This Fall, I celebrate five years of blogging. I have written tons of web development stuff at Perishable Press, lots of helpful WordPress stuff at Digging into WordPress, some creative/artistic stuff at Dead Letter Art, jQuery stuff at jQuery Mix, and some business-related web-design stuff at Monzilla Media. Plus a bunch of interviews, guest posts, and other blogging projects. So yeah, lots of blogging and writing during the past five years. And they just flew by. Despite [...] • Read more »
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A Few Steps Back
I have been doing some non-design-related work recently and have not been saturated with anything even computer-related for the past several weeks. Mostly I have been just enjoying life, but also drawing quite a bit and going around taking photos of old, decrepit homesteads and factories. Needless to say, it’s been a much-needed respite from the usual crunch and grind. Taking a few steps back like this from the Web — even for such a short period [...] • Read more »
New Year Reminder
Just a reminder to stay focused on what you are doing as the New Year unfolds. The world has been overflowing with opportunity and creativity like never before. But most of it is profit-driven regurgitation and mass-marketing of empty hype and latest trends. Stay away from the garbage and keep your mind focused on your goals. Distractions may snag your attention for a moment, but you’ve got to catch yourself as soon as possible and realize that [...] • Read more »
Stupid Twitter Tricks
Might as well face it, Twitter is here to stay. Not that it’s all that bad, just used to be a lot more laid-back and enjoyable. These days it seems to have been taken over by the lowest common-denominator, mostly high-school twits or useless commercial propaganda. Even so, I still enjoy tweeting the occasional profound thought once in awhile, and even like to play around with various types of “advanced” Twitter functionality. You know, cool stuff like [...] • Read more »
How to Protect Your Site Against Content Thieves
Stolen content is the bane of every blogger who provides a publicly available RSS feed. By delivering your content via feed, you make it easy for scrapers to assimilate and re-purpose your material on their crap Adsense sites. It’s bad enough that someone would re-post your entire feed without credit, but to use it for cheap money-making schemes is about as pathetic as it gets. If you’re lucky, the bastards may leave all the links intact, so [...] • Read more »
Find a Diamond in the Rough
Getting the best possible web hosting is for obvious reasons something that all website owners aim to do. However, you might know what type of web hosting you are looking to get but still do not know what provider to partner up with. Many of the web hosting top lists you find on the web today look the same as they all take the same things into account. These guides usually take into account similar factors and [...] • Read more »
Just Nod if You Can Hear Me
I have always heard it said that it’s not what you say, it’s how you say it. When the grocery clerk sarcastically tells you to “have a nice day,” you probably understand it to mean just the opposite, and that the person couldn’t care less about you or your day. Conversely, when your fellow employee jokingly tells you to “go to hell,” you probably take the comment in stride and assume that it was intended to be [...] • Read more »
FeedBurner Subscriber Count Problems
I checked my Feedburner subscriber count on April 2nd and was surprised to see that the number of RSS subscribers had dropped from around 1800 to around 1100. The next day, my subscriber count decreased again, this time to around 700. Today, my Feedburner statistics increased slightly to around 1000 subscribers. So, in the course of three days I lost around 40% of my loyal readers, according to Google Feedburner. Will I get these subscribers back? Will [...] • Read more »
Book Review: WordPress for Business Bloggers
WordPress for Business Bloggers by Packt Publishing was a pleasure to read because it approaches many of the important aspects of WordPress from a slightly different perspective: that of the “business blogger”. The book is aimed at the aspiring business blogger who wants to use WordPress to run a successful business blog. The book claims to skip the basics and jump right into the meat of transforming WordPress into a lean, mean business blogging machine. While this [...] • Read more »
Thoughts on Twitter
Dipping into a little social-media nonsense on this one.. hope you enjoy it! I have been using Twitter now for around two years. In that time, I have gone from hating Twitter to practically loving it. The more I use Twitter, the more I appreciate its value in terms of social networking, self-expression, and even online entertainment. What can I say, it’s just fun to be working online while sharing nano-thoughts with a group of like-minded individuals. [...] • Read more »
Flashforward: Exclusive Interview with Aaron Wall
Aaron Wall on SEO, the future of the Web, Google dominance, and life as a professional taste tester As someone who keeps a close eye on the mystical world of Search Engine Optimization, one of my favorite sources of information is SEO-guru Aaron Wall. Aaron is the author of the immensely popular SEOBook.com, where he shares his knowledge, ideas, and opinions on a wide range of SEO-related topics. I have always admired the direct, informative way in [...] • Read more »
A Social Networking Nightmare
Picture it. You have just prepared some recent snapshots of your buddies from a gathering over the weekend. Special care was taken to choose the images, and resize the images appropriately. As you sign in to your favorite social networking site to upload these images, you realize your credentials are invalid. You type in permutations of your user-name and password, check the “Caps” Key, but find that you are still not allowed access to your account. Your [...] • Read more »
Artificial Omniscience
Eventually, virtually everything will be available through Google. You will be able to get information on anything and everything you ever wanted to know. As technology increases, and more and more data is logged into computers, the amount of data indexed by Google will approach infinity. In addition to all preexisting historical information, books, music, manuals, software, programs and everything else that people and machines have already produced, there is an exponentially increasing amount of new data [...] • Read more »
Open Call for Guest Posts at Perishable Press
After much deliberation, I have decided to take a short vacation away from the computer. I have been working like a dog recently, and feel that a change of pace would help recharge the ‘ol brain cells. I haven’t decided exactly when it will be, but I am thinking that some time off in August (my favorite month) would be swell. Maybe go to the coast, do some traveling, take a long nap, or whatever. Technically, I [...] • Read more »
The Pros and Cons of Blogging
Among my friends, family, coworkers, and other social acquaintances, there are not many “bloggers.” In fact, there aren’t any. Two or three of my old friends have websites that are updated once or twice per year, but none are actively blogging and sharing their ideas with the online community. Many of my “non-blogging” peeps simply don’t “get it.” To them, the whole idea of consistently updating a website with new material seems like a big waste of [...] • Read more »
Take Your Arguments to the Next Level
Everybody loves to argue. Unfortunately, not everyone understands their own absence of understanding. As you listen to people argue, it always sounds as if everyone knows everything about the topic at hand. This behavior seems to come standard with humans, however, what kills me is how people never desire nor seem willing to take their argumentative skills to the next level. In fact, many people I listen to don’t even realize that “higher,” more sophisticated levels of [...] • Read more »