Jazzing Up Prototypes and Frameworks with Alternative Lorem Ipsum Generators

Are you a web designer and fan of the Simpsons? Have you tried Simpson Ipsum? How is education supposed to make me feel smarter? Besides, every time I learn something new, it pushes some old stuff out of my brain. Remember when I took that home winemaking course, and I forgot how to drive? I […]

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 […]

How to Set the WordPress Twenty-Eleven Theme Showcase Slider to Auto-Advance

Using the fantastic and flexible Twenty-Eleven WordPress Theme and its showcase template front page and slider? Wish the showcase slider would slide automatically? I’ve found the answer. The Twenty-Eleven WordPress Theme features a pseudo-static front page template called “showcase.” When set as the “home” page template with the blog as “blog,” you have the option […]

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 […]

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 […]

The Most Powerful Life Changing Conference Event, SOBCon, Comes to the Pacific Northwest

I’ve been tortured the past few weeks on how to convince you that attending SOBConNW 2011 on September 16-18, 2011, will change your life. As usual, when it comes to my favorite annual conference, I find myself wordless. It’s that profound. If the SOBConNW Program and descriptions at the SOBCon site doesn’t convince you, maybe […]

Firefox 5 Crashes: What is Causing Them and How to Fix It

If you are one of the thousands suffering constant crashes from the June update of Mozilla Firefox 5, realize you are not alone. Literally thousands have reported on Firefox 5 crashing across all platforms, including Windows and Mac. UPDATE: The crashes were clearly not a result of problems with Firefox but with Adobe Flash. Crashes […]

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 […]

Managing Multiple Authors: Author Bio Box WordPress Plugins

In the last article in this series on managing multiple bloggers in WordPress, I explored how to customize the author bio box on a single post page using some basic WordPress template tags and code. In this article in the series, I’m going to explore a wide variety of WordPress Plugins that will help you […]

Managing Multiple Authors: Customizing the Author Bio Box

In this series on managing multiple bloggers in WordPress, I’ve covered how to showcase the authors within the WordPress Theme design, talked about how to manage author content within WordPress to help you see all the ways you can promote your authors within the design and content management system, and started showing you code and […]