Lately I’ve been receiving a lot of comment spam, more than I should be getting, so I contacted Akismet to see what I could do. They shared a tip with me that turned out to be quite helpful. Here’s the key insight: spam is attracted to spam. Let’s say a spam comment sneaks by you and remains on one of your posts. That spam somehow … more »

The seventh and final sin in my ongoing Seven Deadly Sins of Blogging series is being inattentive. (Other sins include being fake, irrelevant boring, unreadable, irresponsible, and unfindable.) One appealing aspect of blogs over print media is the ability to comment and respond to comments. It’s the appeal of a conversation instead a lecture. Make Commenting Easy In the Blog Herald, Valorie Maltoni says, In … more »

Blogger, commenter or plain old reader – which are you.

[Audio clip: view full post to listen] 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 … more »

I occasionally receive encouraging emails from blog readers, podcast listeners, people who attended my presentations, and others. These email messages float too quickly through my inbox, so I’ve created a new site feature called a Blog Wall (see the top navigation bar) to capture them more permanently. On my Blog Wall you can add any general feedback you have about the site, a presentation I … more »

If you use WordPress and want to streamline the process for responding to comments, check out the Better Comments Manager plugin. You can respond to all your comments directly from your admin console interface, rather than responding in the comments section below each post. This is one of the more useful plugins out there. Here’s a screenshot of the Better Comments Manager interface: