blogging 102

Reading time: 2 – 2 minutes In the early days of web design one of the few interactive things you could do with your readers was set up a guest book. At first this was next to impossible because almost anyone and everyone who had a website was operating on free sites like Geocities, Angelfire, or Tripod. There was no cgo access unless you paid for it, so there was no interaction beyond the simple mail form. Eventually most of them had heard the call for interaction and offered up ready made guest books. By that time it was really too late to do anything about it, blogging had been invented and was taking quick hold on sites like LiveJournal and Blogger. The world of interactivity was upon the average website owner, and we went from simple users to publishers. The advent of blogging with threaded post and comments we respond to or at the very least should be responding to left behind the old guest book format. Users could now interact with authors directly over on subject specific... 

Reading time: < 1 minute 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 Pussy!” convey_source = "English"; Read More →

Reading time: < 1 minute 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. convey_source = "English"; Read More →

Reading time: 1 – 2 minutes There were several old combinations that worked well together but since WordPress 2.3 came out many of them stopped working properly or stopped working altogether. Fear not there are replacements out there. Unlike many of the regurgitated idiot lists currently out there, everything I list will work in WordPress 2.5 the only version of the blog software you should be running. Ultimate Tag Warrior hasn’t been supported by the author since WordPress 2.3 came out. Many of its features and those of Bunny’s Technorati Tags, Jerome’s Keywords, and other tagging programs are easily replaced in better plugins. The All in One SEO Pack can even be replaced now. The new power plugin combination consists of Headspace2 and Simple Tags. Between these two plugins you can hand every task that you used to require half a dozen plugins and tweaks. convey_source = "English"; Read More →

Reading time: 2 – 2 minutes WordPress Excerpt Editor Excerpt Editor lets you easily make post excerpts from all your posts and pages. With a host of options that will allow you to customize the excerpts including one to let you show the latest post in its entirety and the rest in excerpt or even giving you the entire home page as full posts while the rest are excerpted. There are a couple of really good reasons for using excerpts. First it will even out how your page looks when people show up on it. For those of us who are occasionally long winded and other times not so much this is a very good thing. The second big reason to use them is it eliminates quite a bit of duplicate content which is bad for SEO. The second new plugin for me is NoFollow Those Dupes which is something that not everyone is going to need. I have actually installed it here yet as I am working on some theme upgrades before I do. The great thing is it doesn’t actually eliminate duplicate content,...