Blogging Basics Archive

WordPress 2.5 Image Upload Error

Wanted to give a huge thanks to Deepak. After updating to WordPress 2.5 several days ago, I only today tried to upload an image for the first time. Well, the only result I could ever get was a box labeled "Crunching..." and then a less-then-helpful error message that read only: An error occurred in the upload. Please try again later. After a little searching, though, I came across Deepak's post that had exactly what I needed. Thanks, ... Keep reading »

All You Ever Need to Know About Blogging

That's the title of one of the best articles I've ever read and you can find it over at Meta Best Blog Win. Great advice in a great format. A big thanks to Free Lancer for pointing it out.

2 Quick, Easy Ways to Stunt the Growth of Your Blog

Developing a sense of community among your readers not only helps your readership grow faster, but it also keeps people coming back more often. I realize, though, that some of you would rather only your mother read your blog (and through a feed reader no less), so for those readers I'm excited to present two quick, easy ways to make sure your blog grows very slowly. Don't Respond to Comments This one works great! ... Keep reading »

Beware Trackback Spam

On some of my blogs, trackback spam has now become rampant. Not content to simply spam the comments, spammers are now scraping content from the RSS feed, posting it to spam blogs (splogs), and sending a trackback to the violated site in order to pick up a free link. The problem is that you wouldn't realize it was spam in most cases. On the surface, it looks pretty legit. Why is trackback spam a problem? Well, aside from the ... Keep reading »

Darren Follows Up on Gaming Technorati

You may have run across the scheme circulating now that allows you to quickly move up in the Technorati Favorites ranking if everyone plays along. Darren weighed in on that yesterday, and now he's clarifying his position after receiving quite a bit of negative backlash. Keep reading »

Great Things I’ve Read — April 27

Time for another collection of links for those of you who have subscribed to the feed and don't get to the site often. Keep reading »

My FeedBurner Feed Count Experiment

Several weeks ago, I read Matt's "How I Got 283k Feed Subscribers in 1 Day." The way he did it was to take TechCrunch's FeedBurner FeedCount chicklet and put it on his own site. By changing the link on the image to point to his own RSS feed, though, few would realize that he didn't actually have that many subscribers. I found it very interesting, but that was about it since I knew I'd never have any reason to fake my feed count. Over the next few weeks, though, I found myself repeatedly coming back to this statement: I can see the logic behind someone wanting to use a more popular feed image. Showing a larger subscriber count than what your blog has naturally makes your site seem more popular which unfortunately makes new visitors more likely to stick. Keep reading »

Think Hard About Attending Elite Retreat

If you're serious about your blogging, you should consider attending the upcoming Elite Retreat in Orlando. I went to the first one back in December, and it led directly to me getting to the point just three months later where I was working 100% for myself. If that's at all on your radar, I would highly recommend this conference over any other. Here's why. Keep reading »

10 Blogging Mistakes to Avoid

Back in February, John Chow wrote about 10 Blogging Mistakes To Avoid. He's dead right on 9 of them (not sure about #10 ;) ), and it's definitely worth both a read now and a bookmark for reading at least once a week from now on. I know I will.

Screw Up? Don’t Try to Hide

If you're active on the web for very long, you will screw up. It's inevitable. How you handle it can make you or break you, though. To show you what I mean, let's look at three different examples: one from last year in which a company dealt swiftly and expertly with a problem of their own making and two from this year where just the opposite was the case. I think the end results will be more than enough to convince you to be very proactive the next time you screw up. Keep reading »