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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What Makes a Post Freshly Press-able: Don’t Touch Me
Every day, a handful of WordPress.com bloggers are featured on Freshly Pressed. On The Daily Post, we take a close look at posts that have been Freshly Pressed, focusing on why we were drawn to them and what they can teach us about great blogging. We hope this series provides tips and tools to make your blog the best it can be.
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It’s been said that there are only two story plots in the whole world: somebody comes to town, and somebody leaves town. Don’t Touch Me by Delusia is an intimately personal take on the former. When a woman’s lover returns after a long absence, her feelings for him teeter between familiarity and uncertainty. Here’s why we liked this post:
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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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Queen of the Wild Frontier 