Blogging Basics Archive

One of the best things about WordPress is the number of plugins available that let you customize it to the way you blog. Just like with WordPress themes, though, wading through all the available WordPress plugins can get overwhelming very quickly. So, I wanted to take some time out to list my favorite plugins. These may not be the best plugins for your particular blog, but they're some of the most useful ones out there. Keep reading »

Just wanted to give you an update on my Best WordPress Themes post from a couple of weeks ago. We're up to 28 great themes now in just two weeks, and we've got a full queue through next week. The longer we go, the more convinced I am for the need for someone to separate the wheat from the chaff, but I'm interested to hear whether you feel the same way! Also, I wanted to give a big ... Keep reading »

Hopefully you're using some kind of stat tracking software on your site so that you know what's going. There are some really good free ones out there, and let me say right up front that I completely understand that they need to make money to stay in business. StatCounter (a great, free stat tracker) announced last Sunday that: We were shocked to discover just today that another well known stats provider is allowing up to 9 cookies to be installed ... Keep reading »

When I asked "Does an RSS Feed Imply Republish Rights?" I never thought I'd see as blatant a case as Spivot. (You'll have to type www.spivot.com into your browser to get to their site, because there's no way I'm giving them a link.) They're building a business on making it easy for people to find your content ... and then read it on their site. In fact, you have to work hard to even find a link to ... Keep reading »

That's the title of an article I just read. Actually, sorry, it's what the title should have been. It was actually 20 Quick Ways to Increase Your Alexa Rank. Only a handful were real, long-term ways of increasing your rank, though. The rest were simply ways to manipulate your ranking for short-term gain. Be very careful of advice like this that detracts you from what your focus should really ... Keep reading »

Frequently, each of us blogs something that, given the resulting user feedback, we would have written differently given a second chance. That very thing happened over at ProBlogger.net yesterday with 10 Ways to make your Blog more Attractive to Advertisers. The guest blogger, Chad, strongly recommended not using AdSense on your blog. Well, readers had quite a bit to say about that, and if you are in the habit of reading only blog posts and not the comments, ... Keep reading »

Oops. For those of you who are reading via RSS, I forgot to post my shared links once I hit 10 new ones like I promised last week. So without further ado, here's the new 14! Keep reading »

I realized while looking through a lot of the WordPress themes that I linked to last week (Nobody Cares What Your Blog Looks Like) that the majority of them just weren't great. That weren't terrible by any means, but if I were starting with a new theme, I wouldn't recommend most of them. That experience, coupled with the very low signal-to-noise ratio of WordPress's official theme site, spurred ... Keep reading »

Google Reader has a Share feature that allows you to mark items in the RSS feeds that you subscribe to. When you do that, those items are then made available for public consumption through a custom URL and through a custom RSS feed. Well I read things all the time that I want to share a link to, but it's frequently a chore to write a full post about them, and I just never seem to get around to ... Keep reading »

I've just about had it with Microsoft. I've been a Microsoft dork for as a long as I can remember (even went into work at 3 AM to be one of the first to download IE 3 (and have the t-shirt to prove it)), but my experiences over the last year or so with everything Microsoft, coupled with the painfully true PC vs. Mac commercials, have me seriously contemplating Mac-dom. So that made me even more intrigued by Chris's ... Keep reading »

I'm an admitted Iron Man nerd.  I saw it three times in the theater, and I almost never go to ...

Mark at Business is Personal generates more genuinely great content consistently than any other blog I know of.  He hits a homerun just about every time up to bat.  ...

Love this post by Alan today.  Here's my favorite part: Gurus claiming they make money from the net or whatever line they’re using is like saying the guy we buy ...