Category Archives: Blogging

6 Steps to Kill Your Community

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There have been a number of new platforms popping up recently that claim to increase your user engagement, get you more comments, increase your traffic, and more, through means that I consider short-sighted and harmful. Since people seem not to mind, I thought I’d write a guide for how to increase the number of comments you get by 400-1,000% and ruin whatever shred of community you had on your site.

via Matt Mullenweg – Lead Developer of WordPress

Matt outlines 6 steps and provides a couple of bonus pointers! One of my main pet peeves in regards to commenting is forcing people to sign-up. If I need to sign up to something to comment, I will just not comment. It’s all about lowering the barriers of entry ;)

Easily Publish Content With Posterous

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One of the smartest people I’ve ever met, Maciej Cegłowski, says you shouldn’t self-host web-based software like WordPress or Fever or eventually, Google Wave, because it requires you to “devote half your life to learning and understanding [server] administration.” Go with a hosted service …

via smarterware.org
Over time, I am actually seeing more value in just using a hosted service to publish content. I have been on both sides of the fence and I realize that when I use a hosted service like wordpress.com I just focused on creating content instead of tweaking the site.

However, now that I have moved back to self hosting the wujimon taiji blog, I have spent an inordinate amount of time finding/tweaking theme, looking for widgets, etc etc. I think there’s an issue if you spend ALL OF A FRIDAY NIGHT working on a website!

There is a very simple answer out there to those who want to publish content but don’t know where the start. That answer is Posterous. If you know how to compose an email, then you know how to use Posterous. Give it a try! All you have to do is send an email to post@posterous.com. The subject of the email will be the title of the post and the body of the email will be the content. You can embed photos, insert youtube links, insert mp3 links, etc and Posterous handles the rest. Easy, eh?

Security Alert – Upgrade to Latest Version of WordPress

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It seems that old versions of wordpress are under attack.  If you have a self-hosted version of wordpress (ie, your blog is not on the wordpress.com service) make sure you have the most recent release 2.8.4.  Ahh.. the joys of maintaining a self hosted blog. The good thing is that upgrading is pretty easy with 2.8 and beyond.  For more, check out: How to Keep WordPress Secure.

Offering Email Subscriptions To Your Blog

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I often get the “How did you do … on your blog” questions via email. Rather than posing the answer for one person, I figured other people may also be interested.  The question I received was: How did you add the email subscription option on your blog.

At a high level, a blog creates what’s called an RSS or XML feed of your blog content. This is essentially a file that gets updated whenever a new post is created and contains your post title, content, date, etc.  A service called FeedBurner will allow you to optimize, publicize or monetize your blog feed and then republish it.  One of the optimization features is the ability to provide email subscriptions.

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