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 […]
WordPress
The magic checkbox
Reading Time: 2 min I wrote yesterday about how you should work hard not to confuse Google, and one of the things I mentioned in there was to “make sure your site isn’t doing something stupid“. While that could mean a variety of things, there is one thing that rises above pretty much all of the others, and it’s […]
How I plan out my future posts
Reading Time: 2 min Blogging daily is tough. I just passed six months and I’m going strong, but it’ll end at some point. For now, though, here is how I make it happen. Lots of ideas The biggest challenge for me is coming up with ideas. Following the idea of “long periods of thinking, short periods of writing“, actually […]
Full site editing is coming to WordPress
Reading Time: < 1 min Ever since WordPress unveiled the drag-and-drop “Gutenberg” editor a few years ago, which I use on here (and my first post with it was three years ago today), there has been talk of when it might be extended to help edit your entire site. That time is coming very soon. As of today, you can […]
Some first steps with Google Search Console
Reading Time: 4 min You may be familiar with Google Analytics, used to track traffic on a website, but not as many are as familiar with Google Search Console. I thought I’d take a minute to explain why you might want to set it up. The great thing about Google Search Console is that there is nothing you need […]
If you want to improve, keep the comments open
Reading Time: 2 min One of the big questions new bloggers face is whether or not to allow readers to leave comments. In almost every case, I think the answer is a solid yes. Here’s a bit about why: Take back your content As I shared late last year, I think more people need to be blogging in order […]
Website Accessibility: Help your users, help your rankings
Reading Time: < 1 min Yesterday at the A Brighter Web Meetup, we had a great discussion about website accessibility, why it’s important, and steps to take to get started. You can download the slides as a PDF, or view them all here: Website Accessibility: Help your users, help your rankings from Mickey Mellen You can also check out this […]
300 posts gone
Reading Time: < 1 min I’ve been doing quite a lot of clean-up, organization, and optimization on this blog, and a few days ago I deleted 297 old posts! I still have hundreds on here, going back to early 2004. Why delete? The posts I deleted were quite useless at this point, to be honest. My recent posts I’ve tried […]
Speeding up this blog
Reading Time: 2 min Over the past day, I’ve done a few things to speed up the load time of this site. It wasn’t particularly slow to begin with, but these changes should help make it a bit snappier. Here’s a before and after of the speed scores for the site: Hosting The biggest change I made was with […]
Thinking through “A Brighter Web”
Reading Time: < 1 min We’ve been running various aspect of A Brighter Web, an educational arm of our agency, for quite a while now. We’ve hosted our Meetup every month (sometimes more) for about nine years now, we have a reasonably active Facebook group, and we’ve played with podcasting and other media. So what’s next? To be honest, I’m […]