Blogging

After reading some case studies about the benefits of getting rid of a website’s sidebar, I decided to give it a try on two of my blogs. In the end, getting rid of the sidebars on two of my blogs improved my sites’ bounce rates, pages per session, session durations, % exit, and even ad … Read more

While everyone hates sites bristling with ads and popups, ad blockers are causing legitimate web content creators to suffer more and more lost income each day. Many of the traditional tactics to defeat adblockers, including putting up a paywall, hiding the site content until blockers are turned off, or just begging people to turn off … Read more

As a frequent blogger, I depend on spelling and grammar checking, especially because I’m not a very good proofreader of my own content. So, I was surprised and dumbfounded when I found out that Automattic’s own Jetpack spell checker did NOT work with their new Gutenberg block editor! After looking online, I saw that one … Read more

When you post a web page in a Facebook feed, Facebook will attempt to find the thumbnail image from your site’s metadata. If found, Facebook will cache that image so that it doesn’t have to re-load the image from your site every time it shows up on a Facebook feed. This works great until you … Read more

Stock photography can be expensive. And randomly grabbing licensed images from the Internet can cost you thousands of dollars if you’re found violating copyright and threatened with legal action (this happened to someone I talked to at a Meetup). Filtered Google Search You can find free legal images through a filtered Google search, but I … Read more

Comments are a really important part of any blog. They give you important feedback about your work, and give you invaluable information about what people are looking for. I’ve gotten ideas from some of my most popular blog articles from the comments. So, it’s important to encourage comments on your blog whenever possible! Here are … Read more

A while ago, I had to do a survey of the most popular commenting services out there so I could use it on my highest-volume blog.  My “must-haves” as far as commenting systems are concerned were: For me, some “nice to haves” were: Only ONE commenting platform met all of my requirements!  Here’s a rundown … Read more

Blogging can be a very personal experience. You’re baring your soul before the world. You are vulnerable. One of the worst things is to put yourself out there and receive critical or even mean or hateful comments. I’ve been blogging for some years and overwhelmingly, the response has been positive.  But, one bad or mean … Read more

We all want to protect the content that we create for our blogs and websites, right?  Wouldn’t it be terrible if someone copied your site’s content and you later found out that your copyright notice was wrong and offered you no legal protection? Well, I thought I was diligent by slapping the standard copyright statement … Read more

Much has been written about the differences between Facebook Pages and Groups.  When I needed to decide which to use for a project, I looked online and found lots of sites listing the features of each, yet I felt they missed the essence of which to use in actual practice.  Furthermore, much of the info … Read more