Please Don’t Use Google To Research References

I’m a huge fan of Information Wants To Be Free, a wonderful blog for librarians by Meridith Wolfwater. I’ll be writing more about her blog later, but I wanted to point out a great article called Whatever you do, don’t use Google. After we teach our students how to distinguish between authoritative and unauthoritative resources, […]

Google Sitemaps Goes Standard With Acceptance By Microsoft and Yahoo!

The Google Blog announces the sitemap protocol has now been accepted by Yahoo! and Microsoft as a standard for webmasters to assist with website crawling and “submissions”. Last year we published the Sitemap 0.84 XML protocol as a free and easy way for webmasters to inform search engines about URLs on their web sites so […]

Awesome Lists of Firefox Must-Have Extensions Lists

It took me a long time to get past my fear of leaving Microsoft Internet Explorer. I wasn’t convinced that there could possibly be a better browser, especially one that was free. “Free” to me meant cheap, something wrong with it, cripple-ware, and a trick to get you to buy it. In my wildest dreams […]

Searching for Blogs and Blogging Resources on DMOZ-Google Open Directory

While I wasn’t looking, it appears DMOZ, the “largest human-edited directory on the web” is now in the hands of Google. Still, it’s a fascinating place to explore and search for all kinds of information and resources in a directory catalog form rather than just searching. Like a phone book, your search begins by categorized […]

Technorati Explains Link Count Criteria: Expiration Date 180 Days

Many of us are still trying to figure out how Google’s Page Rank works, but at least we have a better clue now on how Technorati ranking works through a good explanation by Brian Pinkerton in “Making Sense of Technorati Link Counts”. We display four count-related numbers in just this little part of the page. […]

Wrapping Text Inside PRE HTML Tags

Tyler’s “Wrapping Text Inside PRE Tags” is a life saver bit of CSS for those like me who include code markup in your blog pages. The <pre> HTML tag wraps around text and makes it look like typewriter text. It also has an annoying feature to display text EXACTLY as it is written. Lines break […]

Integrating Google Gadgets Into WordPress Themes

As if you weren’t satisfied with all the WordPress Widgets, you can also incorporate a wide variety of Google Gadgets into your full version WordPress Theme. Google Gadgets are, well, anything. They are services, searches, feeds, games, toys, information, and anything. Basically, they are tools, utilities, and games you can add to your web pages […]

Review of Best Minimalist WordPress Themes

Are you looking for a simple, clean, and very basic looking WordPress Theme design? Plaintxt.org has reviewed many WordPress Themes and recommends “The Best Minimalist WordPress Themes”. I’m sharing some of the best—and more interesting—minimalist WordPress themes that are publicly available. Many may react to these by thinking of all the ways they could be […]

One Year Anniversary Review: Designing WordPress Themes

WordPress Theme design is fairly unique in web design techniques as a WordPress Theme isn’t just about the design of the website, it is about web design based upon generated and controllable content. Programming code helps to create each page on a WordPress blog, influencing the look and feel of every element of a WordPress […]

WP-SNAP WordPress Plugin: Alphabetized Index Listing of Posts for Category Pages

Many people use their blogs like encyclopedias, wikis, or great repositories of information. Or for handling collections of information such as quotes, poetry, recipes, code, research, or facts. Others write reviews of books, movies, television shows, and technology. So wouldn’t it be slick to be able to sort through the collection of posts in alphabetical […]

One Year Anniversary Review: Searching and Search Engines

Over the past year, I’ve written a lot about search engines. In many ways, they are the holy grail, the impossible dream, and the unsolved mystery. We are totally dependent upon them. In order to find anything on the web, we must go through a portal of a search engine. It is the epitome of […]

Web Page Design and Styles: Let The One Who Has Never Hacked A Stylesheet Throw The First Stone At Me

I will have graphic details on the new design of this blog, as well as tips and tricks for working with the new CSS Editor on WordPress.com and Sandbox Theme shortly as life has gotten in the way. Until then, take a look at this brilliantly written, and perfectly descriptive, essay by Mandarin on “Stylesheet […]

WordPress.com Custom CSS – All The Styles for the Sandbox Theme

While not complete, here is my first attempt to put all the styles together from within the new WordPress.com Sandbox Theme stylesheet. You can copy the styles from this CSS file. This style sheet does not include the core layout architecture. You choose that from the “skins” after selecting the Sandbox Theme, setting the columns […]

Customize Your WordPress.com Blog’s Look and Theme

Hang onto your WordPress.com hats. You can now customize your own WordPress.com blog. I will be playing with this soon, but to get you started, here is the news. WordPress.com has announced release of a Sandbox Theme by Scott Allan Wallick and Andy Skelton. It allows you to customize your own WordPress.com blog’s look. This […]

When the Blog Breaks: Fixing Your Broken Blog

In Part One of this two part article series, we explored how to determine when your blog or website is down and explored various monitoring and notification methods. In this part, we will look at what may break a blog, and offer suggestions on troubleshooting and fixing your broken blog. What Can Bring Your Website […]