The Bitacle Battle of Blogs

UPDATE: Many years have passed since this article was published. Recently, Jonathan Bailey of Plagiarism Today took a look back at the lessons learned from Bitacle and the battle so many bloggers fought against them. Google now works to prevent and stop such abuse. While the Bitacle model still works, because so many spoke out […]

How To Spot a Splog

After publishing “One Year Anniversary Review: Splogs – The Dark Side of Blogging”, I had several people ask me how to know if a blog is a splog or spam blog. Here are some simple clues to look for. In a Splog, Nothing Adds Up Nor Matches Splogs, spamming blogs, are often little more than […]

Creating Effective, Attention-Getting Headlines and Titles

In part one of this two part series on “everything you could possibly want to know about titles and headlines on your blog”, I wrote about how to write effective, attention-getting headlines and titles, and in this part, I’m going to give you more than you might ever want to know about how to maximize […]

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 […]

One Year Anniversary Review: WordPress Tips, Tricks and Techniques

This is a blog about WordPress and I’ve written a lot about how to use WordPress from every angle. Part of the challenge of writing about WordPress over the past year has been the issue of writing about WordPress, the full version program where you can do just about anything you want, and writing about […]

One Year Anniversary Review: What are Feeds?

As I review this past year’s worth of articles I’ve written, I find that two topics were probably the most life changing for me and many other bloggers: social bookmarking and feeds. In Don’t You Know What a Feed Is Yet? Get To Know Your Feeds!”, I explain what feeds are: Feeds are an awesome […]

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: […]

Your Comment Has Been Moderated – Stay Tuned for Approval

You come across a blog post you really want to comment on. You think out your comment, carefully type it in, check it for misspellings, and, when you are ready, you hit the submit button. The page reloads and…where’s your comment? It’s not there! Did it take it? What happened? Some people understand that comments, […]

Do You Need Permission to Use Feeds

I recently wrote about asking permission to include a blog in your blogroll and asking permission to link to website or blog content, and now I want to know if you need permission to publish a feed on your blog. This is a complex issue. Like blogrolls, I think it is a compliment to include […]

Testing the Readability of Your Blog

Juicy Studio’s Readability Test is an interesting tool to test your blog’s readability. It’s more than just a test for keywords. It puts a page from your blog through a variety of tests that is, frankly, rather amazing. The content on your page is run through several reading level algorithms which test your content for […]

Using Author Template Tags Outside of the WordPress Loop

WordPress allows you to create a custom Author web page for your WordPress blog. You can make this page look like anything you want, customized to the author or with just some tidbits about the author added to the page to help readers learn a little more about the person behind the post. I had […]

Don’t You Know What a Feed Is Yet? Get To Know Your Feeds!

Feeds, something I think are hotter than tags and other gimmicks on the web today, should be the talk of the web. They are, but not as much as you would think. In an article from E-Marketer, “RSS Advertising May Work Around Spam Issues”, they take a look at the perception and recognition of feeds: […]

WordPress.com New Feature: Feed Stats

A feature that I’ve long wanted is finally here: Feed Stats. You can now monitor your feed statistics with WordPress.com. Go to the Dashboard > Feed Stats tab and there they are. There are two charts for you to examine. I’d like more specific information than just these charts, but in general, these statistics will […]

The Growing Trends in Content Theft: Image Theft, Feed Scraping, and Website Hijacking

Stealing content directly off your site or blog and posting it on another blog, or even in magazine, is the most common method of content theft. With the increase in technology, other methods of content theft are growing, and are, unfortunately, easy to do. These include image theft, RSS/feed content theft and website hijacking. Image […]