Developing a Tourist Community Site With WordPress

How would you like to hand-hold a web developer as he creates a WordPress-based Tourist Community Site? Amir Helzer of ICanLocalize recently decided to create such a site for his small tourist town of Bariloche in Argentina. And he wants your help. Over the next month or so, Amir will be taking your advice on […]

Comcast Now Restricts Bandwidth Data Transfer Levels

If you haven’t reviewed the GigaOM White Paper: The Facts & Fiction of Bandwidth Caps, do it now. As of Wednesday this week, Comcast, the largest provider of broadband and DSL for Internet access in the United States is going to be restricting your data transfer levels to 250 gigabytes a month. According to Om […]

How to Remove WordPress.com Ads From Your WordPress.com Blog

Matt Mullenweg has just announced that you can go “ad-free” on your WordPress.com blog. While you may have never noticed, those who are not logged into WordPress.com will see ads on blogs across the WordPress.com network. two years ago, WordPress.com started experimenting with Google ads to help support the cost of the experimental and state-of-the-art […]

What WordPress Plugins and Features Do You Want on the Comments Panel?

WordPress is working on seriously improving the WordPress Comments Panel in the Administration Panels interface. They are including the ability for the Administrator to reply directly from the Comments Panel, adding keyboard shortcuts for improved accessibility and efficiency, restoring the Edit Comment link, and more features to make handling comments easier. The WordPress email comments […]

Blogs Offer Communication, Information, and Connections During Disasters

Jonathan Bailey of Plagiarism Today just called me from Northern Louisiana to report that he and his family have survived the evacuation from their home in Shreveport, Louisiana, though Hurricane Gustav appears to have done more damage where they evacuated to rather than where they left from. Jonathan and I were both victims of Hurricane […]

My Comment Count is Bigger Than Your Comment Count!

With the push towards a successful blog being defined by its comments, a new WordPress Plugin has appeared that may push the comment frenzy even more. PlanetOzh has created the Liz Strauss Comment Counter by Ozh WordPress Plugin which honors the popular blog conversation expert, Liz Strauss. If you want to brag about your blog’s […]

Power Blogging Tips: Comment on Blogs From Within Google Feed Reader

One of the most frustrating aspects of reading blogs through feed readers is the process of commenting on blogs. The typical step-by-step process is: Scan through the blog post titles. Find an interesting title and click on the title to open it and read. Want to respond or read more? Open the post title in […]

Blog Challenge: Describe Your Computer Setup – Then and Now

This week’s blog challenge is to blog about your computer setup as it was “then” in the early days of your computer life, and how it is now, in your modern technology life. What computer tools are you dependent upon for your blog that surround you on your desk? Do you podcast? What do you […]

Comment Spam Alert: I Read a Similar Article

Bloggers should now be familiar with the blog comment spam ruse of “X wrote an interesting post” to lure us into thinking this is a legitimate trackback, and now comes “I read a similar article also named…” to lure us into thinking this comment is legitimate. As Tony Hung illustrated, the comment spammers use a […]

What Are Those Unknown Characters in My Blog Comments?

Little squares, boxes, lines, and funky symbols are often found in blog comments. A friend new to blogging called me about these wanting to know if her blog had been hacked or her computer had a virus. “It looks like alien writing from Star Trek!” Those strange symbols and characters in your blog comments are […]

How to Access Banned WordPress.com Blogs

As discussed in WordPress.com Banned Again: Why Aren’t You Concerned?, WordPress.com continues to be a target for censorship and blocking from various countries and groups around the world attempting to penalize the whole for the “wrongs” of the few the courts or governments decide to penalize, those cutting off thousands of blogs from access. I […]

Protecting Your Content on WordPress.com

By Jonathan Bailey of Plagiarism Today Users of the self-hosted version of WordPress have always had a lot of tools for protecting their site and their feeds. They have always had a variety of plugins for protecting content, including anti-scraping, content theft detection and much more. Even the ability to edit themes and the core […]

When a Comment Requires the Honest Truth

Maybe it was one of those days. Maybe it was something in the air. Today, I had six comments that required the honest truth as a response. Not the tempered, kinder and gentler response but the hard cold truth. The kind of truth you have to give knowing that some can’t take it. Not all […]

Alert: Possibly Related Posts Feature on WordPress.com Blogs

WordPress.com has activated a feature without warning that has many up in arms of protest, making it one of the least welcoming additions to WordPress.com. Since the beginning of WordPress.com, one of the most requested features has been the ability to showcase related posts from our own blogs. WordPress.com has activated this ability, but the […]

WordPress.com Banned Again: Why Aren’t You Concerned?

According to Brazil: Bloggers united against WordPress.com ban by Global Voices, WordPress.com blogs are or soon will be banned due to a judge in Brazil ruling against a WordPress.com blogger featuring a YouTube video embedded in the blog of a couple having sex. The details of the blogger and content in question is a bit […]