Category: Blogging | Page 3

Pruning your content: should you delete?

I’ve got a lot of pages on this website that are lazing around doing nothing for me. Many of the pages I generated over the years seemed like a good idea at the time, but time proved me wrong. Or they were useful at the time, but have no value going forward (who cares what

Nitpickers: proof you’re gaining ground

Here’s something nobody warned me about. When you’re blogging, particularly on a controversial topic, there’s something unpleasant that happens when you start gaining popularity. It involves people coming to your website and telling you in comments how you’re doing everything wrong, and you must do what they say instead. You’ll notice they don’t talk nearly

How to tell if it’s spam

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

WordPress theming: getting comment_form into your theme

WordPress 3.0 has a new php call: comment_form. It’s awesome in that it replaces about half the code in a typical theme’s comments.php file. But it’s not in most legacy themes, and the way to add it to your theme is not so obvious. Also, it’s nerve-wracking to customize because there’s no HTML to edit,

Making commenters work for you: beyond deleting and modding

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

Making commenters work for you: the comment policy

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

Making commenters work for you: going beyond simple moderation

Most webmasters – particularly those from the U.S.A. – think about moderating blog comments in terms of only spam prevention and censoring especially ugly language or hate speech. They think it would be censorship to moderate someone’s ideas, even if those ideas are subtly toxic. But as a blog grows, suddenly the webmaster is outnumbered

Make a leaderboard load after the content in WordPress

It’s ideal to have your content as close to the top of the source code as possible – maybe even crucial. I’ve run the same site both ways, run two sites simultaneously both ways, and every time the theme with the content closer to the top enjoys a boost from the SERPs. SE bots have

Moving to new hosts with Cpanel backup

Thinking about moving your sites to a new host? If both hosts have Cpanel, there are a few ways to do this. First, the “full backup” method, explained here. This one is simplest, but doesn’t always work. The new host may not give you the access level you need to install the backup on that

How to make a GTD WordPress blog

UPDATE: Put your WordPress GTD into a Zoho Notebook, along with your feedreader and most everything else you need at your fingertips. I spent a lot of time this week trying out different online and server-side apps to help me get into GTD mode. Nothing was quite right for me, and eventually I decided I