Blog Category: Blogs

All bloggers should read this Reuters article “Judge in US defamation rules blogger not journalist“. Sorry if you’ve already heard of this, I’ve been on vacation and am just finding out now.

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I just noticed that my Feedburner counter shows zero readers. I went searching to see if anyone else has this issue and found this post: Feedburner Counter displays 0 readers on all blogs – so apparently it’s not just me. I agree with Vincent and am hoping Google hasn’t just decided to kill Feedburner services. Here’s a link to the official Feedburner Status Blog.

UPDATE: The number came back, magically, by itself. No idea why.

One of my clients found this excellent list of “50 Blog Topics for Small Business Owners”. If you have a small business website with a blog, and are banging your head on the desk trying to think of what to write about, read over this list, it’s sure to help you think of something to write!

50 Blog Topics for Small Business Owners by Jessica Swanson.

In the last 12 months, I’ve had three clients with WordPress blogs get hacked into. In every case, the WordPress version had become outdated. So if you see a little message like this when you log into your WordPress Dashboard:

Don’t ignore it, just hit the “Please update now” link and follow the instructions.

WordPress may release updates every month, or every few months, so be sure to log into your blog at least monthly to check for a new version number.

Prevent hacking and viruses – keep your WordPress Blog updated!

I ran across a really impressive article today while I was working on a client’s WordPress blog. She had hired a company to perform SEO (Search Engine Optimization) on her  blog and was unhappy and looking for guidance. While I knew some of the basics, I went in search of some expert advice.  I wanted to post a link to this comprehensive article called “WordPress SEO: The Definitive Guide To Higher Rankings For Your Blog” written by Yoast that I found, because although it’s quite lengthy and time consuming, it’s a wonderful checklist for those of you who have time and patience and  want to increase the rankings of your blog.

He starts out with the most important things to focus on:

• Permalinks (I always do this)
• Titles (yup, this too)
• Descriptions (um, don’t really do this at all for my posts)
• More text (who new you could change this!)
• Image Optimization (those pesky alt tags!)

Enjoy!

Usually Akismet protects my blog from spammers. It’s captured and prevented nearly 50,000 (yes, fifty thousand) spam comments from annoying me. But today, all of a sudden, I got a dozen spam comments one right after the other. I looked at the IP addresses, and they were from all over, Israel to the Netherlands. So I looked inside the Akismet Configuration and saw this scary message: “Unable to reach any Akismet servers.”

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One of the many reasons I like using DreamHost as a hosting company, is their WordPress “one-click installer” program that makes adding a WordPress blog to a website fast and simple. This article lists directions on how to set up a blog on DreamHost, assuming that you’ve already purchased a domain name and set up a hosting account with DreamHost. These instructions also assume that you’ve already got a good understanding of how WordPress works.

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I often get very short comments in my blog. They often say “Great post” or “Thanks for the tip”, or some such vague language. One of the ways that people hope to improve their website page ranking, is by getting inlinks – and they do this by leaving fake or spam comments in other people blogs. But how can you tell the difference?

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So you want to start a blog and become a blogger? I recommend you don’t use Blogger or another service that forces you to have a domain like yourblog.blogspot.com or yourblog.wordpress.com – but rather, strongly encourage you to buy your own domain and set up web hosting for your blog. I know this sounds complicated, but in the long run, it’s very affordable, around $10 per month – and you have complete control over your blog. I often get asked to set up blogs on client’s websites – and have run into some issues with different hosting companies – so this article will detail what to look for in a hosting company with blogging in mind.

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Yesterday the blogging community lost, what in my opinion, is one of the finest examples of what blogging can accomplish: Leroy Sievers, author of the NPR My Cancer blog, passed away. I’ve been reading his blog for around 6 months, following his heroic battle against colon cancer that had spread to his brain, lungs, back, hip – pretty much all over his body. His outlook and conversation style reminded me of a good friend I had when I used to live in Florida – so I felt like I “knew” him, even though I didn’t. In many ways, he introduced me to blogging and is an inspiring example of what good can come of authentic, honest, and brave online writing. If you’ve never read Leroy’s blog, take a look, and maybe leave a comment for his wife Laurie, who was his caretaker.

I’ll miss reading your blog Leroy.

We all hate spam. If you own a WordPress blog, and you have comments enabled (which is recommended), you will get spam in your comments. But there’s good news…there are several easy steps you can take to prevent spam comments in your blog.

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I’ve found myself explaining this to my clients, with varying degrees of success, so I thought a really well-written blog article might help. This article will attempt to explain the difference between static web pages and dynamic web pages, and why your particular website might have one or the other or even both.

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As you’re reading this, it’s probably June 23rd or a bit later.

As I’m writing this, it’s May 11th.

Have I invented a time machine?

Nope! I’m just taking advantage of WordPress’s Scheduling feature, and I’m really loving it.

If you’re like me, you like writing blog articles. But you don’t always have ideas all the time. I keep a little note pad with ideas for future articles. But I don’t always feel like writing, and the bloggers out there say you should blog on a regular basis, like once a week, etc. The scheduling feature of WordPress comes to the rescue!

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This is an article about something that really bugs me. It’s known as “scraping” and it means that people out there who are too lazy or too dumb to write their own content for their websites, decide to steal it from your blog. From what I understand, it’s not a matter of if it will happen, but when it will happen.

I’ve been finding a few example of my own blog articles appearing in other people’s blogs, and thought I’d share them with you so you can see what this practice looks like.

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Ever read a blog article that’s complaining about a company an thought, “I’m sure glad they didn’t write that about me”.

How do you know whether other bloggers have written a blog article about you or your company?

It’s easier than you might think if you know how to use a RSS reader. (If you don’t, read my article on how to use an RSS Feed Reader).

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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.

Did I know which articles would be hits before when I wrote them? Nope.  What’s the secret: Keep writing!
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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.)

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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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