by Noemi Tasarra-Twigg on April 26th, 2013
How’s it going, folks? The last weekend of April is around the corner. Are you going to do something special to reward yourself?
Before you kick off those shoes, here are the highlights from this week’s Job Board.
A virtual newsroom is looking for a digital copy editor to work remotely. They use browser-based CMS, InDesign CS4, Adobe PDFs and Google documents, as well as basic in-house systems. If you’re more reliable than anyone else you know, hit Apply!
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Categories: Jobs
by BP Guest Blogger on April 26th, 2013
The other day, I was reading an entry here about how to make your blog mobile friendly, and the last thing the writer mentioned is a blog concept that I personally advocate, that of responsive design. If you are unfamiliar with responsive design, essentially it is designing your website so that it automatically adjusts to fit the screen of most mobile users. While I personally advocate responsive design, I understand that it is not for everyone. Today, we will take a look at some of the pros and cons of using responsive design for your blog or website. Read More
Categories: Blog Design
by BP Guest Blogger on April 26th, 2013
WordPress has rapidly become one of the most popular content management systems on the web. This has a number of advantages for users – the main one being rapid development of both the core platform and additional themes and plugins – but also means many sites end up looking the same. Customizing a WordPress theme can be an easy way to make your site stand out. There are a number of methods for theme customization, with some requiring little or no knowledge of programming. Here are four of the most popular methods. Read More
Categories: Blogging Tips, Blogging Tools
by BP Guest Blogger on April 25th, 2013
Building a Twitter following doesn’t have to be a complicated process. When you build a following by being yourself, you’ll find you have a much more quality audience for your tweets. The people who choose to follow you will be more likely to be interested in your tweets, and to retweet and interact with you. Although it may take time to gain a substantial audience at first, the higher quality of your followers will make it more than worth the effort and time. Read More
Categories: Blogging Tips
by Jake Rocheleau on April 25th, 2013
Making the decision to invest in a VPN is not an easy one. You will need to weigh the pros and cons of paying for such a service and determine which provider would best suit your own needs. But it is very commonplace for modern Internet users to be looking for a more secure method of accessing websites. Even other common tasks such as FTP and SSH will log your natural IP address, so there is a multitude of reasons for looking into private access.
But I think that many tech-savvy users will gloss over the key points without really browsing through each website. I want to stress how important it is to make sure you choose the right provider. Also how you can educate yourself on the differences between proxy support and a full VPN software package. I think this wiki entry has some good details worth skimming.
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Categories: Blogger Tools
by Jonathan Bailey on April 24th, 2013
Earlier this month, WordPress users across the world (as well as users on other platforms) fell victim to a massive brute-force attack on their sites.
The hack, or attempted hack, used a large botnet (a network of compromised computers doing the bidding of someone else) to repeatedly try and guess passwords on WordPress sites to gain administrative access to them. From there, the botnets would take over the sites and attempt to integrate them into a new bothnet, one made up of high-powered servers with better connections to the Web.
For most sites, the hacking attempt was pretty harmless. If you don’t use the original “admin” account and have a password that is easily guessed, you were most likely safe from the attack. Rather, the attack was an attempt to cast a broad net in hopes of finding the low-hanging fruit, sites that can be trivially broken into.
But while your site is probably fine as long as you took even the most basic precautions, there were still repercussions. The weight of thousands of attempts to login put a strain on many people’s servers, especially if the server had many different WordPress sites. This resulted in websites slowing to a crawl and even shutting down, including ones not directly affected.
But while the worst seems to have passed for now, there are still some lessons to be learned from it and it’s important to grasp them before the next wave hits.
Because if there’s one thing that’s for certain, there is another wave coming. Read More
Categories: Blogging Sense, WordPress Tips
by BP Guest Blogger on April 23rd, 2013
Most bloggers know that a slow site can lose them a few viewers here and there, but very few are aware of just how essential speed can be, both for driving traffic and for presenting yourself in a positive light. According to a national survey conducted in 2010, about a third of viewers will abandon a site after waiting up to five seconds for it to load. And slow loading times are not only frustrating for users; they also make your site appear less polished, modern, and dependable.
Fortunately, there are many ways to increase your site speed: some are sweeping changes that require commitment but yield great results, and others are small alterations that, when implemented, will accumulate into a significant improvement. Read More
Categories: General
by BP Guest Blogger on April 23rd, 2013
When looking to boost the appeal of your website, it can be difficult to decide whether you should focus on updating old posts that have had a lot of hits, or whether you should be generating new content. Ultimately, the decision comes down to the kind of site you run, and if you can successfully combine older posts that still have relevance with topical, optimised content that’s going to stimulate attention on social networks. Read More
Categories: Blogging Tips
by BP Guest Blogger on April 22nd, 2013
Link building is definitely one of the most popular activities in search engine optimization, and as is usually the case, it didn’t take Google long to catch on to tactics that it considered unworthy. While link building in itself is not “bad”, there are some aspects that raise eyebrows – at the very least. In 2012, the landscape was pretty much changed, thanks to Google’s actions against questionable link building. It has even been said that 2012 was the year when the world of link building changed forever. Read More
Categories: Blogging Tips
by BP Guest Blogger on April 22nd, 2013
Questions and Answers sites have been around for some time now, and we have some very good examples of this in sites like Quora, Stack Exchange, and Answers.com. But what about your own site? How would a Q&A section fit in? Would a Q&A app be useful to help your visitors become customers?
Q&A tools come in many shapes and sizes, but one of the more interesting things about Q&A is how it can engage with random visitors to your page. Take a traditional web page, with an FAQ link and a Contact Us form. The only way a customer can get in touch with that site is by sending an email or filling in a form. If that customer has a question, they have to fill in all their details, and send them on. Read More
Categories: Blogging Tools
Blogging Pro Job Board Highlights (April 22-26)
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