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 …
Category: Weblog Tools
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 …
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, …
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 …
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” – …
If you use Google Reader, you’ll know by now that Google is shutting the service down on July 1. That’s tomorrow. Since its launch in October 2005, Google Reader became a popular choice for many as the preferred method of subscribing to, reading and sharing information via RSS from blogs and websites. I’ve had a Google Reader account since its launch, yet I never really used Google Reader. My preference was a desktop reader programme: FeedDemon for Windows. I preferred …
