I’ve installed a plugin that I think is based on a great idea:  taking advantage of older blog’s archives to find new things to tweet.
The aptly-named “Tweet Old Posts” searches your blog’s older postings, then chooses one at random based on an age range and categories you specify, and tweets a link to it just as though it were a new post.  It gives bloggers with Twitter accounts additional material to tweet, and it gives your followers additional material to read on your blog that they may have missed the …

A couple of weeks ago, I made a change here at the old blog.
I had become frustrated with the premium version of this blog’s current theme. In particular, I was frustrated with elements of the code that were difficult to figure out. And then there was customer “support”, whose answer for every question seemed to be, “Submit a support ticket for that” and whose follow-up answer seemed to be, “We can do that for a fee of $30 per hour,” without ever telling me how many hours it would …

I’ve made a few changes to the big blog this morning in an effort to effectively kill two bugs with one stone.
For a while now, I’ve been using a premium theme that I purchased because I liked a few features the premium version had over the free version.
Specifically, these premium features involved a scrolling carousel of featured posts at the top right corner of the front page, a front page video box and a random posts section at the bottom of the front page.  But I’ve come to wonder whether …

The NBC O&Os — that’s short for TV stations that are owned and operated by the network itself — have come up with a really cool feature that allows anyone to quickly toss in their limited two cents on a news or feature story while tabulating that reaction for other visitors.
It’s called NBC Moods, and you can see it demonstrated at the website of its Washington, DC, station WRC-TV, here.
When the page loads, right below the big NBC WASHINGTON logo, you’ll see a line in a casual typeface that begins, “Locals are…” followed …

Hi, loyal readers. I am need of a simple favor: please leave me a comment to this post, even if you don’t normally leave comments: I need your help in testing the system.
Recently, I added the Intense Debate comment system, which seems to have been improved since being acquired by Automattic, the company that also owns WordPress. Comments are down a bit recently, but I realize it’s summertime, and readership tends to be a bit off as people head out on vacation or just out to …

It’s easy to see which categories on this blog have the most content by checking out the category cloud on the sidebar: TV is the leader, followed by the Saturday Six, Politics, then Sunday Seven and Humor.
But do those Top 5 by Post Count match the Top 5 by reader visits? As it happens, they don’t.

Two months ago, when I logged into Google Analytics, I saw that there were several days that showed a month-to-month drop of 12-18% in visits. Last month, I saw a gain of about 12-18% most days.
Today, I’m down 17.74% in visits from one month ago. Specifically, the average of visits between May 12, 2010 and June 11, 2010 is 17.74% lower than the average of visits between April 11, 2010 and May 11, 2010.
So what am I supposed to make of that?

Based on some recent problems getting certain comments to appear, I have returned to Intense Debate as a comment management system for the blog. A while back I tried Intense Debate and it didn’t work as well as I hoped it would.
Since then, I’ve learned that Intense Debate is now part of WordPress’s parent company, which leads me to believe some issues I had with it might work a little better now.
If you stopped by last night, you might have seen that no comments appeared to be present on …

I’m working on an issue that occasionally sends certain comments to WordPress’s trash can rather than into the normal moderation queue. I’m not sure why it’s happening, but I’m definitely seeing it happen, and a few of you who have fallen victim have complained about leaving the same comment several times without it ever appearing as “awaiting moderation.”

In chatspeak, TMI means “too much information.”
When it comes to blogging, providing TMI could mean particular problems, especially when it comes to subjecting the writer to possible identity theft risks.

Back in February, I posted an article about a common problem that almost all bloggers will deal with sooner or later: the dreaded troll.
Just yesterday morning on Today, there was a segment about blogging and the advice to never feed a troll.
It’s funny how many different people, with many different agendas, can all behave in such similar fashion.

I just had a quick look through the list of comments that my spam software had correctly flagged as spam.
The majority of them have one critical thing in common: