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How a Timer Can Help Your Productivity
Productivity It is a very trying time of year for me. Between my haunted house, full-time job and Web site, not to mention the other sites I write for, it is very stressful and I can feel as if I’m pulled in dozens of directions at once. This can make getting anything done very difficult, especially on larger projects. The problem is fairly simple, when there is so much that needs to be done, it is too tempting, for me at least, to try and do ...
Continue readingMy Favorite Writing Assignments
Blogging Kevin’s recent post about how long a blog post should be reminded me of a pair of writing assignments I was handed when I was in school, both of which changed my perspective on writing forever. You see, when I was in high school and college, I spent a great deal of time studying journalism and creative writing, my two great passions. I was hoping at the time to get a job for a major newspaper working in their Web division, helping grow and ...
Continue reading5 Fast Ways to Speed Up Your Blog
Design & Coding Every time someone visits your site, your blog is in a race against the clock. The time between when a user will click the link to your site and can actually read your words is limited. Too long and people just click away. Though, with high-speed Internet becoming as prevalent as it has, these issues have become somewhat less important, though that same speed, combined with instant streaming videos and audio, seems to have frayed people’s ...
Continue reading5 Things Haunting Taught Me About Blogging
Blogging Every year I run a small, free neighborhood haunted house out of my garage. It’s a mammoth undertaking every year involving countless hours of work, a staff of about four or five helping during crunch times and months of planning. All for about 12 combined hours of “open” time in late October. However, like every large undertaking I’ve tried, it’s come with its share of life lessons, at least a few of which apply to ...
Continue readingTwitter Mention Spam on the Rise
Blogging When Twitter recently changed their handling of @replies back in March, few called it anything less than a drastic improvement. The change was simple enough, rather than reading an @reply as a message that had @username in the beginning, it looked for the @ symbol anywhere in the Tweet and changed the feature name to “mentions”. It was a great idea that helped foster the conversation on Twitter, it came with some consequences, the ...
Continue readingHow Often Should You Change Your Blog Theme?
WordPress Themes For better or worse, your blog’s theme is the first thing most people notice about your site when they visit. Even before they’ve read a word they’ve made judgments about your site, its appearance and its professionalism that can not be undone easily. With that in mind, many bloggers obsess over their themes almost as much, if not more, than their content. Considering how easy themes are to change out in most blogging ...
Continue readingUsing a Double-Ender in Podcasting
Podcasting Last week, we took a look at how to set up a free Mac podcasting setup. This included the software applications needed to record yourself, use a soundboard and have a co-host or interviewee talk to you via Talkshoe, Skype or some other VOIP product. But while getting the software in place to run a podcast is fairly easy, getting a high-quality podcast out of it is less so, especially when you are trying to record a conversation over the Web. ...
Continue readingHow To Create a Free Mac Podcasting Setup
Podcasting If you’re a Mac user and are interested in podcasting, but haven’t yet taken the plunge, you’ve probably been a little bit intimidated by getting things to work. Though there are many great podcasting guides, most will ask you to spend hundreds of dollars on hardware such as mixers, external sound cards and so forth. But while these things can definitely help improve your sound, if you’re just wanting to test the waters ...
Continue reading5 Things to Check Before Signing with a Host
Domain Names & Hosting Signing with a Web host is a long-term commitment. Though you can leave a host at any point, doing so is, at best, a nuisance that would be best avoided and, depending on the contract, can be very expensive. As a result, when you sign up for a new host, you want that relationship to work out and last. However, doing that can be very tricky as hosts often times bury the important information under a pile of useless info and marketing. So what ...
Continue reading5 Ways to Find Out What Your Readers Want
Blogging Almost any blogger will tell you that one of the most important things to do is write what your readers want to read about. This is especially important if you are blogging in a niche area where you can spend a blogging lifetime focusing on one aspect of a topic when another is what interests people. But how do you find out what your readers want you to write on? When readers find what they want on a site, they tend to stick around. When they ...
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