David Hauslib has decided to put Jossip on hold since there obviously wasn’t any takers when the site went on sale in March last year. The New York Post even reported the rumor that Condé Nast, owning Wired and a ton of other media properties, was interested.

But then there was nothing, and ASSME reports that the site haven’t been getting any love lately. The old archive is still available, but the front page features a pause sign and Jossip Initiative, which is Hauslib’s company. The remaining site is Queerty, a gay site that Hauslib called “leading” in response to a Gawker post on Mollygood, another site he opted to close late last year.

Happy Monday, folks! First up this week, Mark Carey has released a plugin that allows you to comment on Movable Type blogs using your Twitter account. A user can sign into your blog using their Twitter username and password, and they can post their comments to Twitter. I’m particularly glad to see an oAuth version is coming soon, which will remove the need to have users log in on your site.

Also this week, Mark Kolich wrote a post with 10 .htaccess hacks for Movable Type. Mark has collected some very useful tips here for increasing both the speed and security of your site. Plus, many of them can be used no matter what powers your website.

That’s it for this week. What have you done with Movable Type lately? Tell us in the comments.

Though journalism schools are often maligned in the blogging world as producing stale writing, they do teach many valuable lessons that are useful when running your own site.

One of those lessons is a primer in mass media law. By publishing works to the Web, one is essentially performing much of the same function as newspapers and television stations did exclusively just a few decades ago. However, the laws that govern such publications are not taught in most high schools nor most colleges.

So what should a blogger know about the law before they put up their first post? There are many things, certainly more than what can be covered in this post, but here are twenty questions every every blogger should be able to answer. read more

The Royal Pingdom blog continues to do and publish interesting studies. The latest one is about how many of the top IT companies that are represented on Twitter, or even in control of their brand, and the result is a depressing one indeed:

Alas, our Pingdom poll of 100 Fortune 500 IT-companies (full table below) showed that 67 of them can be hard to find with a name search, as they don’t use Twitter accounts which have the same names as their company name.

That’s 67%, a staggering number, that just don’t get Twitter. Perhaps a bit harsh, but true nevertheless. Maybe they are more inclined to get their Twitter account under control now that even Oprah’s doing it?

The Google Adsense Blog helps you to get started with Google Ad Manager, Google’s hosted solution for managing your ads. Ad Manager is free to use, but if you grow big you might have to pay up, be sure to read the terms of service so that you know what you’re getting into.

Here’s part 1 and part 2 to help you get going.

So why would you want to use Google Ad Manager? read more

Gotta love CAPS LOCK huh? Oprah brings it…

HI TWITTERS . THANK YOU FOR A WARM WELCOME. FEELING REALLY 21st CENTURY .

and Shaq responds:

@oprah ur caps r on, btw

Welcome to Twitter, Oprah.

I had an interesting discussion with a client last week about when and how to implement a new blog design. She wanted to warn her readers that a change was coming, and take a few months to implement the changes step by step.

We talked about the process and created a timeline for the slow unveiling of the site design, a smart decision for those with a large audience, especially when making dramatic changes to the site’s navigation and content handling. Some audiences can handle it, and love design changes, but some can’t. They just don’t respond well to change.

We talked a little more about her readership, covering some basic web analytics such as where her readers come from, how they access the site (through the front page, single pages, tags and categories, or through aggregators, email or feeds), and I stumbled upon some stunning facts that shifted the entire game plan.

While her site gets a steady stream of visitors, several thousand a day, only 10% return. Of those, only three percent return to the blog at least once week. Honestly, that’s about 9 people a week.

This changes everything. read more

In my last post, I talked about the importance of inserting keywords in the title tags of your blog posts. The title tag is by far the most powerful onpage SEO factor. But what about catchy titles that don’t have many keywords? Is there a place for them in SEO?

The answer is yes and here’s how you can combine catchy and keyword rich titles to improve your rankings. read more

WordPress 2.8 Has-Patch Marathon: Jane Wells announced The Super-Awesome WordPress 24-Hour Has-Patch Marathon to attack 500 active tickets on WordPress 2.8. The invitation included developers, hackers, and coders to dig into the code of WordPress and fix all kinds of things and test them from April 16-17. We’re awaiting results of the marathon.

TalkPress: Imagine combining the architecture behind WordPress.com with bbPress. The end result is TalkPress. In a recent announcement on the bbPress blog, Sam Bauers explained that TalkPress is going to be a hosted forum service using bbPress with the HyperDB extension for WordPress to create a WordPressMU style network of bbPress forums. It is currently being tested by corporations such as Time’s Health.com site. read more

For a while blogging became just my job. My last hobby blog had been sold, my personal blog down and broken. It seemed the fun had gone out of blogging for me.

So to fix that, a friend and I just launched a purely fun blog, all about Formula 1. In doing so I learned a couple of lessons: read more