The short answer: I don’t know. But here’s what I have learned: The more articles you write, the higher the likelihood that one of them will be a hit. Of all the articles I have written, the two most popular are: City Search Click Fraud and Kavam.

Did I know they would be hits before when I wrote them? Nope. Was I completely surprised when my Kavam article got over 100 hits in one day and my Citysearch article started attracting more and more coments? Yup. What’s the secret: Keep writing!
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I’ve decided to take the plunge and upgrade my web design WordPress blog to 2.5 - I figured I’d better do this before one of my clients asks me to upgrade their blog Go here to read about the new features it’s got. If you’re a client of mine and you want to see what the new admin area looks like before you upgrade, you can take a look at some of the videos in the link above, or take a look inside my demo blog.

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This article contains instructions on how to convert a Blogger Blog into a WordPress Blog. It assumes that you have a Blogger account that uses Gmail, and that you already have WordPress fully installed on your own domain. It also assumes that you know how to use a .htaccess file accomplish page to page redirection. (If this sounds like gibberish and you would like me to do the conversion for you, please contact me.)

Why consider converting? You know all that wonderful content you’re writting on Blogger? If you have a blogger subdomain (ie. yourname.blogspot.com), and you have your own website, that content is not benefiting your website one bit!

Moving to WordPress that’s fully integrated with your website is a great way to get credit for that content, because the content lives on YOUR domain, not Blogspot. While Blogger does have a FTP publishing capability, in my experience it’s super slow for large blogs, and WordPress is a much more effective solution - easier to customize and jam packed with plugins that make it easy to super-charge your blog.
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Perhaps you like to write your blog articles in Word or received articles from other that are in Word. You have been simply copy and pasting from Word into WordPress, and wondering why the font and style of text doesn’t match some of your other blog articles.
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Duplicate content is not a topic I usually talk about with my website clients. Perhaps it’s because of my academic background and the fear of being accused of plagiarism that my professors drilled into me.

I presume small business owners know they shouldn’t put content on their websites that they didn’t create themselves, but recently, I realized this was an incorrect assumption. And like I usually do when something surprises me, I write a blog article about it
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To optimize your blog for search engines (search engine optimization or SEO), you should understand how much of an impact individual post titles can have on your post’s rankings, and how to manipulate post slugs. Titles and slugs?!
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Maybe you’ve noticed the orange icon at the top of my blog’s URL or on this page, and you’re wondering what the heck is it.

Or maybe you’ve heard others talking about RSS feeds and felt left out.

Or maybe you just are looking for a way learn about ways to improve your small business website but don’t have time to go around searching for information. Using RSS is a great way to have information that’s customized to your tastes and interests, come right to you - just like a waiter will bring you what your ordered from the menu.
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I received a strange email from a client, who said that he thought his website had a virus. When he went to his WordPress blog, he received this pop-up warning from VirusScan:

If you have a WordPress blog, please read on.
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If you’re like me, you sometimes see this “A new version of WordPress is available! Please Update Now.” in the dashboard of your WordPress Blog Admin area. If you’re also like me, maybe you are so busy with other thoughts you ignore these messages. This is just a reminder that it is important to heed these messages and at least click on the “Please update now” link to take a look at what changes are in the latest version to see if they might pertain to you.

Why should you upgrade? Sometimes there are new features to be had. But more importantly, there are continuous security improvements as the brilliant folks at WordPress.org strive to stay one step ahead of the hackers out there.

How can you upgrade? Click here to view the WordPress instructions on how to upgrade. If you’re currently a client of mine and you want help upgrading your version of WordPress, please contact me.

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To add an image to a WordPress Blog Article or Post, just watch this video.
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I love WordPress. But with so many things to think about, keeping my WordPress blog up to date with the latest version keeps slipping my mind. That’s why I recently signed up for automatic notifications.
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I client recently asked me what is “social bookmarking”. You may have seen those little icons at the bottom of my blog posts and wondered what they heck they are for. Those are “social bookmarking” icons, and they make it easier for people who are members of social bookmarking services to bookmark my blog articles. I found this wonderful video that explains social bookmarking, in particular, “del.icio.us”, but it applies to many other services as well. Enjoy!

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I know what you’re thinking, you’re thinking what the heck is a “trackback” and a “pingback”? This is my humble attempt to explain these two types of blog to blog communication and why you might want to enable this behavior in your WordPress blog.
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I often encourage my small business clients to add WordPress blogs to their websites. WordPress blogs are a wonderful way to add relevant content that attracts visitors. Before visitors can find your WordPress blog article though, the search engines, like Google, need to crawl over your blog article and index it. How long does it take for search engines to become aware of a blog article, crawl it and index it? Read on…
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This video tutorial takes you through the basics of creating a post in a WordPress blog. No matter what WordPress looks like on the outside, the administration area is always the same, and therefore this tutorial will apply no matter what theme of WordPress you may use. Enjoy!

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I do WordPress blog installation and customization for my website design clients, and have developed a list of my favorite plugins. Here they are: Read the rest of this entry »

If you were like me, you used the default login “admin” to write many of your blog entries. If you use a blog reader, like me, you can see the name of the user in the feed. And if you were also like me, you often wondered: how could I change this from “admin” to my name? And perhaps you even tried and failed, like me. Here’s how to do this:

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Feedburner is a free service that can help you promote your blog. Blogging is a world unto itself, and Feedburner is a great tool to use to help get more traffic to your blog. Here’s a link to the Feedburner Blog page, that will give you an idea of some of the benefits. Here’s a list of some of the changes I’ve made to my own blog, based on joining Feedburner.

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So you’ve just gotten a new WordPress blog, perhaps Aldebaran Web Design did it for you (if so, thanks for the business!). Here is a list of things I highly recommend you configure and look into to maximize the benefit your blog will have for your small business or personal project.

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You may have heard of “weblogs” or “blogs” for short and wondered what all the fuss was about. While blogs are a great way to express your opinions on a myriad of topics, they are also an excellent way to increase visitor traffic to your website. How do they do this?
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