Blogging

Perspectives on blogging in the UK

Neville Hobson Leave a comment Advertising, Blogging, Business, Communication, Experiences, Marketing, Public Relations, Social Media, Social Networks, Trends, Web, Weblogs

Blogging for business and pleasure is alive and flourishing in the UK, according to the second annual survey of UK bloggers carried out by Vuelio UK in conjunction with Canterbury Christ Church University. The survey was conducted in February 2017 to explore how bloggers work, their activities and views about their relationship with PR professionals and the future commercialisation of their work. Published last week, the results present a useful snapshot of the UK blogosphere. Whether you’re a blogger or someone wanting to understand and connect with bloggers, there’s much of interest in the report. Ten highlights: Although a majority (34%) of survey respondents said they blog for personal reasons, there is continuing growth in professional blogging with more interest […]

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How to make your blog a secure and trusted place

Neville Hobson Blogging, Hardware, Reputation, Software, Technology, Web, Weblog Tools, Weblogs

If you run a self-hosted blog – like WordPress, for instance – now’s the time to enhance your confidence and that of your visitors and community in its security and trust. While this is mostly about data security, it’s also about search engine optimization and search results ranking by Google. I’m talking about enabling https, the secure form of http (hence the ‘s’) that offers important benefits: In its popular deployment on the internet, HTTPS provides authentication of the website and associated web server with which one is communicating, which protects against man-in-the-middle attacks. Additionally, it provides bidirectional encryption of communications between a client and server, which protects against eavesdropping and tampering with or forging the contents of the communication. Authentication of and confidence […]

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UK blogging snapshot in new blogger survey

Neville Hobson 11 Comments Blogging, Communication, Professional Development, Social Media, Trends, Web, Weblogs

An overnight email from Vuelio: How’s your blog doing? How big is your audience, and what are you doing to grow it? Is blogging a hobby, an awareness-raiser, or a money-spinner? We’ve joined up with Canterbury Christ Church University to launch our first ever UK Blogger Survey in a bid to find out what blogging is all about in 2016. We’re asking bloggers all over the country what kind of blogs they’re writing, how popular they are, and how commercial they want to be. The survey takes just seven minutes to complete. We know you’re busy, so we’ll be entering all respondents into a prize draw. We have one iPad Mini 4 and one Lily Drone to give away – […]

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Open Live Writer: a successor to Windows Live Writer

Neville Hobson 8 Comments Blogging, Communication, Experiences, Innovation, Software, Weblog Tools, Weblogs
Open Live Writer

One of the most useful software programs to come out of Microsoft in the past decade is Windows Live Writer, what I consider to be the best offline blogging editor for Windows. WLW first appeared in 2006, but since the last version was released in 2012, with an update in April 2014, it has languished in the no-longer-supported and -developed bucket. I continue to use it, though, as I have still seen no other blog editor for Windows as good as this. Now, though, there’s great news for anyone who’s as wedded to this editor as I am – WLW has been open sourced and is being maintained by a group of volunteers at Microsoft. And the group has now […]

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Developing peace of mind with WordPress plugins

Neville Hobson 7 Comments Blogging, Experiences, Software, Weblog Tools, Weblogs

Whenever a new release of the WordPress content management system comes out, I’m usually on it immediately, updating all my sites running WordPress to that latest version. But not this time. Not yet. Version 4.4 of WordPress was released on December 8, but I’m still on WordPress 4.3.1, the immediately preceding version. The reason? It’s about plugins, the eminently useful add-on software you install that adds additional or improved functionality in many different ways to the core of WordPress itself. The screenshot above shows the problem for me – eight already-installed plugins that have updated versions available but cannot show whether they’re compatible with the new version of WordPress: all I see is ‘Unknown.’ I’d usually go ahead and update […]

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