Tag: blogging tips

How to Start a Blog for Beginners

how to start a blog-684748_960_720Back in the dawning of the eBook age, when I signed on with a small publisher for my first novel, one of the requirements of my contract was to start my own blog. I knew what blogging was, but I hadn’t seen any point to having one of my own – mainly because I didn’t think I had anything to say that other people would be interested in reading unless I’d made it up.

But since I was now contractually obligated to have a blog, I went to my internet service provider, which at the time was Earthlink, and used their tools to set one up. The name of my blog, which rolls trippingly off the tongue even now, was, “Allegedly, She Has Something to Say.” Continue reading “How to Start a Blog for Beginners”

Block Those Comment Spammers

Guest post
by Gordon Long

For those of you who run blogs (and don’t we all?) and are getting a lot of spam emails and attempts to put up garbage in your comments section, I’ve been doing some work on it. Last month I got trouble from my website host for too much database use. In trying to figure out why, I discovered that I had over 10,000 spam emails in my mailbox! In one month. Sort of fills up the disc space.

So what can you do about it? Most of us think, “That’s too complicated,” but I found out I could at least get started. It’s a learning process we all should take a stab at.

Continue reading “Block Those Comment Spammers”

When did you last back up your blog?

button-2076_640 pixabayThe answer may not be ‘never’ of course, although I’m as guilty as everyone for panicing when it’s too late. But if you have a WordPress site you may have used their handy little ‘export’ function assiduously, under the impression that your site would be instantly restorable if necessary. Unfortunately the download this creates, sitting smugly in the Cloud somewhere, will have a few details missing.

If you are a whizz with databases and FTP clients, the most comprehensive way to back up a WordPress site is with the free plug-in WordPress Duplicator but if your dashboard is as far as you want to go into the engine room, here’s a quick, easy way to cheat. We’re going to use screenprints to capture all the bits your exported file will have missed. Continue reading “When did you last back up your blog?”

Keywords Vs. Tags

keywords and tagsWhat is the difference between a keyword and a tag? That’s a very good question. Theoretically, they are the same thing. Since most of the time this question is being asked from a blogger’s standpoint, that’s how it shall be answered. And I’ll be using Indies Unlimited as an example to make it easy to follow.

The incredibly simplified answer to the question is: keywords are used to find things via search engines; tags are used to find things within your own blog. So, you would use keywords to help label your article so when people search on Google, they hopefully use the words in your article (or in your article’s keyword Metadata). Just so you know, metadata is “a set of data that describes and gives information about other data.” Thank you, Wikipedia. By the way, did you know Wiki has a series of pages on George Clooney? Anyway, your keywords make up a set of data that describes the information in your article. Got it?

Tags also describe your article, but they do it more like an internal filing system, if you will. About a year ago, the Evil Mastermind wrote an article about using keywords in book titles. Let’s say that article wowed you (of course it did!) and you want to read other articles with similar content at Indies Unlimited. At the bottom of the article, under the share buttons (which you always use, right?), you will find this: Continue reading “Keywords Vs. Tags”