It hits me constantly just how many free apps I use that I would find it hard to do without and how many of them it took me so long to find out about, so I wanted to share. Yes, I know. All the cool kids use Gmail. I use both, but I still much prefer Yahoo! Mail. Maybe it's the more traditional method of replying to emails ... Keep reading »
A blog I had running WordPress 2.6.5 was hacked to include a truckload of pharmaceutical links. That was nothing new. I've seen that on my blogs and on others. What was different this time, though, was the method for including the links. I won't republish the code, but here are enough of the functions and variables it used for someone to find this post when searching for more information or to determine if their blog was hacked using the same ... Keep reading »
A huge thanks goes out to Staska.Net who pointed me to Ronald's fix for the new "feature" in WordPress 2.1 that cuts off your RSS feeds at the <!-- more --> tag. I had to use that tag in order to format my homepage the way I wanted to, so I had just resigned myself to having to publish only a partial feed. Not anymore! Now I can have the best of both worlds, ... Keep reading »
Looks like John Chow's Technorati 100 blog has been hacked by ISKORPTIX (safe link), and Geek in Paradise is reporting that the hacker has hit several other blogs as well. Looks like it may be a server hack and not a WordPress hack. Update, 18:05 Eastern: Prompted by Tim in the comments below, I've read back through everything now, and it doesn't look like we know what the problem is at all. I can't believe ... Keep reading »
You've probably heard many times about all the free visitors you can get from search engines. Well SEO, or search engine optimization, is the science -- and art -- of getting a site to rank well in order to get as many of those visitors as possible. The great thing for you as a blogger is that you don't have to been an SEO expert to see quite a bit of search engine traffic to your site because most blogs are tailor-made for ranking well in search engines. Just take a look at the top ten search engine ranking factors and notice how many are naturally inherent in blogs. I count seven to nine, depending on how strict you want to be. Since blogs are almost always text-heavy, very community-driven and interlinked heavily, it's hard to find your blog not ranking for lots of things if it becomes popular. However, there are a few easy things that you do need to do to ensure that you're set up for search engine success. The basic principle behind all of them is that SEO, first and foremost, is about so much more than your homepage. Especially with blogs, you'll find that most of your search engine visitors come in on anything but your homepage. So almost all the basic SEO for a blog has to do with your individual pages. Keep reading »