blogging 102

Reading time: 5 – 8 minutes Recently, there have been many developments in the RSS arena. Changes that will make RSS a major force on the web and a dominant contributing factor to your computing experience. Online marketers should pay special attention to the RSS wildcard in any future marketing ventures. If you’re like the average surfer or computer user (you’re probably scratching your head) what the heck is RSS? Never heard of it? ‘RSS’ stand for ‘Really Simple Syndication’ and its original acronym stood for ‘Rich Site Summary’. RSS is basically just a simple code like xml or html. Truth be told, many surfers who use the web every day probably never heard of html either. However, there is one very important distinction you should realize about RSS — one fundamental difference that makes it such a revolutionary element. It changes how information is transmitted on the web, it sends out or syndicates a site’s contents.... 

Reading time: < 1 minute By Jason Hulott There has been a lot of to-ing and fro-ing in the search engine world of late and there are lots of conspiracy theories as to why these things happen. It is easy as a webmaster to get caught up in these webs of intrigue. You get email notes about them, you view so-called experts’ thoughts on bulletin Boards – hey you probably even read things in newsletter articles! Well I hope so anyway…. The big driver for webmasters currently appears to be content and link building. While link building is important I don’t believe it makes Queen. Maybe a Prince. Content and links DO go hand in hand but, without relevance, the Kingdom is doomed. Sorry I will stop the analogy now! convey_source = "English"; Read More →

Reading time: 2 – 2 minutes 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 packed neatly into one space. If this were a standard freebie theme you wouldn’t be able to see much more than this. It is my esitmation that his home page is home.php rather than the standard index.php. (for more information see the the wordpress codex on) By making use of the home.php as a landing page in your theme you can then make a blog template that will... 

Reading time: 2 – 2 minutes We all know it and we all hate it, and believe it or not we have all participated in it to some degree as internet noobs. There are several ways to deter spam on a blog. First is the use of plugins, I like Askimet WordPress. it works really well and used by most of the big name bloggers so that is good enough for me. The second place to deter spam is with email. if you are a pro blogger you need to have your contact information out there. It is your internet business card and people need to access it. There are some nice forms that will do, but those are only a partial solution, because unless you are able to program it to accept attachments, links, etc it doesn’t have the functional range of email. Posting your email address openly though is a call for spammers, and while many companies like Yahoo and Google do a good job at filtering it for you others don’t. I have found the javascript code below however works very well and keeps bots...