Perennial Faves: Separating Blog You from You You
No matter what kind of blog you publish, you’re sharing some information about yourself. Yet even if you write a purely personal blog or are completely comfortable peppering posts with details about your life, you may want to shield some things from the internet’s prying eyes.
We often encourage you to use social networks and other online tools to help grow your blog — it’s a key part of growing traffic, and it brings in motivating feedback — but not every online space you frequent has to be connected to your blog. It’s time to think critically about managing your online identity.
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The Ghosts in Your Dashboard
Your WordPress.com dashboard is the nerve center of your blog: it’s where your ideas come to life, and your creativity gives them shape. As writers, artists, and thinkers, we know inspiration can be sporadic and those moments of genius are fleeting — they come and go, which means that sometimes your literary flame burns out, and those bursts of creation are short-lived.
The result? An abandoned idea. The dreaded draft, sitting in limbo, staring back at you. And so, we’re curious: what’s lurking in the drafts section of your dashboard?
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Your Statistics: More Than Just an Ego Boost
Or more than just an excuse to down a pint of Ben and Jerry’s and vow to give up blogging forever, as the case may be.
Most of us look at our stats more than we probably should; it’s natural to want to see whether anyone’s paying attention, and undeniably gratifying to watch the graphs go up, up, and away. But if you’re trying to build a readership and are not using the world of data lurking in your stats to inform your blog and boost your traffic, you’re missing out. Your stats page is way more than a bunch of charts with the power to boost or kill your confidence — it’s a bunch of charts that give you the ability to see into the minds of your readers and shape your blog accordingly.
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Trackbacks and Pingbacks
We’ve talked a lot about comments here on The Daily Post, but we’ve never mentioned the comment’s cousins, the casual pingback and the formal trackback. A couple of you have asked what the deal is with trackbacks and pingbacks, so let’s give them some attention.
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SEO and Your Blog
A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post for the WordPress.com blog about how SEO works on WordPress.com, and today I’d like to discuss this here on The Daily Post. SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and it refers to things you can do to increase how high your site ranks in the search results of Google and other search engines.
SEO is a hot topic around the blogosphere, and you’ve likely heard a lot about it. Much often repeated SEO advice is untrustworthy and some of it is just plain bad.
The good news is if you have a site on WordPress.com we take care of the vast majority of the technical side of SEO for you. The only thing you really need to do for great SEO is write!
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How to Starve a Troll
For as long as there have been blogs, there have been trolls. A troll is a commenter who hangs around your blog for the sheer purpose of annoying and goading you and your other readers.
Trolling is quite different from merely being critical. Obviously, not all of your readers are going to agree with you about everything, but a troll’s comments will rarely have anything to do with the topic at hand. For example, say you review a certain book you like. Someone might comment that she thinks it is an overrated work and doesn’t understand why anyone likes it. That’s not trolling. Even a comment as abrupt as “I’ve always hated that book” isn’t trolling, because, while it’s not particularly interesting, it’s at least a response to what you’ve written.
A troll, on other hand, is not actually trying to express anything. Rather, a troll is seeking to provoke…
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Source and Attribute Creative Commons Photos Like a Pro
Miss Manners will be the first to tell you that when someone gives you a gift, the proper response is a warm, enthusiastic, “thank you!” in writing. Did you know that when you accept the “gift” of a Creative Commons-licensed work such as a photo or illustration for use in your web projects, Miss Manners would endorse that same, warm, enthusiastic “thank you!” in the form of proper sourcing and attribution? Being a good citizen on the web means demonstrating proper behavior, at all events. Today, we’re going to share the wonder that is Creative Commons and your responsibilities for sourcing and attributing any material you may download there.
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Queen of the Wild Frontier 