Mean Spirited Comments and Blogging

Trolls. Flamers. Meanies. Vicious. Not Nice. Unkind. Rude. Inconsiderate. Nasty. Whining. Bitching. Moaning. Bastards. Where there are humans, you will find humans who seem to have more than their share of these personality traits. Blogging is no exception. Even the most non-controversial blogs, like this one, is the target of the blogging thug, mean spirited […]

Spam: Stupid Pointless Annoying Messages in Emails, Comments, and Everywhere

No Colour Hat SEO Blog’s article, “Email, Spam, and Unsolicited Junk” is part of a series of an indepth look at spam email and comment spam, and other unsolicited junk that plagues us on the Internet and in our lives. SPAM stands for Stupid Pointless Annoying Messages and sometime referred to the meaning of an […]

Why Do You Comment in the Comments?

I’m working on an article about comments, why people comment, and what comments do for recipients, and I ran across this wonderful commentary on the issue of comments from Kamigoroshi – Why Do You Comment On People’s Blogs? Why does a person blog? My answer would be because they like to express their thoughts and […]

Special Guide to Weblog Comments

Life Hacker’s Special Life Hackers Guide to Weblog Comments is an excellent article to help you seriously consider how to handle your blog comments. In a nutshell, they include: Stay on topic Contribute new information to the discussion Don’t comment for the sake of commenting Know when to comment and when to e-mail Remember that […]

Delaware Supreme Court Extend First Amendment Protection to Online Comments

“Delaware Supremes extend First Amendment Protection to online comments” by by Bob Cauthorn is seriously worth a read. The Delaware Supreme Court yesterday delivered what one hopes is a watershed decision when it definitively extended First Amendment protections to an anonymous blog poster who attacked an elected town councilman in Smyrna, Del. More importantly, the […]

Separating Comments and Trackbacks in WordPress – The Answer

WordPress 2.7 News Update: For information on the new structure of comments and trackbacks in WordPress 2.7, please see Migrating Plugins and Themes to 2.7 – Enhanced Comment Display in the WordPress Codex, Justin Tadlock – Making your theme’s comments compatible with WordPress 2.7 and earlier versions and Sivel – Separating Pings from Comments in […]

Comments on Comments

I want to seriously talk to you about the responsibilities of hosting comments on your blog. It’s fun and it’s a great thrill to get a response to something you’ve written, but it also has responsibilities, both by you and the comment poster. We can’t control the comment poster, but we can control our response […]

Blog Exercises: What Are You Missing?

Frogs redefine my thoughts about amphibians annually. As a child, spring was for tadpoles and summers were for frogs in the swamps, ponds, and ditches around my country ranch in the Pacific Northwest. Moving to Oregon’s Coastal Mountain range west of Portland, my winters are spent driving up the foothills like a crazy person, avoiding […]

Blog Exercise: Inspired by Photography

We are all inspired by photography, a picture that motivates and inspires, that moves us, sometimes to the point of changing our perspective on a subject or on our life. With all of the power found in photography, over the next few weeks I will be offering Blog Exercises with the emphasis on getting you […]

Blog Exercises: May Random Editing Day

May. It’s starting to warm up outside in the north, and growing a bit chilly down under, but it’s that time again. It’s the May Random Editing Day. In this Blog Exercise you will need to edit five random posts from among your thousands – okay, maybe dozens of published articles. What should you look […]

Blog Exercises: Backups and Alternatives

I didn’t expect to return home after a meeting this morning to find I have no telephone or Internet access on this bright sunshine, calm weather May day. I’ve got classes to prep for, sites to review for students and clients, article deadlines, these blog exercises to publish and keep to my year long commitment, […]

Blog Exercises: Prepare for Summer

It’s Editorial Calender check-in and check up time. May is the shift from spring to summer. From blossoming flowers to green leafed trees casting shade, the weather is changing, bringing warmer days to the northern hemisphere and colder temperatures down under. For those of us living in the Pacific Northwestern United States, we are experiencing […]

Blog Exercises: How to Write about Something Someone Else Wrote

In the early development of the web, blogs were classified as echo chambers, vessels of redundant content as every original idea was shared, reshared, quoted, and spread across the web at rapid speed. Some estimates state that less than 2% of all the content on the web is original. It’s mostly regurgitation of the same […]

Blog Exercises: Excerpts and Continue Reading

Encountered the front page of a blog where the posts ran on and on and on and on, stretching across the length of the page? Do you ever wish you had more control over the length of your posts on the front page of your site? This Blog Exercise explores the use of the “more” […]

Blog Exercises: How Long Are Your Paragraphs?

How long are your paragraphs? Have you measured them lately? One of the telling differences between traditional writing and writing for the web is the length of the paragraph. Look at the example below. Which is easier to read? On the left, the paragraphs are huge, long blocks of text. On the right, the paragraphs […]