on WordPress. There are only 15 slots left, so hurry. The 4 credit class runs Tuesdays and Thursdays from 6-8:30PM July 3, August 23 at Clark College […]

WordPress Codex Night Success and PDX Saturday Codex Party

Last night’s PDX WordPress Meetup Group: WordPress Codex Night was a resounding success. In just under two hours, 130 changes were made to the WordPress Codex, the online manual for WordPress Users. On the informal WordPress Documentation Team Task List, 49 “things to do” were added which will become deleted files and pages, redirects, new […]

PDX WordPress Meetup Group: WordPress Codex Night

The WordPress Meetup Group in Portland, Oregon, has invited me to tonight’s meetup at the US Bancorps Building in downtown PDX to talk about the WordPress Codex, the online manual for WordPress Users, and how to contribute. I’ll show them some basics about the Codex and we’ll spend a couple hours working on maintenance tasks […]

What My First WordPress College Class Taught Me

As the last day of class approaches for the world’s first WordPress College Course at Clark College in Vancouver, Washington, and the next one begins in a couple weeks (filling fast), I’d like to share some lessons my students taught me about WordPress – and teaching. They taught me humility and pride. I stand truly […]

Prove It: What Makes You Trust a Website?

What makes you trust this site? What makes you trust me? What makes you trust any website you visit? What is it about the site that earns your trust? I’ve asked this question at most of the conferences and keynotes I’ve given over the past seven years: What makes you not trust a website? The […]