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 …
Category: Blogging
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 …
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 …
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. …
Facebook announced some updates to its Notes tool last week designed to make it appeal more to users of the social network than has been the case so far. Notes lets you write longer-form content exceeding the brevity a status update gives you, and post it to your Facebook timeline to share with your friends. Think of it as ‘blogging lite’ within Facebook – the update brings some new features including adding a cover image to your post, adding images including …
#wcldn (@ WordCamp London) https://t.co/RpOQMSlSQ7 pic.twitter.com/ZFgx9DWeFA — Neville Hobson (@jangles) March 21, 2015 This past weekend, as many as 600 people got together in North London to talk about things WordPress, the content management system that is the platform of choice for more than 75 million websites worldwide, and is in a market-leading position with blogs. It was WordCamp London 2015, a three-day event comprising a contributor day on Friday, and the two-day conference over the weekend that I attended, …
One of the prime reasons to start and maintain a blog, especially for business purposes, is the conversation that might happen when you publish a post. You have something to say that others might have some views on, in agreement or disagreement, perhaps branching out in a related topic direction. Enabling others to add their perspectives to your post in the form of a comment is the foundation point for making a conversation happen, and connecting all the points of …
Back in the day when blogging was social media, in the decade of the 00s, you were pretty limited in the methods you could use to publish your thinking and ideas. Then, you only had blogs, the websites that enabled anyone with a thought to create a web page (a post) and publish it. But those websites and those who blogged kick-started a near-revolution in how people expressed themselves and who did that self-expressing. That time is epitomized in Hugh …
Every week, I receive two or three requests to publish guest posts on my blog. The requests come by email from people I don’t know who almost always have a Gmail address, not a recognisable company domain. And there is usually nothing in the email about the person other than a name (which often doesn’t quite match the name in the email address), and no links to any presence on the social web. They offer to be guest bloggers, writing …
