Blog Archives
When it the Best Time to Publish on a Blog?
Blogging We all know that the best way to build a blog out is to publish high-quality content regularly and promote it well. However, are there ways that can give your blog an edge and, perhaps, help it stand out from the crowd? With blogging being such a near-instant medium, many have debated what, if any, impact the timing of the post has. Does publishing in the early AM help you catch people checking their RSS readers before lunch or should you ...
Continue reading5 Steps to Write a Link Bait Post
Writing The term “link bait” or “Digg bait” is sometimes used in a negative light, meant to indicate a type of post that is meant to pander to a lower element than most blog posts. But while this can be true and often times is, it is also not always the case. What the term “link bait” actually means is that the post is the type of work others will want to link to. The types of content people want to link to is as ...
Continue readingHow do You “Subscribe” to a Site?
Blogging Before we begin, a very quick thought exercise: What do you think of when I say “Subscribe To This Blog”? The reason I ask is simple. When I first started blogging heavily, “subscribing” to a site meant simply one thing, taking the RSS feed of a site and reading it in an RSS reader. It might have been a software RSS reader or a Web-based one, such as Google Reader, but the process was the same. The only exception was a ...
Continue readingShould Bloggers Ditch Facebook?
Social Networking Many blogs, including this one, integrate Facebook into their site in one of many ways. From buttons that allow you to share stories via the service, the ability to use Facebook login to post comments or even dedicated pages for the blog. Facebook offers many ways to build their product into your blog and many bloggers have snapped it up. However, privacy concerns over Facebook are now becoming legion. The EFF has reported on the slow shift away ...
Continue readingWriting for the Eye vs. Writing for the Ear
Blogging Being a good writer is more than just following the rules of grammar and punctuation, it’s about understanding how and why the audience reads your work. This allows you to create a work that is engaging to your readers and encourages them to finish every article you’ve written or at least read as much as can be done. However, doing this is not simple and it requires keeping several different factors in mind as you write a post or ...
Continue readingPost Idea+ Plugin: Simple Idea Tracking
WordPress, WordPress Plugins It’s a situation nearly every blogger has faced. You come up with a great idea for a new post, perhaps while writing a different one, and you rush to jot it down. However, inevitably, you lose the paper or toss the note in the trash on accident, only to lose the idea forever. Others, myself included, have resulted to hammering out a quick post with just the title and marking that as an idea with a promise to come back to it later. However, ...
Continue readingShould You Register Your Blog with the U.S. Copyright Office
Blogging In most of the world, including the United States, a work enjoys copyright protection the moment it is fixed into a tangible medium of expression. In short, once the doodle is on the napkin, the photo on the SD card or the blog post saved on the server, it is considered copyrighted. However, in the United States, enforcing those rights can be a bit trickier. If you want to sue for copyright infringement, you have to first register the work in ...
Continue readingPluggio: Workflow-Based Tweeting
Social Networking There’s been a lot of talk over the past few days about Twitter developers merely “filling holes” in Twitter and not really building anything new. The idea being that most of the apps created for Twitter merely fixed problems or inefficiencies in Twitter, not create something truly new. This debate comes as Twitter has released its first official app, thus competing with the developer ecosystem it has created, and purchased the ...
Continue readingFormStack: Easy Form Generation
Design & Coding Every blog needs a way for readers to get in touch with the owner. Though there are countless ways used, including IM, Twitter, Facebook and comments, email is still one of the most popular and one of the most important ways to do so. However, putting your email address on a Web site unprotected is practically an invitation to get spammed. Also, many users don’t have their browsers configured to handle such addresses clearly and, as a ...
Continue readingIs Your Site Mobile Friendly? Does it Matter?
Design & Coding Making your site mobile/iPhone friendly is relatively simple to do. If you’re a WordPress blogger, all you have to do is install WP Touch (previously discussed here) and adjust the options to suit your liking. But if you are among the bloggers that haven’t created a mobile-friendly version of your site, you are not alone. The vast majority of sites on the Web do not have mobile-friendly versions, especially small-to-midsized sites, ...
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