The Wrong Advices

If you’re having trouble explaining to Grandma what a blog is, this video by the guys at Common Craft should help.

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10 years after the first Alexa toolbar hit the Internet, a new Firefox compatible version has been released, named Sparky.
Some of the features include:

Sparkline - A very small condensed traffic history graph. Gives you a quick view to show whether the site is moving up or down.
Rank - Shows the traffic rank of the [...]

Everybody wants more search engine traffic. It helps grow your readership, it converts well monetarily, and it gives you a warm fuzzy feeling when you check your stats.
However, like many bloggers out there you probably aren’t getting as much love from Google as you’d like. Here are some possible reasons why.

There was a recent poll conducted which produced a flawed list of the ten most hated words on the Internet. Coming in at number two behind folksonomy was the word blogosphere.
I demand a recount!
Blogosphere is clearly the most widely ridiculed and irritating word to spawn from the Internet in the last decade. The only [...]

It’s not often you come across an article that is absolutely spot on with its commentary yet at the same time hilarious.
The article in question is titled 11 Mistakes Your Blog Makes In Bed, and uses sex as a metaphor for blogging.
Michelle’s list of blogging faux pas begins with the following mistake many bloggers [...]

Not all your visitors will be tech savvy users, and even though they might be using a feed reader regularly, it doesn’t necessarily mean they will be familiar with all the terminology.
That being the case it’s a good idea to add some chicklet buttons for the more popular RSS readers to improve your chances [...]

Whenever you make changes to your blogs design (this includes any new plugins you install), it’s a good idea to test whether those modifications are being rendered correctly by different web browsers.
Unfortunately all the major browsers render pages differently and I’ve often found the smallest change can completely mess up my blog. Most of [...]

Muhammad Saleem has written a guest post over at Copyblogger which discusses the importance of writing good headlines for both readers, search engines, and social sites.
He makes some excellent points in this article and I wanted to expand on two in particular. How headlines can affect RSS subscribers and search engines.
RSS Subscribers
Contrary to what [...]

While the built-in editor for Wordpress does the trick most of the time, it’s features are rather simple and don’t allow for more advanced post layouts without getting your hands dirty with some HTML coding.
If you are looking for a more flexible and sophisticated way to compose your posts there are a few blog [...]

As flawed as it is as a metric, many advertising programs still place significant weight on Alexa rank. Naturally if you are part of any of these programs you will want to improve your rank to maximize your earnings. Or if you’re like me you do it for the challenge, and the pleasure of [...]