Blog Exercise: New Years Reboot, Restart, Kick Ass

“It’s that time of year when the world falls in love…” The Christmas Waltz by Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn I’d like to think that New Year’s thinking includes bringing back the love to your blog. You might not think that, but let’s go with that belief as we continue with this year’s Blog Exercises. […]

Robin Williams Starts Our Conversation on Depression, Suicide, and Mental Health

The world is grieving the loss of one of our favorite comedic and dramatic geniuses, Robin Williams, and the conversation begins about mental illness, depression, and suicide. The Facts As We Know It: The news arrived about 3:30PM PST that the actor had died due to suspected suicide. CNN reported that according to the Marin […]

Blog Exercises: Start Here Guides

Training for educators using online learning management systems for high schools and college recommend creating a “Start Here” page to guide the student through the process. If the process is complicated, this makes sense. The question I wanted to know from trainers is why don’t they provide training upon entrance to the school so each […]

Blog Exercises: You Shouldn’t Have Started with a Question If You Didn’t Want it Answered

In the movie, Big Fish, the son tries to describe to his father how little he knows him. Will Bloom: You know about icebergs, dad? Senior Ed Bloom: Do I? I saw an iceberg once. They were hauling it down to Texas for drinking water. They didn’t count on there being an elephant frozen inside. […]

Blog Exercises: Things I Wish I Knew When I Started

“9 Things I Wish I Knew When I Started.” “6 Things You Need to Know Before You Begin.” “The 10 Lessons You Need to Know Before You Take that First Step.” “What I Wish I Knew Before I Knew.” These titles show up in my feed reader on a regular basis. In this blog exercise, […]

Writing for the Web Course Starts June 3, 1013

I will be teaching “Writing for the Web” at Clark College Corporate and Continuing Education in Vancouver, Washington, Tuesdays and Thursdays, June 3 – July 8, 2013. The class will be at the West Coast Bank Building in downtown Vancouver, Washington, just a few minutes from downtown Portland, Oregon. Writing on the web is now […]

Prove It: It’s Starts With Defining Who You Are

Who are you on the web? How do you describe yourself? What words do you use to tell the world who you are, what you stand for or represent, what you do, how you do it, and why they should want to get to know you and work with you? Preparing to teach my WordPress […]

WordPress Themes: Start With a Solid Framework

Why I Created a WordPress Theme Framework by Justin Tadlock is a good look at the reasons why WordPress Theme designers and developers should work with a framework when designing a WordPress Theme. A strong Theme framework creates a solid canvas upon which to build your WordPress Themes. If you are or considering building WordPress […]

When Akismet Goes Bad: What to do when Akismet starts spamming your own comments

The reason why I created Akismet Auntie Spam helper script was because I seem to have a problem few other people do — every couple of months Akismet decides that my own comments and trackbacks are spam. This is unforgivable and a fatal usability flaw in Akismet’s design. Comments and trackbacks from the blog admin should skip the spam check process. I challenge anyone who argues differently to have to deal with always having to double check if their own comments are marked as spam. The delay between posting a comment and it appearing in Akismet almost always assures that you will miss one or there will be an inordinate delay in responding to your commenters.

But enough of the ranting about my problems with Akismet. Here are two things you can do to help when Akismet is marking your own comments as spam.

Starting Your Podcast

By Daniel Brusilovsky By popular demand, Lorelle has asked me to write another article on podcasting. For all of you starters, here is the article to read! Everyone has there own preferences, and I accept it. But this article is based on my preferences. I use a FREE service called Mypodcast.com. I will show you […]

If I was to start writing & blogging today I would…

By Greg Balanko-Dickson I have been writing online daily since 1998 and only converted to blogging in 2005. In the last two years things have changed considerably and I would do things differently. This all started with reading a post courtesy Steve @ Micro Persuasion: …the world now tuns faster. The blogosphere has transformed from […]

Blog Community Building Starts With Two

10 Things about Making Room for a Community by Liz Strauss of Successful and Outstanding Bloggers is a fabulous step-by-step list for community building, on your blog and otherwise. Liz begins by pointing out that a “community of like-minded thinkers” began with two. This is really important. When we think of a community, we often […]

Getting Past the Writing Starting Gate

“When You Can’t Get Started Writing” by Writing English is a great introduction to the old writer’s block or modern day blogger’s block, when you sit down at the computer with motivation but no inspiration. I can’t tell you how many times people have come to me, holding an empty piece of paper, saying, “I […]

Blogging Gear: Start With a Good Blogging Program

Bloggism.net has a two part article series with reviews and feature lists of the most popular free blogging tools. In part one, WordPress gets the best review (yeah!), and Movable Type, Drupal, Greymatter, b2evolution, and Geeklog are also covered in part two. A blogger just like any other professional needs gear, surprisingly a lot more […]

What Would You Do Different If You Started Your Blog Over?

ProBlogger’s “What Would I Do Different If I had To Start My Blog Over by Merlin Mann” is a splendid response to the question, as answered by Merlin Mann and published on ProBlogger. Maybe most importantly for the primary “blog” portion of the site, I wish I’d realized that the date and time of a […]