Bookmarking interesting content you encounter on your travels around the web is very much a second-nature act these days. See and save it now, read or share it later. It wasn't always as easy as that until Delicious came on the scene in 2003 in the early days of the modern social web. It offered not only an easy way to bookmark websites and other content and save those bookmarks to your account on the Delicious website, but also organize the bookmarks via user-assigned tags and enable other … [Read more...] about Delicious: Preserving a big piece of social web history
Weblog Tools
How to make your blog a secure and trusted place
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 … [Read more...] about How to make your blog a secure and trusted place
Open Live Writer: a successor to Windows 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 … [Read more...] about Open Live Writer: a successor to Windows Live Writer
Developing peace of mind with WordPress plugins
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 … [Read more...] about Developing peace of mind with WordPress plugins
Facebook blogging could be great…
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 captions in the post body, and … [Read more...] about Facebook blogging could be great…
The richness of WordCamp London 2015
#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 … [Read more...] about The richness of WordCamp London 2015
Connecting content and the social conversations
A topic Shel and I discuss in this week's FIR podcast episode 715 is commenting on blogs. More specifically, about the conversation that can happen in response to a post someone writes and publishes on a blog, and where the conversation actually takes place. Increasingly, it's not on the blog itself - it's on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, anywhere across the social web except in the comments section of the blog post that prompted someone to add their two pence-worth. Here's an example: … [Read more...] about Connecting content and the social conversations
PR blog lists: not so much who, more how
What's the first thing you do when you come across a list of blogs, ranked in an order of some kind with '1' being the best ranked? a). Post comments about the list to highlight the blogs that aren't in it that you think should be? b). Look for mention of yourself and, depending on where you find yourself in the ranking, tell everyone? c). Dismiss it out of hand as being hardly credible - "it's just a list" - and a waste of time? d). Look for explanations of the measurement and … [Read more...] about PR blog lists: not so much who, more how