Weekly Digest: On The Road to WordCamp, Sponsored Themes, Selling Your Blog, NoFollow, and More

The Weekly Digest from Lorelle on WordPress this week will be shorter, and do not expect a Weekly Digest next week as I will be in San Francisco playing with my WordPress friends. I’ll have a ton of news on my blog following the WordCamp conference!

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Exciting Lorelle on WordPress News

I’m going to WordCamp! While I’m waiting confirmation, it looks like I may have a driveway from my plea for a parking spot for my motor home in San Francisco for the WordCamp conference next week. Thanks to everyone for looking out for me.

WordCamp 2007 July 21-22 in San Francisco and I’m one of the guest speakers presenting Kicking Ass Content Connections. I’ve had a few people ask me what that means. Yes, I’ll be kicking some ass over content issues, but also kicking your ass into gear over your content and blog building and networking techniques. With so many of the top blogging speakers there, it’s going to be an incredible weekend!

Selling Your Blog: Problogger Darren Rowse featured a list of articles he’s collected on the issue of selling your blog called How to Sell Your Blog. The list included two of my articles from the Blog Herald, Selling Your Blog: What Are Buyers Looking For and Selling Your Blog: What Goes Into the Selling Price. Thanks, Darren.

eMoms Says NoFollow: After a lot of debate and discussions, eMom Wendy Piersall has decided to turn off the DoFollow tag for comments and is reinstituting the NoFollow. She’s had it with cheating commenters. The NoFollow was a link tag requested by Google a couple years ago which instructed Google’s web crawler to follow but not give credit to any links tagged with the NoFollow tag. This was an attempt, lame one at that, to take away the link juice gain of PageRank for comment spammers. It didn’t work.

Many bloggers got together and decided to give their commenters “credit” for commenting by removing the NoFollow tag in comments through adjustments to the code or Plugins. Still, the comments are indexed and some link love might get through, but it really hasn’t worked either. And Google isn’t the only search engine in town. Other search engines totally ignore the tag, so it doesn’t matter to them what you tag a link. Like so many things on the web hyped way beyond their truth into myth, this is another one that can go bye-bye. It’s not working, no matter which way you look at it.

We must come up with ways to stop comment spam at the source not on our blogs. However, the growing debate around comment spam, human comment spammers and paid comment spammers will climax in a lot of retribution. I’m very worried over what will happen to the once free and easy interaction of blogs. Aren’t you?

Interviews and Features: Somehow in the rush of travel and work lately, I missed the publishing of an interview I did recently with Adii discussing my past and how I got involved with WordPress and blogging. My apologies. It was a fun interview with really good questions. Other recent interviews and features include:

Guest Blogging: Recent guest blogging adventures included:

Exciting Lorelle on WordPress News

We must come up with ways to stop comment spam at the source not on our blogs. However, the growing debate around comment spam, human comment spammers and paid comment spammers will climax in a lot of retribution. I’m very worried over waht will happen to the once free and easy interaction of blogs. Aren’t you?

Guest Blogging: Recent guest blogging adventures included:

Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won’t Tell You About Blogging: The reviews coming in are amazing for the book. Performancing says “It is immensely useful and comprehensive, and I highly recommend it to anyone serious about blogging.”

To order your own copy of the limited first printed edition with a reduced introductory price, order from SplashPress or the new Blog Herald Bookstore. For more information on the book, see the original announcement and a recent update with reviews and other information, as well as the Blogging Tips Book official page. Coming soon will be an ebook version and an audio version. Stay tuned!

Lorelle on WordPress Scrapped and Violated: Some wonderful blogging friends and fans have been alerting me to copyright violations and feed scrapers (splogs) of this blog. THANK YOU. If you find Lorelle On WordPress is being scrapped or the content stolen, please let me know.

What’s Happening with Lorelle on WordPress

Recent posts from Lorelle on WordPress included:

Most Popular Articles on Lorelle on WordPress

I was honored by the attention my plea for a parking spot for my motor home in San Francisco for the WordCamp conference. Thanks to everyone for looking out for me.

Well, I knew that the response to the official statement that WordPress will no longer permit sponsored WordPress Themes in the official Theme Viewer would be big, but I had no idea how big. So many are writing about it, I can barely keep up. Two posts of note come from the two volunteers who maintain the WordPress Theme viewer, Mandarin Musing and Headsetoptions. Here are some other referrers:

Announcing WPMUDEV Premium gained a lot of attention, too. WordPressMU is an amazing program for group blogging, and what James Farmer and his team are offering is a way to have the benefits of WordPressMU and the ongoing development support so you won’t have to start, literally, from scratch.

Smashing Magazine’s coverage of copyrights has again brought a lot of attention to What Do You Do When Someone Steals Your Content.

The most popular posts on Lorelle on WordPress this week were:

Linking To and From Lorelle on WordPress

Cory Miller lists Lorelle on WordPress in “My Top 25 Favorite Blogs and Feed Reads”, saying very nice things about what I do. Thanks, Cory!

Dawud Miracle is at it again with a fabulous article with tons of links, this time tackling “Why Building Website Traffic Is About Content And Relationships.” Lucky me, he cites Blog Community Building Starts With Two, an article of mine that dispells some of the myths that a community needs a cast of thousands. I’m still reeling from his neat article about me.

Popular destinations and recommendations from this blog elsewhere included:

Blasts From the Past

Here are a few WordPress Plugins I’ve covered in the past:

Blog Herald Columns

I’m so thrilled with the popularity of Tips for Writing Good WordPress Tips which I published on the Blog Herald this week. I was very nervous about publishing that article. I’ve been working on it for over six months. I’m thrilled it has been so well received.

Recently on the Blog Herald, I wrote about:

Lorelle’s Linkworthy Links

Why Writers Should Blog… – a good slap on the hands for writers and authors on blogging.
The Worry Free Way to Find Great Blogs to Read – an interesting look at evaluating what blogs you read.
Fool Birders – My husband is a bird watcher – okay, bird bonkers – so I loved this post.
The Problogger Job Board – want a job blogging, then this appears to be the key source for finding blogging jobs.

This is the Weekly Digest of Lorelle on WordPress.
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Lorelle VanFossen is a member of WordPress, WordPress.com, the 9Rules Network, and author of Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won’t Tell You About Blogging.
Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won’t Tell You About Blogging: The reviews coming in are amazing for the book. Performancing says “It is immensely useful and comprehensive, and I highly recommend it to anyone serious about blogging.”