Sorry about the mess everyone. I am making some changes around here this weekend and will looking at a few different theme designs to decide what I like and don’t. If the theme changes on you mid read sorry for any disruption. The current theme is the Freemium Theme by Ptah Dunbar. Feel free to tell us what you think of it. Brad Update: 10-8-2008: We should be bck online here later today. If you run a site about blogging I encourage you to check out http://www.bloggingfornoobs.com/topsites/ convey_url = "http%3A%2F%2Fbradtheblogboy.com%2Ftheme%2Fsorry-about-the-mess%2F";convey_source... Read the rest of the Blogging in Black and White Article
One of the least used and most powerful features of wordpress is the page template. The page template to make a long story short integrates non standard coding into your blog seemlessly. It is probably used most often as an archive page in free themes, but most of those free templates forget to tell their users how to use the template and therefore it goes unused. They can be used for so many other things than just an archive page though. Darren Rowse of ProBlogger makes extensive use of page templates. If you look at the beautifully designed landing page you will find a lot of information all... Read the rest of the Blogging in Black and White Article
I was going through my Woopra stats not so long back when i noticed something very exciting and very unexpected. My political blog, Brad’s Tiny World, was receiving a lot of traffic from CNN and within a few days of watching that incoming traffic I started noticing them coming from The Wall Street Journal. When tracking down this traffic I found it had come in the form of a sweet little plugin I had accidentally left on when I was testing what did and didn’t work with the new theme tools and WordPress 2.6. I had long known Sphere Related Content plugin existed, in fact the... Read the rest of the Blogging in Black and White Article
The biggest means to increasing regular readership is involving your occasional readers through a better comment experience. These five pugins will do just that if you do it right. 1) Nofollow Free: Without going nofollow free few small blogs have a hope in hell of drawing lots of comments straight out of the box. You will get some spam, but nothing worth having comes without a little bit of work. there are easy ways around this too. Akismet will block most spam. Moderated comments will hold all of them until you can look at them. You can also moderate them so regular commentators... Read the rest of the Blogging in Black and White Article
Those were the words I heard often enough at as kid when I was being cautious. I heard them from friends who tried to goad me into trouble making either with or for them. I heard them from many a male relative who simple mistook caution for timidity and didn’t really know what else manly they could say. Now that I am older and wiser those words keep coming back to me. No, they don’t pertain to my blogging for the most part. When they do I shudder with revulsion and take action. This time though they apply to a lot of my fellow bloggers. So I say unto many of you, “Quit Being Such A... Read the rest of the Blogging in Black and White Article
Every blogger wants a reaction to their posts. Whether or not everyone will admit, this is the whole reason we do what we do it. It is no fun talking out of your ass if everyone ignores you. So ask yourself what are you doing for those people? I have put a lot of thought into this of late. I know how to get a lot of diggs when I want, and a lot of traffic too. What I was missing though were lots of comments. I read what the big guys were saying. Then I realized many of them were just talking out of their asses, because if it were really great advice they would be doing it themselves. ... Read the rest of the Blogging in Black and White Article
I was recently had the unfortunate experience of using a one of my local libraries computers to access one of my blogs. Not only are they still using IE 5.X they have very limited resolution. Despite 17″ monitors and a couple of 19″ for the really blind folks the resolution was horrible. They were all stuck at a static 800×600 except for the large monitors for the severely visually impaired which were stuck at 640×480. While those setting should be an option, they made for pretty horrific view of many sites I took a look at. My challenge to theme designers is this... Read the rest of the Blogging in Black and White Article
