Reading Time: 2 min Child pornography and human trafficking are major problems across the world, and the web helps to facilitate both to a rather large degree. Whenever some website gets taken down (or blocked on a site like Facebook), you’ll often see memes like this start to float around: At first glance, it seems like a solid question. […]
Websites
Trusting authentic recommendations
Reading Time: < 1 min Over at GreenMellen, we don’t host websites. We help people choose hosting, and we take care of all of the technical work, but we want our clients to have ownership of their sites. We do this for their long-term benefit (owning your own stuff is a good thing), but recently I’ve noticed a great side […]
You don’t need to build your own server
Reading Time: 2 min With the continuing fight that many are facing against “big tech”, a growing group of people are building their own servers to host their websites and content. There are really two reasons you might want to do this: Servers for your media consumption at your house, such as music and movies. If you can’t get […]
Protect your community
Reading Time: < 1 min There is a good chance you found this post through an online community that you’re a part of, possibly Facebook or Twitter. While having a community on sites like that is a great thing, it’s also incredibly fragile. Social media accounts get shut down constantly; mostly for good reasons (spammers, etc), but normal accounts can […]
Sharing the posts I write
Reading Time: 2 min Since I’ve started blogging regularly again, the way I share my posts each day has been slightly adjusted a number of times. I recently was asked for some details on that, so here you go. Before I tackle that, though, there are two important things to frame this with. First, you need to understand why […]
Why most blogs should allow comments
Reading Time: 3 min Over the past decade, I’ve seen more and more blogs get rid of their comment section and simply say something like “go discuss it on Facebook”. I think that’s a bad move, at least in most cases. At a high level, it’s because I still think we need to take back our content. Taking back […]
Building castles out of sand
Reading Time: < 1 min When it comes to building your presence online, you can build it out of rock or out of sand. Naval said it well on Twitter a few years ago after Alexander Cortes was kicked off of Twitter: Building a following on Twitter is building a castle out of sand, as the implacable tide shifts in […]
Digital marketing doesn’t need to lead to digital sales
Reading Time: 2 min If you have an online store, some degree of digital marketing is essential to drive traffic and sales. On the other hand, don’t feel like digital marketing is futile if you don’t have way for visitors to transact business online. At the end of the day, marketing isn’t just about sales, but about conversions. Not […]
Users don’t click on your blog page, and that’s ok
Reading Time: 2 min You’ve probably heard that having a blog on your site is a great way to increase traffic and awareness, and I wholeheartedly agree with that. However, most users that visit your site won’t go over and visit your blog page. If that’s the case, then why blog at all? Because it’s intended for everyone else. […]
Page Experience is becoming more important to Google
Reading Time: 2 min For the past few years, Google’s “page experience” update has essentially been used as a tie-breaker. If you have features such as HTTPS on your site (which you should), or your site loads quickly (as it should), those weren’t huge ranking boosts. In fact, Google confirmed back in 2015 that HTTPS was essentially just a […]