DISQUS

Ed Morita is a major fan of tattoos, often getting them to represent a major event or change in his life. He started blogging recently and the connection with people all over the world through his food blog and fascinating artistry with sweets and chocolate finding fans, it changed his life and he credits WordPress accordingly.

The fact is that he understood blogging and social media better than most immediately, opening up the placement of the permanent tattoo to his readers and put it where they voted the most, on his wrist/forearm.

Someone had to do it, and I'm honored to know that someone did not do it for the money, nor the gain, but for the life changing experience that comes with blogging, paying tribute to a program that helps millions of people have their say for free around the world. Ed is a caring, compassionate, and giving person who wanted to give back in a way, while carrying a reminder of his first blog. That's awesome.

Ed Morita is a major fan of tattoos, often getting them to represent a major event or change in his life. He started blogging recently and the connection with people all over the world through his food blog and fascinating artistry with sweets and chocolate finding fans, it changed his life and he credits WordPress accordingly.

The fact is that he understood blogging and social media better than most immediately, opening up the placement of the permanent tattoo to his readers and put it where they voted the most, on his wrist/forearm.

Someone had to do it, and I'm honored to know that someone did not do it for the money, nor the gain, but for the life changing experience that comes with blogging, paying tribute to a program that helps millions of people have their say for free around the world. Ed is a caring, compassionate, and giving person who wanted to give back in a way, while carrying a reminder of his first blog. That's awesome.

Thank you again for being such a great part of how WordPress is changing lives. I loved what you guys had to say and you helped me understand better how WordPress really does change lives. Thank you so very much for taking the time out at Blog World Expo to talk to me!

I'm glad Aaron got you set up and running. I pointed you out to him. Enjoy the awesome hosting with Fastservers. They are changing how sites are hosted - trust me. I've been with them for a year and love every moment - total trust and support. Have fun at BlogHer - wish I was there. Going to Hawaii for Podcamp/WordCamp and more instead - Hawaii Geek Week!!!

It was amazing. As a newcomer to the community, I was thrilled to meet so many "old friends" as there seems to be no new friends in Portland - just ones you haven't met yet.

I'm still processing the event, but I'm also eager to get involved in the open source, tech, and blogging community here. It's amazing. Lucky us!!!

I think the free beer was the best part of the event, right? :D It was really fun and I had a great time. I'm so glad to be a new neighbor in Portland and eager to get to know my fellow techies and bloggers in the area, too.

Thanks for the fun and the great times at WordCamp!

EXCUSE ME! Remember, while I do abuse Plugins on my personal blogs, I'm on WordPress.com. I can't TOUCH WordPress Plugins there. They won't let me. They know I'm bad. :P

Great article and advice, my friend, on streamlining the bandwidth. Ajax and JavaScript, with or without Plugins, is also a killer, especially if these things load BEFORE the content.

I'm finding a lot of people who want to incorporate full video players into their blogs to play images and sounds. Really, why bother? It just adds more load to the page.

With the world moving towards the mobile web, we have to take bandwidth into serious consideration that goes way beyond trying to honor those still on dial-up. The mobile web has a long way to go to catch up with land-line and cable speeds. We have to design nice for those bloggers and web users on the road. :D

Speaking of which, you may get two copies of this comment. Disquis' Ajax spun and spun for over five minutes and still hasn't done anything. I reloaded the page and am trying a second time. While it's a neat feature, I'm finding it slows down loading and commenting tremendously.

I'm so glad that you were safe and sound. Riding these storms out, even when you aren't in the direct path, isn't fun.

I remember looking at the size of Hurricane Katrina and realizing how insignificant we were in relationship to this massive storm's coverage.

It's incredible that the United States doesn't suffer more than it does. We forget that even in the wake of hearing of hundreds killed in Haiti and nearby areas as the storm smacks them first. Ah, so what. It's a poor country. Tough luck. But one person dies in the states and it's the end of the world. I feel so horrible for those in the other areas hurt first by these storms. Much more needs to be done for them, not just ourselves. We are the lucky ones. We have the ability to run. We might not take it, but we have the choice.

Glad you are safe!

I'm glad you got it, and thanks for the note about the comments. I'll have the editor look into this.

EVERYTHING on our blogs are important, but unfortunately, most of the time we put design elements in because we like them, not that they are needed or necessary for our readers' experience. When we stop and really consider how important each design element is, what is left behind becomes most important for all involved.

Thanks!

Here's one more specific example that might help Tam.

Your blog categories, the collected bodies of work you write about, are Fruit, Vegetables, and Meat.

You write a blog post about lettuce. You tag it with search terms and keywords such as lettuce, salad, greens, bib, romaine, and such. These are specific to the post about lettuce. If someone is searching the net for information on types of lettuce, you want those tag words to help them find it.

The post is then "filed" under "Vegetables" because those visiting your blog might have arrived because you wrote a fascinating article about bib lettuce, and they want to see more of what you have in your blog file folder related to Vegetables. So they click the category for vegetables and find out that you've written a ton about corn, carrots, spinach, beans, and such.

But let's say that they really wanted to know more about romaine lettuce and not bib lettuce. The tag link for "romaine" should take them to all the other posts you have with the tag or word "romaine" in them, giving them a micro-category view of everything you've written about romaine.

That might only be three posts, not enough for a category called "Romaine" but enough that helps the visitor and makes them dig even deeper because now you have helped them learn more about Romaine and established yourself as a vegetable expert. :D

Think of categories as Pendaflex file folders that hang on hooks in a file cabinet and tags as the multiple folders that sit inside of those larger file folder holders. Does that help?

I still like the analogy that categories are your blog's table of contents and tags are your blog's index words list. That makes the most sense to me.

After all that and you STILL don't get tags and categories? Must have been the late night talking. :D

Think of how you use the bible. You have the books of the bible which can be seen as categories, grouping related stories/content together. But you want to find out how many times "floods" are mentioned in the bible. Do you go to the categorical books of the bible? No. You hit the index for the word "flood" which is a "tag" in this pitiful but appropriate example.

Tags are "per post" which means they are added to each post when writing it. They can be any words that describe the content within and words people will search for when they search for that post from a search engine, for example.

Categories are used mostly by those visiting your site looking for groups of related content. If I want to find out more on what you've written on the topic of the bible, I would select that category to see all those related posts.

Does that help?

And hopefully, you will get some sleep soon. :D

It's going to be so much fun. I can't wait. I just moved to Oregon and I'm so excited to get to know everyone. What a great welcome!

Thanks for the interesting review of Woopra. The chat feature makes a lot of people nervous, but I think they will grow accustomed to it and it will soon change the web, breaking the barrier to truly be more social. There are a lot of great new features in the next beta release. Hold onto your hat!

WordPress Comment Ninja Greasemonkey Script by Engtech of Internet Duct Tape works with all WordPress blogs, including WordPress.com, which makes my life responding to comments so much easier and faster. As for tracking comment across the web, there hasn't been anything really of consistent value. People like this or that, but there are no standards. It's really frustrating. Feeds or subscribe to comments via email alerts seem to be the most successful so far.

As for signatures, especially those with links, they are seriously considered bad form, as are blog designs that remove or lack the comment name featured prominently. Anything that changes the standard that has been developed, like the order of name, email, and URL before the comment box, or interferes with the comment process like adding captchas and verification tests (which are hated and don't work and found to prevent more comments than protect the blog), make it complicated and frustrating for users, and bloggers lose. People like clean and consistent overall.

Don't forget, it takes only one, maybe two, people to bring down the tone of a blog conversation since people tend to be attracted to the negative more than the positive. You can have 200 great comments and 2 nasty, and nasty will attract all the attention. Same as happens at a party when negative enters the room. :D

This is great information, Andy, but for those who don't really understand what sitemaps are, WordPress and WordPress.com uses pings when a post is published through ping-o-matic to alert search engines and others that you've published a new post. This is the traditional "invitation" for them to send out their search bots.

The sitemaps are a constantly current table of contents for your blog, updated every time you publish a new post. It acts like a road map, telling the search bots which recognize XML sitemaps which pages to index. On the first run through, it indexes everything. On the next visits, it can check via the dates to find out what is new or modified and index only the new information, allowing the bots to move faster through the sites and not waste so much time with duplicating effort and information.

As for those who fear having these activated, they are a standard on most sites today, invisible to users and administrators. You control whether or not you want your WordPress or WordPress.com indexed through the Options panel.

Sitemaps are recognized by Google, Yahoo, and MSN last time I was paying attention to these things. Not all search engines or site indexing bots recognize them, so while it improves indexing, keywords, links, and other traditional techniques still holds sway over SEO. This is just a tool that speeds up the work of the search engine bots.

Matt, it was a pleasure to meet you and talk to you during my presentation during SOBCon. I hope my talk helped you get more clarity on how you are going to bring your diverse topics together.

You were a magical part of the weekend and I wish we could have had more time to sit down and talk about tea, a favorite subject of MINE. Thanks so much for making the conference special for me, and everyone.

WordPress.com does not permit advertising on free WordPress.com blogs. If the WordPress.com community would like to see one or more of these Themes added to the Theme options, they can petition for inclusion, but other things can be done with the areas reserved for ads. Why not text widgets, flickr pictures, or something else?

There are thousands of WordPress Themes available for self-hosted WordPress users. Suggestions and recommendations are heard every day for new Themes, but only a few make the cut.

And linking to the copyright violator is giving them just what they want: links. :(

Thanks for the recommendation, and sorry for your problem. Many try to confuse the issue, but copyright violation is copyright violation and illegal.

I hope they are complying and removing the content, but do take care when making these issues public. As I warn in the article, you can be held responsible for libel and defamation, which carries greater penalties. Educating your readers is critical. Risking your life and future is serious business.

Good luck and expect more of these creeps. There is big business in stealing content and making money on it. I also recommend you check out Plagiarism Today, my favorite source for help on copyright infringement issues.

That was so much fun and it was great to talk to everyone that I could. Next time, we'll spend more time talking to those in the chat room!

Did Matt really hijack your puter? Shame on him. Matt, get your own...thousand or three. :D

You rocked the place, Jonathan, with a very tough subject. But you had them totally engrossed - with you all the way. Brilliant!!!

We had such fun, and I honestly loved the look on everyone's face as they envied my beautiful piece of vegetable collage artwork. It was gorgeous. As was everyone else's meal. Work of art food.

What fun. Wish all WordCamps were that much fun. This one beat the rest, hands up and down.

Thanks for the kind words about my series. It continues to be one of the most difficult article series I've written, and I'm really surprised at its popularity. Thank you so much for your support.

Can't WAIT!!!!! Hugs are coming at you when I see you!

Thanks for including my book in this list. Stay tuned. There are more books to come.

While I agree with most of these, there are some that I question your claim about hurting your PageRank. Where did you find the information that doc-type and other meta tags are harmful to PageRank? Just curious.

While I agree with most of these, there are some that I question your claim about hurting your PageRank. Where did you find the information that doc-type and other meta tags are harmful to PageRank? Just curious.