One Year Anniversary Review: In the Beginning WordPress Begot WordPressMU Begot WordPress.com

The dream was “how to make WordPress available to everyone, no matter what level of experience or expertise they had”. Individual WordPress blogs are great, but the popularity and ease of blogging got the corporate world interested in providing blogs for their employees as a way to communicate with the outside world on what they […]

What Do I Do With My New WordPress.com Blog

You just got your first WordPress.com blog. Now what do you do with it? There are two ways to tackle your new WordPress.com blog. First, there is the typical way, then there is the practical approach. The Typical Way of Starting a WordPress Blog The typical method of starting to use your WordPress.com blog is: […]

Akismet Smacked By Comment Spam: The Stats

Akismet, the official comment spam fighter for WordPress.com blogs and WordPress users has been working overtime to fight off an onslaught of comment spam bots. Akismet has a new Akismet Stats page with a chart to show you how hard it is working to combat comment spam. The chart measures the number of comment spam […]

Investigating the Connections Between Blogging Styles and Traffic Stats

Mister Snitch takes a look at “Blogging Styles and Traffic Stats” to find a correlation between the two. Just as there are different styles of investing, there are different approaches to traffic generation. Aside from the occasional, reclusive J.D.Salingers, most writers want to be read as widely as possible. Some bloggers literally will do anything […]

Missing the wordpress.com Referers Tab?

If you have suddenly been missing the Referers tab from your Manage Panel in your WordPress.com blog, I thought I’d let you know that it has moved. The Referers panel provided some basic blog statistics on visitors, search engine links, and incoming links, as well as most popular posts. I’ll write in more detail about […]

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: Backlinks

Known as incoming links or referrer links, backlinks are links pointing from an external site to your site, directing their readers to you as a resource. Timethief of “one cool site blogging tips” describes backlinks as: Backlinks to your content are like votes for your blog. The more backlinks your blog receives the higher it […]

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 […]

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 Credit Course at Clark College in Vancouver, Washington

Beginning in January 2012, I will be teaching “Introduction to WordPress,” a four credit class at Clark College in Vancouver, Washington, just across the Columbia River from Portland, Oregon. While many schools are beginning to offer WordPress courses, few are offering credit classes and Clark College approached me to make that happen here in the […]

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 […]

Blog Struggles: I Need an Eraser for My Old Posts

Online Diary: May 20, 2010 I’d like to go back and erase my old posts. Don’t you feel that way sometimes? Maybe all the time? As I think about talking to the telephone poles out there and reassessing where I am, the urge to purge is overwhelming me. I want to go through all my […]

WordCamp Las Vegas: By the Numbers Presentation

Last weekend I presented “By the Numbers” at WordCamp Las Vegas, covering web analytics and blog statistics. I spoke about which numbers you should be paying attention to, and which you can ignore, and ripped apart some myths around the stats we love to watch. The focus was on the statistics we get with our […]

WordPress News on the Blog Herald

The past few weeks of the Blog Herald’s WordPress News reports that I do have been huge. Each one now takes many hours to produce, rounding up all the news from WordPress developers, Plugin and Theme developers, WordPress.com, WordPress fan podcasts and blogs, and the WordPress Community. WordPress 2.7 is the biggest WordPress version ever, […]