I’m trying something a little new on my blog. Previously, every time I read a cool post, I submitted the link to Writer River. The problem with that, however, is that posting to another site isn’t such a smart search engine optimization (SEO) strategy. Using the Writer River method, people who follow trackbacks don’t follow them back to my site (idratherbewriting.com), but rather go to another site (writerriver.com).

Additionally, it’s more beneficial for me to link to others from my idratherbewriting.com site, because it has a higher authority than writerriver.com. Links from higher authority sites are more beneficial in transferring search engine visibility than links from lower authority sites. For example, a link from NYTimes.com will push you to the top of Google results while a link from Sam’s vacation blog probably won’t have much influence.

So here’s what I did to better search engine optimize my site. I created a new section on my site called What I’m Reading. The page shows all the posts I’m reading (which I want to share), with short commentaries or summaries about the content. This way I keep the keywords and links on my site. I’m hoping that this strategy will create more pull back to my own site and will increase the rank of those I link to, more so than links from Writer River. Read the rest of this entry »

With a title like crunching and burning, it may sound like I’m writing about a painful illness, such as having leprosy with third degree burns and walking on sharp gravel. But actually this post is about the terms some companies use to try to make their applications look super-cool. If you’re a web 2.0 company trying to establish your product as the bomb, all the rage, critical to being hip, etc. you can’t use generic names and emotionless adjectives. You want to conjure up some inner appeal to coolness.

So when you upload images into WordPress, you see a progress bar that says “Crunching.” Crunching is sexy. Crunching sounds exciting. Crunching makes you feel like you’re on the edge of some new functionality that is so revolutionary, no other term can quite describe it. But really, all crunching means is resizing. When you upload images in WordPress, the image editor resizes the original image into three separate images: thumbnail, medium, and large.

"Crunching" is really just resizing

The problem with using the term “crunching” rather than “resizing” is that, although it’s cool, most users don’t actually realize what’s going on. They don’t realize that they can set the dimensions that the image is being resized to. They don’t realize this because crunching is vague. Crunching is eating grape nuts, or stepping on cheerios, or feeding tickets into Chuck-E-Cheese counting machines. Crunching rarely means resizing. The tradeoff for cool interface terms is confusion. Read the rest of this entry »

WordPress’s threaded comments feature is not entirely now; it’s been around since 2.7 (the current version of WordPress is 2.7.1). But even though under Settings > Discussion you see the ability to activate threaded comments and indicate how many levels deep you want it to be, you have to actually make some changes to your theme for threaded comments to work.

The following screenshot shows an example of threaded comments.

Threaded Comments. Click the image to see the actual post.

You see that you can reply to comments directly within the thread, rather than at the bottom. If you receive a lot of comments, threaded comments can add a lot to the usability of the conversation. Read the rest of this entry »

When choosing a blog platform, you have a variety of options: Drupal, Movable Type, Typepad, Blogger, Joomla, Expression Engine, WordPress.com, self-hosted WordPress, and others. But when you start researching the options, WordPress seems to have at least 10 main strengths over its competitors: Read the rest of this entry »

I helped another person whose WordPress site was hacked this weekend. I’ve noticed a trend about sites that get hacked. Most of the people installed their WordPress blog either long ago, before the right security phrases were included in the wp-config.php file, or they installed WordPress through an auto-installer that didn’t insert the right security phrases.

The wp-config.php file is the key file that contains your database name and password. It’s the file that makes the WordPress files talk with your MySQL database, where all your posts and pages are stored. wp-config.php has also been upgraded with stronger security phrases over the past couple of years.

If you have a self-hosted WordPress site, FTP into your root directory and download the wp-config.php file. Then download the latest copy of WordPress from WordPress.org and compare the wp-config-sample.php file in the WordPress download with your version of wp-config.php. After the database, username, and password details, there should be a section of security phrases that looks as follows: Read the rest of this entry »

Last week I gave a webinar on WordPress to the STC-Suncoast chapter. I recorded the webinar using Camtasia Studio. If you have some time on your hands (for example, if you’re going on a plane ride to Atlanta and you have a few layovers), you can watch the webinar on your computer.

A few notes about the webinar. First, your computer’s resolution needs to be at least 1280px wide, because this is how I recorded it. Also, to watch it online, you need to have high bandwidth. I also made a version you can download for this very reason. Third, ideally I would break this presentation into smaller sections, tagging each section with labels in a table of contents. But that would require my whole evening, so I decided to pass on doing that.

The file is about 275 MB, which is quite large. If your bandwidth is restrictive, try downloading the zip version. After downloading and extracting the zip file, click the .html file in the folder.

Download WordPress Video in a Zip File

Watch MPEG4 WordPress Webinar Video (it has to load 10% before it starts to play)

If you’re a writer, the most logical side job for the weekends is freelance writing. You know, copyediting for websites or other projects that people have. I’ve done this in the past, mostly picking up jobs from my brother-in-law who designs interactive flash sites and games for people. At times, the clients need copy as well. However, I’ve pretty much stopped doing freelance writing, for several reasons. Read the rest of this entry »

April 2009 Update: You can watch a recording of the webinar here.

I’m giving a webinar to the STC Suncoast chapter on WordPress on April 14, if you’re interested. The title of the webinar is “Introduction to WordPress.”  Here’s the description:

If you’re a writer, chances are you already have a blog or are thinking of starting one. And if you work in technology, most likely you’re thinking of using WordPress, the preferred blogging platform for most techy geeks. Starting a WordPress blog and posting content is fairly easy, but the realm of possibilities in WordPress extends far beyond this. Read the rest of this entry »

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Download MP3 (to download, right-click and select Save Target As)
Length: 40 min.

This is the second half of the Blogging for Technical Communicators webinar that I gave to the STC-Rocky Mountain chapter on February 19, 2009.

Here’s the accompanying PowerPoint visual.

Note: Make sure you listen to Part 1 first. Otherwise you’ll come into this podcast in media res.

Topics covered in this half of the podcast include the following:

• How Your Audience Consumes Blog Information
• Key Elements of Blog Appeal: Story, Voice, Transparency, Honesty
• Making the 652 Posts Findable on Your Blog
• Comments — and What to Do With Them
• What Happens to You When You Blog
• Questions Everyone Asks About WordPress

This rotating flash tag cloud provides a curious approach to tags, no doubt more novel than useful, but still interesting and somewhat worthwhile. The flash cloud shows only 80 tags (any more and it’s unreadable).

My rotating WordPress tag cloud (click to view the flash version)

For a comprehensive list of site tags, see my tag index. Both arrangements lack usability. I’m never quite sure what to do with tags. My approach has been to treat them like index keywords, so I often tag each post with a handful of freeform tags that come to mind.

However you approach the organization of your content, making 697 posts (the number of posts on my blog) findable on a website that people don’t spend more than 5 minutes browsing is a formidable challenge. Common organization schemes, beyond tag clouds (whether “cumulus” or flat, list or other), include category lists, date-based archives, related posts, random posts, most popular posts, most popular posts by category, indexes, category indexes, top 10, article series links, manual arrangements of links, and a search box.

Despite all of these methods, none seems to be especially compelling. Ninety percent of users arrive at the from search or feed, scan the posts on the home page, perhaps the related links on the post they landed on, and then click away. They see less than 5% of the total site content. What do you feel is the best method for organizing blog content?