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 […]

Firefox 15 Out and Dazzles

Firefox 15 is out. According to InformationWeek, the latest version of the Firefox web browser is better than ever. Here is a summary of the new features: Behind-the-Scenes Updates: No longer will you have to fuss over upgrades. It will happen in the background and “seamlessly implement the changes when the browser is next launched.” […]

Expand Your Writing Abilities: Novel-in-a-Day Project

Last year, Literature and Latte, the creators of the powerful Scrivener writer’s program, shook the writing world with an innovative “Write a book in a day” project. They are doing it again this year. This form post for Novel-in-a-Day 2: The Revenge details the information. The event is Saturday, October 20, 2012, 2100 UK time, […]

WordPress 3.4 Green is Good to Go

WordPress 3.4 is out, named “Green” in honor of jazz guitarist and composer Grant Green. Green is a great nickname for this hot release of WordPress, bringing with it some excellent new features and improvements. As with all WordPress upgrades, it is recommended you backup your full WordPress site, database and all files, before upgrading. […]

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 […]

Do Not Delete Comment Spam. Mark Spam as Spam.

Is comment spam one of the things that gets you down? Are you taking it personally? Are you confused by comment spam and how to handle it? I’ve been speaking at a variety of meetups lately on web publishing, blogging, and podcasting, and the topics often turn to managing comments and comment spam. “I’ve started […]

WordPress Stats Infographic of WordPress World

Using some of the stats from my recent article on WordPress Stats, Yoast did some more research and created a new WordPress Stats Infographic to feature the statistical information on WordPress visually. What is most interesting about the new research his team found, building upon my own research, are the following: 48% of the top […]

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 […]

WordPress Stats and Numbers: Breaking Their Own Records

Working on developing a core of WordPress classes for Clark College and preparing for the next “Introduction to WordPress” college course in a couple weeks, I’ve put together some statistics on WordPress you might find helpful – and stunning. WordPress continues to break records set by others, but more often lately, break records set by […]

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 […]

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 […]