Many thanks to Pearson Education for sending me two recent books about blogging for review. The first of these is Blogging to Drive Business by Eric Butow and Rebecca Bollwitt. It seems that Eric has written the more business and strategy-centric chapters, and Rebecca the more practical information about blogging.
This is a slim volume – 162 pages which includes …read the rest of this article

I claim no expertise, but I have tried and tested a lot of Wordpress plugins on this blog and the following remain on my ‘essential / must-install’ list. I have provided links to each of the plugins, so you can find out more. But if you want to try them on your own site, it is far better to use …read the rest of this article

I’ve just installed the Wordpress Mobile Pack, a free set of plug-ins that format, edit and compress your blog so that it works better for mobile users. It switches to the mobile version on-the-fly as it detects the user agent (browser) used. There’s a link to the mobile version in the sidebar, if you want to know what it looks …read the rest of this article

I’ve been making some changes to this site recently: upgrading to the newest version of Wordpress, choosing a new theme and fiddling with the layout.
One thing I discovered is that, unless you’re running a very minimal installation, it’s quite easy to run out of memory, even with only a handful of plug-ins. Versions of the software have become slightly larger …read the rest of this article

The latest storm in a teacup to upset the blogosphere is the spectre of ‘fast-food content’. Raised as a threat by McArrington himself, the worry is that fast and loose content quickly generated to match popular keywords will swamp quality content in search rankings.
…what really scares me? It’s the rise of fast food content that will surely, over time, destroy …read the rest of this article

I’ve been having a go at the latest chic-geek blogging tool – posterous – recently, as you’ll be able to tell if you look at the posts I’ve made here over the last month or so. But, in the end, I’ve decided not to use it. Why? Read on.
Just to be clear, before I go on to my objections: it’s …read the rest of this article

I’ve recently installed a relatively new Wordpress plug-in from the good folk at Backtype.
This is what it does: it scans the web, including social networks like Twitter and other blogs, for mentions of your post and draws those mentions in as comments on the post. This is a good thing in many respects. It helps to give readers a sense …read the rest of this article

From the Merriam Webster entry:
Main Entry: re·cid·i·vist
Pronunciation: -vist
Function: noun
Etymology: French récidiviste, from récidiver to relapse, from Middle French, from Medieval Latin recidivare, from Latin recidivus recurring, from recidere to fall back, from re- + cadere to fall
Earlier this evening, I made what some might describe as an immoderate comment on Twitter. To whit, when my friend and colleague Mike Butcher …read the rest of this article