I guess I’ve been lucky, I don’t get too many harsh, mean, angry comments on my blog. But this week I’ve gotten two, and so it got me to thinking about how blogging might necessitate having a bit of a thick skin.

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So you want to start a blog and become a blogger? I recommend you don’t use Blogger or another service that forces you to have a domain like yourblog.blogspot.com or yourblog.wordpress.com - but rather, strongly encourage you to buy your own domain and set up web hosting for your blog. I know this sounds complicated, but in the long run, it’s very affordable, around $10 per month - and you have complete control over your blog. I often get asked to set up blogs on client’s websites - and have run into some issues with different hosting companies - so this article will detail what to look for in a hosting company with blogging in mind.

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Yesterday the blogging community lost, what in my opinion, is one of the finest examples of what blogging can accomplish: Leroy Sievers, author of the NPR My Cancer blog, passed away. I’ve been reading his blog for around 6 months, following his heroic battle against colon cancer that had spread to his brain, lungs, back, hip - pretty much all over his body. His outlook and conversation style reminded me of a good friend I had when I used to live in Florida - so I felt like I “knew” him, even though I didn’t. In many ways, he introduced me to blogging and is an inspiring example of what good can come of authentic, honest, and brave online writing. If you’ve never read Leroy’s blog, take a look, and maybe leave a comment for his wife Laurie, who was his caretaker.

I’ll miss reading your blog Leroy.

We all hate spam. If you own a WordPress blog, and you have comments enabled (which is recommended), you will get spam in your comments. But there’s good news…there are several easy steps you can take to prevent spam comments in your blog.

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WordPress 2.6 was just released and they’ve made a lovely little video, which I’ve embedded below to give you an overview of the new features. As always, it’s really important to keep your WordPress version up-to-date to make sure you have the latest and greatest hacking prevention prevention.

Here’s the video:

And if you’re lucky enough to have your blog hosted at DreamHost, you can even do this upgrade all by yourself by following the instructions in my article “How To Upgrade WordPress“. It doesn’t cost you a thing and is super easy to do.

Of course, if you’re a current client of mine and you want me to upgrade your blog, I’m happy to do it as well.

Happy blogging

I’ve found myself explaining this to my clients, with varying degrees of success, so I thought a really well-written blog article might help. This article will attempt to explain the difference between static web pages and dynamic web pages, and why your particular website might have one or the other or even both.

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As you’re reading this, it’s probably June 23rd or a bit later.

As I’m writing this, it’s May 11th.

Have I invented a time machine?

Nope! I’m just taking advantage of WordPress’s Scheduling feature, and I’m really loving it.

If you’re like me, you like writing blog articles. But you don’t always have ideas all the time. I keep a little note pad with ideas for future articles. But I don’t always feel like writing, and the bloggers out there say you should blog on a regular basis, like once a week, etc. The scheduling feature of WordPress comes to the rescue!

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This is an article about something that really bugs me. It’s known as “scraping” and it means that people out there who are too lazy or too dumb to write their own content for their websites, decide to steal it from your blog. From what I understand, it’s not a matter of if it will happen, but when it will happen.

I’ve been finding a few example of my own blog articles appearing in other people’s blogs, and thought I’d share them with you so you can see what this practice looks like.

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Ever read a blog article that’s complaining about a company an thought, “I’m sure glad they didn’t write that about me”.

How do you know whether other bloggers have written a blog article about you or your company?

It’s easier than you might think if you know how to use a RSS reader. (If you don’t, read my article on how to use an RSS Feed Reader).

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The short answer: I don’t know. But here’s what I have learned: The more articles you write, the higher the likelihood that one of them will be a hit. Of all the articles I have written, the two most popular are: City Search Click Fraud and Kavam.

Did I know they would be hits before when I wrote them? Nope. Was I completely surprised when my Kavam article got over 100 hits in one day and my Citysearch article started attracting more and more comments? Yup. What’s the secret: Keep writing!
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I’ve decided to take the plunge and upgrade my web design WordPress blog to 2.5 - I figured I’d better do this before one of my clients asks me to upgrade their blog Go here to read about the new features it’s got. If you’re a client of mine and you want to see what the new admin area looks like before you upgrade, you can take a look at some of the videos in the link above, or take a look inside my demo blog.

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This article contains instructions on how to convert a Blogger Blog into a WordPress Blog. It assumes that you have a Blogger account that uses Gmail, and that you already have WordPress fully installed on your own domain. It also assumes that you know how to use a .htaccess file accomplish page to page redirection. (If this sounds like gibberish and you would like me to do the conversion for you, please contact me.)

Why consider converting? You know all that wonderful content you’re writting on Blogger? If you have a blogger subdomain (ie. yourname.blogspot.com), and you have your own website, that content is not benefiting your website one bit!

Moving to WordPress that’s fully integrated with your website is a great way to get credit for that content, because the content lives on YOUR domain, not Blogspot. While Blogger does have a FTP publishing capability, in my experience it’s super slow for large blogs, and WordPress is a much more effective solution - easier to customize and jam packed with plugins that make it easy to super-charge your blog.
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Perhaps you like to write your blog articles in Word or received articles from other that are in Word. You have been simply copy and pasting from Word into WordPress, and wondering why the font and style of text doesn’t match some of your other blog articles.
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Duplicate content is not a topic I usually talk about with my website clients. Perhaps it’s because of my academic background and the fear of being accused of plagiarism that my professors drilled into me.

I presume small business owners know they shouldn’t put content on their websites that they didn’t create themselves, but recently, I realized this was an incorrect assumption. And like I usually do when something surprises me, I write a blog article about it
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To optimize your blog for search engines (search engine optimization or SEO), you should understand how much of an impact individual post titles can have on your post’s rankings, and how to manipulate post slugs. Titles and slugs?!
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Maybe you’ve noticed the orange icon at the top of my blog’s URL or on this page, and you’re wondering what the heck is it.

Or maybe you’ve heard others talking about RSS feeds and felt left out.

Or maybe you just are looking for a way learn about ways to improve your small business website but don’t have time to go around searching for information. Using RSS is a great way to have information that’s customized to your tastes and interests, come right to you - just like a waiter will bring you what your ordered from the menu.
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I received a strange email from a client, who said that he thought his website had a virus. When he went to his WordPress blog, he received this pop-up warning from VirusScan:

If you have a WordPress blog, please read on.
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If you’re like me, you sometimes see this “A new version of WordPress is available! Please Update Now.” in the dashboard of your WordPress Blog Admin area. If you’re also like me, maybe you are so busy with other thoughts you ignore these messages. This is just a reminder that it is important to heed these messages and at least click on the “Please update now” link to take a look at what changes are in the latest version to see if they might pertain to you.

Why should you upgrade? Sometimes there are new features to be had. But more importantly, there are continuous security improvements as the brilliant folks at WordPress.org strive to stay one step ahead of the hackers out there.

How can you upgrade? Click here to view the WordPress instructions on how to upgrade. If you’re currently a client of mine and you want help upgrading your version of WordPress, please contact me.

To add an image to a WordPress Blog Article or Post, just watch this video.
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I love WordPress. But with so many things to think about, keeping my WordPress blog up to date with the latest version keeps slipping my mind. That’s why I recently signed up for automatic notifications.
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