WordCamp Hamburg, Germany

I asked my friend, Ian of Letters Home To You living in Hamburg, Germany, to report on this past weekend’s WordCamp Hamburg. Unfortunately, he could only report on the first day of the two day event. Call it a mash-up of users, developers, code freaks and the rest of us, people like me who could […]

Protect Yourself Online With Common Sense

Social Networking Safety Tips by DygiScape is a thought-provoking look at staying safe while participating in social networking services. It’s no question that social networking Web sites are growing rapidly everyday. This growing trend of sharing yourself more and more online; safety is often overlooked. Setting forth some safety guidelines will benefit the users of […]

Attack of the Mean Commenter: Blocking Commenters and Comments on Your WordPress Blog

By now, you all should know that you have total control over your blog’s comments, right? You can choose to allow only registered users to comment, delete any comment you want, edit any comment, and do the same for trackbacks. While it helps to have a good comments policy, you still have total control over […]

Protecting Your WordPress Blog

I’ve written extensively about the choices you have in responding to negative comments and bloggers. You can respond or ignore, but never retaliate. However, a few months ago, Darren Rowse of Problogger was the victim of a spammer and hacker and it made me want to jump up and hit back, as I’m sure it […]

Blogging and Social Networking as a Teenager

By Douglas Bell Today is the end of Lorelle’s first month of celebrating two years of WordPress.com and Lorelle on WordPress, and I really want to say congratulations to her. However, while this past month has had many articles on blog writing, SEO, web design, blogging personally and for profit, and of course, a number […]

Contact Form WordPress Plugins

As noted in Subscribe, Email Mailing List, Blog Update Alerts, and Newsletter WordPress Plugins and WordPress Plugins for Comments from the month long series of WordPress Plugins, there are a lot of ways for you to keep in contact with your blog’s readers. There are also different ways for them to get in contact with […]

Speed Blogging: What is Getting In Your Blog’s Way

Blog Chalk Talk offers “Daily Blogging Tip: Practice Blogging Quickly”, an interesting challenge to see what is getting in the way of your blogging efforts. Start a timer. Give yourself, say, 10 minutes. Go! See how much you can write, how fast you can edit, how quickly you can find and insert a relevant photo, […]

Things I Want Gone from the Web in 2007

Here are a few things I want gone from the web in 2007 – and forever – along with a few things I want you to do to make the web a better place in 2007. Kill All Popup Windows In every shape and form. Out-of-control Advertising Web pages, specifically blogs, are now looking more […]

Holiday Season Request: Open Your Internet Access Points

I’ve made this an annual request for the past few years: Please Open Your Internet Access Points During the Holiday Season. No matter where you live in the world, the next couple months are filled with some form of traditional, cultural, or religious holiday. Family members will be taking time off from work and their […]

The Wonderful World of WordPress Products

By now, most of you should know that there are three versions of WordPress available and one awesome forum software program, bbPress, which works seamlessly integrated with two versions of WordPress. Let’s look at your WordPress options and see which one is right for your blogging needs. WordPress.com WordPress.com is the free but limited version […]

Need WordPress.com Help – Ask Nicely

Timethief, an active volunteer on the WordPress.com forums offers this well-written guide for requesting help on the WordPress.com Support Forum: As this is a support forum it doesn’t make much sense to post a support request with a title like (1) can anyone help; (2) help me; (3) or any other titles on the same […]

Palestinians versus Israel – Israel versus Gaza – and the beat goes on

Having recently moved from Israel back to the United States, and considering a return soon, recent fireworks events in the area are drawing my eye. Few blogs were available writing about the subject during our five year stay in Israel during the Intifada, especially those with an “inside” perspective on either side. Now blogging is […]

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 […]

Good Reasons to Upgrade WordPress

Alex King explains why you should upgrade WordPress, with some interesting explanations on the changes in WordPress. There is one simple reason why you should upgrade: security. The 1.5 branch of WordPress isn’t getting the security patches that the current development branch is. And even if someone were vigilantly applying patches to the 1.5 branch, […]

Blogging Tips – Hundreds of Resources for Finding Content for Your Blog

Blogging is great fun. It’s exciting. You start out with great ideas, full of motivation and inspiration. After a while, though, you run out of steam. The muse isn’t so amused any more and you start hunting for content, things to write about. There are two aspects of finding content for your blog. First, it […]