The Internet is a wonderful place: the most advanced medium for communication of ideas and knowledge that mankind has ever created. But you wouldn’t know it if you looked at the comments section of many blogs and sites, which are full of rancorous trolling and partisan sniping. Not all of them of course, some sites […]

Podcasting is undergoing something of a renaissance. It’s always been popular among a certain demographic, but in the last couple of years, podcasting has gained mainstream acceptance. The number of high-quality podcasts has grown. Traditional media outlets have jumped on the podcasting bandwagon. Skype and Google Hangouts have made creating video and audio podcasts with […]

Do you use RSS to read content on sites you are interested in? In 2014, it might be more pertinent to ask if you know what an RSS feed is. RSS use has declined enormously over the years. It wasn’t widely used in the first place and is now even less popular. WordPress produces a […]

I’m beginning to think that WordPress developers have a case of Medium envy. Every other new theme seems to take significant design cues from the blogging platform. In many ways, that a good thing. As I’ve argued before, using a platform like Medium for publishing takes control away from the writer and puts it in […]

Many bloggers start out with an urge to write and publish without any clear idea of their options when it comes to content management systems. They choose a platform like Blogger, which is Google’s blog platform, and it works fine for them — for a while at least. After some time they frequently find themselves […]

Sentinote is a WordPress plugin that allows Evernote users to write and publish their posts and pages from within Evernote. If your writing workflows are anything like mine, you make extensive use of Evernote. It’s by far the best tool I’ve found for collecting and organizing my notes, images, links, web pages, and other research […]

Once upon a time, the email newsletter was an essential part of any blog. Now we have many different ways of being notified of new content, particularly social networks like Twitter. But, some still prefer to have content delivered to their inbox rather than trawling through social media and RSS feeds — a surprising number […]

Only a tiny percentage of a site’s visitors will leave comments, and the ones who do are not always representative of the audience as a whole. In an ideal world, a significant proportion of readers would engage in some way with a site beyond just passively consuming the content. Encouraging them to do so can […]

If you’re a creative, you’re going to need somewhere on the web to showcase the products of your creative endeavors. Whether you’re a photographer, a designer, an artist, or a musician, without a website your reach is seriously limited. Of course, there are any number of social networks and sharing services that will allow creatives […]

What is your website for? There are various ways to construe that question and various possible answers. Many businesses and bloggers see their site as a central digital presence from which they can establish their brand, attract referrals from search and social, promote their services, publish content, and provide support to customers. A website can […]