I wish I could tell you that I never made any of these mistakes, but that just isn’t true. A couple of these items have cost me dearly, and honestly, the first one I have learned not once, but twice. If you’re starting out, this list can save you a lot of trouble in the future. If you’re an experienced blogger, you may find some pain down there: Own your domain – I’ve had lots of calls looking for help…
I installed the autoupdate plugin on David Churbuck’s blog yesterday and this morning he used it to update the software in a couple minutes. This is truly delivering on the promise of the blog, a simple content management system which non-technical users can manage themselves. From his post: About one minute, a simple, straightforward set of questions, and ta-da, I am up to date with the latest verison. Gratitude aside, this auto update is a big step towards making WordPress…
(For our newer readers, I used to work for the premier supplier of newspaper software systems, and in the dim and distant past was a writer with the Worcester Telegram – so I still follow what’s going on in the print world quite closely) The Sunday New York Times had a very intesting article this morning entitled “I Got the News Instantaneously, Oh Boy” which was written by Media Writer Tim Arango. In it, Tim takes on the issue of…
Throughout new media, we keep hearing one term over and over again: relevance. The ad networks seek to provide relevant ads, we try to provide relevant content, we all seek relevent metrics to judge our success. Merriam-Webster defines relevance as: 1 a: relation to the matter at hand b: practical and especially social applicability : pertinence <giving relevance to college courses>2: the ability (as of an information retrieval system) to retrieve material that satisfies the needs of the user Many of the links we get aren’t really relevant. This…
I used to use Technorati to find compelling blog posts to share and comments. It was rather convenient to be able to go to one spot and find out what people were saying in blogs around the globe and to easily search. One of the most compelling features, for me, was that it was an application designed with blogs only in mind. This morning I was looking a set of compelling blog posts on the anniversary of 9/11. So I…
When I started this site in March, after I stopped working with Vario Creative, where I had previously been blogging, I expected that the same traffic building steps that had worked for me before would work here. After 5 months, I can safely say, that’s not the case. You see, when I started blogging at Vario, the important keys to getting readership were Technorati position and getting trackbacks from other sites. In today’s world of sploggers and spammers, the trackback…
I’ve been telling everyone for a while that WordPress is a Content Management System – now I’m ready to prove it. I’ve set up a small site for The National Gallery and Gift Shop in Sutton, MA using WordPress and I’m thrilled with the way it’s turned out. Before I mention the features of what has been setup, you need to know one thing – I was able to train them how to enter content, manage their calendar and…
David Churbuck linked to the Ben Worthen story in the WSJ yesterday entitled “Why Most Online Communities Fail“. David points out that a simple typo from a Deloitte powerpoint managed the ruin the story and deflect the discussion from the matter at hand to a moot discussion on percentages. 1. Going out with the claim that 60% of businesses invest over $1 million in online communities thanks to a Deloitte typo that should have stated 6% is not a great…
I remember when I first setup WordPress back in 2003, the old 1.x days, my comment was that “It’s just like a CMS (content management system) with most of the functionality removed.” Well, with the release of WordPress 2.6, I can finally eat my words. It’s now simply a content management system, and a darned good one at that. That’s right, content management system. To call it a blogging platform is to sell it short. It’s now all the features…
I ran into an interesting issue recently, and since I had so much trouble finding a solution, I’ll post about it. We have a very large WordPress site with somewhere around 32,000 posts. Sometime during may the database (MySQL 5.10) started to randomly crash, taking along with it the Apache server, etc. Every time the crashes occurred, we’d find that the number of users had climbed over the available processes, in this case, 501. We went through a whole host…