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Our featured blog this week is the WordPress hosted Smoke-Free Texas if for no other reason that it has a good message!
However, check out the sensible inclusion of Latest Flickr photos, Twitter feed and Smoke-Free Texas on Facebook links, maximizing their targeted inbound traffic potential. There are useful WordPress plug-ins for these Social Networking sites available from WordPress.Org Social Network
The featured blog this week is littlelioness.net, a personal blog by Fiona, a 27 year old Australian woman currently residing in Canberra. The littlelioness.net domain was registered on 11 September 2002, and is powered by WordPress, and there are archives which go back to November 2007, so Fiona has been blogging a comparatively long time. The theme is WhitePlus, which is available from the WordPress.org Free Themes Directory WhitePlus
The site has some great food pics on the pages which makes them attractive and interesting. Newbie bloggers should take note, and make sure to include photos in your posts to hold your readers’ attention.
As a Speech Pathologist, and an Atheist who sometimes works in Catholic schools, Fiona has some interesting personal challenges, and a chatty style when talking about them. For a view on her world, click here to visit littlelioness.net
Our post last Thursday has sparked some debate around the office about how long a blog post should be. I mean honestly, a blog post should be as long as it needs to be, and no more!
It is a bit like the instruction I was given all those years ago when as a newbie mechanic I asked how far should I tighten a bolt. My mentor, a wily old veteran who had probably been around at the retreat from Dunkirk (or is that Dunquerke?), nodded sagely and then told me (with a straight face) to tighten it until it snapped, and then back off a bit…
As a rule, I always finish a blog post off and then leave it for a few hours before going back to edit down a bit. Usually it just needs to have a few superfluous words removed, and the odd repetition corrected. That is really the same thing, as my old mentor would have advised; write until it is just too long, and then back off a bit!
A quick random sample of a few blogs gives a sample (admittedly unscientific!) of post length as a general guide. The following are average word count per post:
However if you average up posts from one of the more prolific bloggers, the word count can be a lot higher. Penelope Trunk of Brazen Careerist averages about 1500 words a post, with some as high as 1856.
Now if you think about it, the length of you article reflects the content. For a helpdesk how-to, you really only need to know the problem and solution, so a low word count is appropriate. For a coaching article, more wordage is required, because there is likely some scene setting, to give people the vision, sounds and feelings that they might experience. If you are a worldly wise uber-blogger like Penelope Trunk you probably have a lot more to say.
The advice we give to trainee bloggers who ask the question “How long should a blog post be?” is simple and gradual:
To check out the blogs we have sampled here, click on the links below to take your own word count:
We often get asked to give advice and tips about writing a blog. Common questions people ask are:
How much should I write on my blog? How frequently do I need to add posts? What do I do if I get stuck and can’t think of anything to write? While we cover this sort of thing during our WordPress training, it doesn’t hurt to extract a couple or three top tips for writing a blog, just as a reminder. They are:
How Long Should I Make My Post?
For a beginner, we advise you to make your first few posts about 200-300 words, about something you are really passionate about. If you find you have a lot more to say, check if you could split it into two or more smaller articles. If you are a prolific writer, then you can make you posts longer, but for a start, aim to have just three bullet points.
How Frequently Should I Write?
Our advice is to publish small articles every day on your site if you can. That way the content stays fresh. If you find that too time consuming, try a small submission every two or three days, or once a week. If you have split a long article into two smaller segments, post the second part the next day
What Do I Do If I Get Stuck?
Anybody can get a block if they are a writer, it is par for the course. If you found yourself going too long without inspiration try this easy sequence:
If you use this technique, you can find Inspiration in anything you do. It really is that easy! Good luck and happy blogging!
Our featured blog this week is a hosted at WordPress.com, and it is by Charles Harris of Footloose Films. It is a good example of why blogging using WordPress is such a liberating outlet and is part of what make the Internet great. Check out “Best TV drama, my arse” for a sample of Charles’ forthright opinions.
Charles Harris is an experienced award-winning writer-director for cinema and TV. He sold his first script for production in Hollywood and has since worked with top names in the industry from James Stewart to Spike Milligan. As script consultant, he has helped professional writers from Britain, Europe and USA, sat on BAFTA awards juries and lectured on MA courses at London University and London Film School. He is also a qualified NLP trainer and Advanced Presenter.
The Chas Harris Footloose site carries information on Writing and Directing, with a sideline of NLP and Martial Arts! It is small but growing steadily, so we will keep a watching brief on this site. Charles runs workshops on writing Treatments, Screenwriting, and Pitching, which is grabbing the attention of entertainment industry professionals in just a few words. Everybody can use some tips on that!
The WordPress theme used on the Chas Harris Footloose site is Andreas04 by Andreas Viklund. Andreas is responsible for a number of themes, which we have used on our many hosted WordPress blogs.
Follow the links below for more information
If you’ve been on the internet for any amount of time you’re probably familiar with “spam” in your email inbox. For the uninitiated, spam is an unsolicited commercial message trying to sell you something. Some of this is generated by botnets, groups of hijacked PCs which are working secretly for a botnet controller, sending unsolicited mail using the mailbox of unsuspecting PC owners, or probing websites for security vulnerabilities. Other spam is posted by people who have nothing better to do.
So what does this have to do with WordPress blogs? Well just like you can get spam messages in your inbox, people will leave spam comments on your blog. Unlike email spam, where the target is you, in an attempt to get you to buy something, comment spam generally targets search engines like Google or Yahoo! trying to increase the PageRank of a website.
You are probably aware that Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google pioneered a search technique called PageRank. Basically what it does is, in addition to looking at the content of a page they index, they also look at who links to a page and what that link says. This technology is what made Google very good at returning relevant results, and made it the most popular search engine today. So why on earth would a spammer target a search engine through your WordPress blog? Simples! As Aleksandr Orlov the meerkat would say!
By posting a comment on your blog with a back-link to the site they are promoting, they hope to cash in on the PageRank of your site and so increase the ranking of the target site. With hundreds of bots in a botnet, all probing for open comments on WordPress blogs, they could theoretically get to the top of Google search listings for a targeted key phrase. What is possibly more annoying for the webmaster of a spammed blog, linking to a site which is identified by Google as a problem site, could damage the PageRank of the blog which has been spammed. This comment spam or link spam as it is known can be the bane of a popular WordPress blog.
So how do you avoid getting spammed by the comment spammers? Try the following simple tips:
If you are up to editing your web server system files, you can also block the IP address of frequent spammers if you find that a few IP’s are constantly sending comment spam. The easiest way to get rid of these spamers is by blocking their IP address using .htaccess method; adding the following to your .htaccess file:
<limit GET POST>
order allow,deny
deny from xx.xxx.xxx.001
deny from xx.xxx.xxx.002
deny from xx.xxx.xxx.009
allow from all
</limit>
You can list as many sites as you like in the list, putting each one on a new line as above.
By the way Spammers, posting spam to comments on this site will get you an entry on the Google spam report at https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/spamreport, as we use Google Webmaster Tools. As we moderate every comment before it is posted on the site, link-spam will never see the light of day, so you are just wasting your life.
For legitamate ways to increase the PageRank of your homepage, see our earlier post on the subject entitled Improving Your Search Engine Results
If you are interested in even more imaginative ways to fight link spam, check out Conversation With An Idiot Link Broker, from Danny Sullivan at Search Engine Land! Click here to read Conversation With An Idiot Link Broker
Featured WordPress blog: Brazen Careerist – Advice at the intersection of Work and Life
This week we are visiting a blog which is a wonderful place to draw inspiration if you are a writer or blogger, and highly entertaining for everyone, even if they are neither. It is titled Brazen Careerist, by Penelope Trunk, with the subtitle Advice at the intersection of Work and Life. It contains such gems as “if you want to be an idea person, you should sit down and write an idea first thing in the morning”.
Penelope Trunk is the founder of 3 internet companies, most recently Brazen Careerist, a social network to help young people manage their careers. As an entrepreneur she got a column in a national magazine and started giving advice in places like Time magazine, the Wall Street Journal, and the London Times. Her career advice now appears in more than 200 newspapers.
As she points out in Penelope’s Guide to Blogging, a blog is a great way to figure out what you want to do with yourself because writing regularly is a path to self-discovery. For that blinding insight alone she deserves a visit, but believe me, the rest of the site is filled with the same sort of wisdom which bloggers, job seekers, and Internet savvy in general should be immersed in every day.
Another point she has made in her blog is that personal responsibility is the most important trait of a successful career. This is one right out of our business coaching manual and a sentiment we have been able to identify with in other ventures such as life coaching and presentation skills training.
Would be bloggers would befit from reading Penelope’s post entitled What makes a blog successful? This contains some interesting views about why you should blog; we might even make it required reading on our Getting Started With WordPress training!
To read more from this entertaining blogger, click here to visit Brazen Careerist
One of the most frequent questions a new WordPress blogger will ask is “How do I change the Theme?” or “How do I alter the appearance of my WordPress site?”. This post will take you through the simple steps to changing the appearance of your site. After completing this exercise you will be able to download and activate a new theme for your WordPress site.
First of all, log on to the wp-admin pages using the account details you used when setting up, or an account with Administrator role. On the left Menu click on Appearance and the Manage Themes page will appear.
The current theme will be displayed at the top, and any alternative layouts will be displayed under the heading Available Themes. If this is a fresh installation, there will likely be one one alternative, which will be WordPress Classic.
You can see what your current blog would look like using the Classic theme by clicking on the Preview link under the thumbnail view. After a few seconds your current blog will be displayed in the WordPress Classic style. If you wish to change the appearance of the site to Classic, then you can do so by clicking on Activate WordPress Classic at the top right of the preview screen, and you will be taken back to the Manage Themes page. The rest of the world can now see you blog in it’s new style.
As there are thousands of WordPress themes available for free, the next step is to see what themes appeal to you. Click on Add New Themes (under the Appearance menu item) and the Install Themes page displays.
You can Search for themes by keyword, author, or tag, by entering the string in the search box and clicking Search. Enter a string and search to see any themes which match your criteria displayed in the Search Results. At this point you can either:
If you select Install, you should see a number of messages somthing like the following:
Afterwards you will be offered a choice of Actions: Preview, Activate or Return to Theme Installer. Selecting Return to Theme Installer will take you to the Install Themes page so that you can search for another theme. Finally clicking on Themes will allow you to return you to the Manage Themes page, where you will see your new thumbnail picture under Available Themes, or as your current theme, depending on your earlier choice.
Congratulations, you are now able to download and activate a new theme for your WordPress site. In the next post in this series, we will look at How To Manage Plugins in WordPress. Happy blogging!
A common question which is often asked of our support staff is “After Installing WordPress how do you customize it?” So it is about time for More WordPress Configuration Tips, to take you to the next step.
First of all, log on to the wp-admin pages using the account details you used when setting up. In order to make the site your own after installation, we suggest that you customize WordPress by completing the following steps:
In the WordPress General Settings (Settings, then General)
In the WordPress Writing Settings (Settings, then Writing)
In the WordPress Discussion Settings (Settings, then Discussion)
Once you are ready for your Blog to see the world (or is it the world to see your Blog?), in the WordPress Privacy Settings (Settings, then Privacy)
In the next installment, we will show you how to install your new WordPress theme, in order to change the Appearance of your WordPress Blog rather than the default theme.
Regular bloggers will already know that Matt Mullenweg is the co-founder of the WordPress blogging software and founder of Automattic, a company that runs WordPress.com and Gravatar. He has just published an article on cnn.com entitled 10 blogs to make you think. His stated job as the co-founder of WordPress is to help many more people start blogging, and his top ten list is a great place to start reading if you are new to blogging, or a seasoned vetran.
His first recomendation is Scripting News by Dave Winer, who pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software. We particularly like Dave’s blog about the Android operating system, Droidie. This is a blog about the Droid phone from Motorola with the Verizon service and Android 2.0 operating system. We are interested in anything to do with Android OS at the moment, having just taken delivery of an HTC Hero.
Other notable blogs and sites nominated by Matt include Open by Glyn Moody, Raw Thought from Aaron Swartz (check out his FBI file!) and the daily comic XKCD
To read the full article by Matt click here to read Mullenweg: 10 blogs to make you think on the cnn website