I hope you all played with beta 2 of WordPress 2.8 this weekend, because I sure didn’t for once. If you already ran beta 1 you might want to know about the changes that has been implemented. And if you’re just curious about what’s in 2.8, but don’t want to go through the hassle of actually running it before the sharp 2.8 release, then read this Codex page.

In the United States, today is Memorial Day, a holiday in honor the veterans who fought for our country over the course of our history. It is a holiday for most and a chance to spend at least some of the day reflecting.

As such, many will not be blogging today, but that does not mean it is always a full day off. Most, myself included, will be spending at least some time working on our sites, just not necessarily writing new content for it.

If that describes you, here are five things that you can do, other than actual blogging, to help your site and keep it going strong. Best of all, these are all, for the most part, short-term tasks you can pick up and drop off between other activities on a holiday.

Here’s 5 suggestions on how to spend your blogging holiday if you plan to spend at least a little bit of in front of your computer. read more

As mentioned in the last article in Nothing to Blog About, not every idea is worth publishing. Not every blog post is publishable. Not every blog post should see the light of the public eye. And sometimes that type of blog post is stopping us from producing blog content.

I can’t tell you the many hours I’ve spent struggling over a blog post, determined it had value and needed to be published. I’d beat at it, thrash it, rip and tear it apart, only to decide it wasn’t ready, nor was I, to have this ever be published.

Has this happened to you? A blog post you want to publish sits in your drafts or stares at you from your blog screen screaming, “NO! NOT YET!”

Are you listening? read more

In my last post, I defined anchor text and talked about its importance in SEO.  Today, we’ll look at a couple ways to use it effectively.

Research Keywords.

It’s a good idea to do some keyword research so that the keywords you use in your anchor text are good keywords. I’ve written about keyword research before so I won’t belabor the point. read more

Not everyone out there is a fan

I am a Starbucks fan, and I didn’t know any of the allegations being made … and ironically I think I would have never heard about this bad news stuff if it wasn’t for Starbucks social media campaign … read more

E! wants to utilize the celebrities twittering, says B&C, and claims that they will run tweets in a stream in their programming. They will also feature a “Celebri-Tweet” widget on the eonline.com website, which is really bloggish already. Maybe this is what will push even more B- and C-list celebs to Twitter, their chance to compete with the likes of Hugh Jackman for twittering air time?

The king of Gawker Media, Nick Denton, is featured in an interview over at Ad Age. Naturally, a lot of the focus is on advertising revenue and the fact that Denton doomed it last year, and then did well enough after all. While online revenue for a blog network like Gawker Media is interesting, this caught my eye:

If a good exclusive used to provide 10 times the traffic of a standard regurgitated blog post, now it garners a hundred times as much. That should be reassuring to people. The content market is finding its new balance. Original reporting will be rewarded.

Denton then goes on and talks about recent strategic hires to strengthen the voice of the network’s key titles. Content is king yet again, eh?

Committee to Protect Bloggers is an important blog about fellow bloggers in distress. You might remember them reporting on the death of Omid Reza Mir Sayafi some time ago, a matter we’ve covered as well. Unfortunately, one of the three founders, Curt Hopkins, is forced to step away due to being unemployed.

As much concern as I have for people I don’t know, far and away my most important commitment is to my wife and our family. From now until after I am re-employed, I cannot spend a single second on anything but my search for employment.

This is bad news, since Committee to Protect Bloggers is an important source for bloggers in distress all over the world. If you think you can help Hopkins in any way, be sure to let him know. It is also a reminder of how vulnerable a lot of the information online is, with no publishing houses or big companies to fall back on when the people behind them get in trouble.

If people judged me by the number of ideas I generated in single day on the subject of WordPress and blogging, I’d be the Einstein of the blogosphere. If they took a peek into the all the various files, folders, virtual and physical, I have to store all of those ideas, they’d pack me up and send me to the mental institution.

I come up with ideas for things to blog about constantly, rarely running out of ideas. The problem is that few of these see the light of day, or I get so caught up in the ideas, I can’t get past the idea to the Publish button.

As part of this series called Nothing to Blog About, we’re talking about how to stir up your mental pot when the bloggy brain bogs down and content cannot be found. From among the various options suggested already, I’d like to resurrect the traditional idea file. read more

Prolific British celebrity twitterer Jonathan Ross is using Twitter to run his own informal book club.

The reasoning behind it won’t mean much to anyone outside Britain who isn’t a fan of Richard and Judy’s TV chat show, recently axed, but what’s more important is that it’s another interesting use of Twitter.

I’m not suggesting that no-one has thought of the idea before, but when you’re as popular and have as many followers as Ross, people take notice. read more