Content Creation

Coming up with ideas for blog posts is one of the toughest challenges a blogger faces. We've talked before about using a feedreader to speed up your blog writing. That may be all you need if most of your posts involve linking to someone else's and then offering insights of your own. It can also give you brand new ideas as your mind goes off on tangents from what you've … [Read more...] about Coming up with new blog posts

Finding topics to write about is one of the most common problems for bloggers. There aren't a lot of topics most of us could have a conversation about daily, let alone post an article about daily. We're always looking for new ways to keep the inspiration flowing. If your current approach to blogging is something along the lines of "look for stuff; write about it", here's a … [Read more...] about Use a feedreader to speed up your blog writing

When I recently searched for a spam plugin to replace Akismet, I found a rather amusing assortment of spam on a lot of the plugin authors' websites. At first, I took this as an indication their spam plugins totally sucked. Then I realized it was that they don't recognize certain types of spam when they see them. (Which probably means their plugin doesn't recognize it either, … [Read more...] about How to tell if it’s spam

The previous articles in this series talked about going beyond a simple anti-spam approach to comment moderation and actually moderating comments so as to shape comment threads into valuable web pages. If you're convinced you need to do more than eliminate spam and hate speech, read on. Beyond "spam" and "delete" If you don't want to post a comment you see in your moderation … [Read more...] about Making commenters work for you: beyond deleting and modding

We talked the other day about how you don't have to let your commenters run your site. You have the right to go beyond spam-prevention and moderate so that comment threads become a vital part of your website. There's a temptation for webmasters to think of their commenters as their audience. The fallacy is that there are quite a few readers who don't comment ("lurkers") to … [Read more...] about Making commenters work for you: the comment policy