Daniel Greene

Tag: WordPress

  • Why I moved my blogs from WordPress.org to WordPress.com

    I finally got tired of the hassle and hours it took me to update my WordPress.org-powered self-hosted versions of two different blogs–danielgreene.com and smithersgreene.net. Trying to upgrade my blogs to WordPress 3.0 was the last straw.

    I’m a guy who started writing his own HTML and CSS in 1996; in fact, I was one of the first handful of brave ones on the Internet to style valid HTML with CSS knowing that most browsers couldn’t handle it. After all, what did I have to lose? Little old me with his personal website.

    This was a decade before Flickr and YouTube and Facebook and Twitter allowed you to post content with ease and let them take care of the code, and years before every major website was written in structural HTML and styled with CSS. This was back when you had to either have a self-hosted website or something like AOL Hometown Web pages. This was when “Web Designers” would charge you an arm-and-a-leg for a page and a couple of links. I was okay with the idea that, if I wanted a site that used proper HTML (without proprietary structural markup) and CSS, I had to get an ISP to host my own website. And I had to write all my own HTML & CSS.

    Things have changed in the past few years. Even with WordPress.org, I had more freedom to blog without worrying about the coding. When I didn’t have to worry about updating WordPress and editing .htaccess pages and PHP files, it worked great. But I hated it when I would break my site when trying unsuccessfully to upload new versions of the blogging platform software. I thought, “Why can’t it be more like posting content to Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, or YouTube? I can’t break those sites. There must be an easier way.”
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  • Thinking of moving from WordPress.org to WordPress.com

    It’s been such a headache for me to manage my WordPress.org-powered blog that I’m thinking of moving it over to WordPress.com. I didn’t realize until recently that I could even have it all on danielgreene.com. I read this article called WordPress.com vs. WordPress.org tonight, and I realized that, on WordPress.org, none of the Pros are helping me and all of the Cons are hurting me, whereas on WordPress.com, none of the Cons would hurt me and all of the Pros would help me. I’m not a PHP programmer nor do I really want to hire one to manage my site for me. I freak every time I have to update from one WordPress software version to another. Automatic updates always hang. Manual updates are a pain. With WordPress.com it’s all taken care of, and I could focus solely on what I really love to do, which is write and share media. The terms of service for WordPress.com forbid ads, but I don’t earn more than maybe $100 a year in Google AdSense ad revenue on danielgreene.com anyway. With the money I’d lose, I’d gain time— and peace of mind! And the few “legacy” pages I have, such as my Style Sheets Demo Page, while pioneering in its day, hardly seems relevant anymore. I could probably even put some of that CSS into a WordPress page anyway.

    What do you think? Any reason why I shouldn’t turn danielgreene.wordpress.com into danielgreene.com and move my blog over here?

  • Generic blog spam must be stopped

    Spam filters need to learn new tricks

    Why don’t blog spam filters recognize as spam those generic comments that link to commercial websites? Akismet used to filter all the spam that came into my blog, but now there’s a type it never catches– generic comments linked to a money-making (or even phishing or malicious) websites. These spammers write adulatory comments that don’t address the content or topic of the post. They tell you that you have just earned a new follower and that they will add you to their RSS feed straightaway. They say things like, “This is the best post I’ve ever read on the subject.” Note they say “the subject” without naming it. Sometimes they even write editorial comments that have nothing to do with your blog post. Here is an actual examples taken from a recent comment on my blog:

    Here’s one posted on my blog entry “Comparison of EPUB Download Sites”

    How risky is blogging really? Blog firings are relatively rare. In a recent survey of 279 human resource professionals by the Society for Human Resources Management, just 3 percent of companies reported disciplining bloggers and none reported firing anyone for blogging. You’re more likely to get in trouble for fooling around online or downloading music at work. About half the companies in the survey said they’ve fired or disciplined employees for Internet use that was unrelated to work duties.

    Note I didn’t say anything about “blog firings” or the risk of blogging in my post.

    If there’s any risk of blogging, it’s for your blog to be highjacked by people using your publication to promote their get-rich-quick schemes.

    Here’s one on my blog post “My first Speak & Spell workshop“:

    This is an excellent post. I have a similar blog myself so I will keep coming back to read more.

    And this from a guy who runs a blog about magic spells. At least his comment addressed the topic of my blog post, even if incorrectly.

    I’ll add more examples as they come in, which I’m sure they will.

    P.S. This is not a paid advertisement, but I do like using WordPress for Android because new comments to my blog show up as notifications on my Nexus One and I can follow the notification to open the app and mark comments as spam if I choose. It helps me stop spammers sooner than if I had to wait to get to a computer and log into my blog’s admin dashboard.

  • My first blog post using WordPress for Android

    WordPress for Android was released on February 2, and I downloaded it from the Android Market today for my Nexus One. Now I’m posting a blog entry with it. It looked like it hung just now when I tried to select Categories, but other than that, it’s pretty nifty. Oh– I just realized I just had to click the refresh button to the right of Categories and I got a list to choose from. Not bad!

  • Deaf Guy Touts Top Ten WordPress Plugins

    This guy subscribed to my videos on YouTube (thank-you-very-much!) so I checked him out. He has several ASL videos, and one in particular caught my eye because my new blog is “powered by WordPress.” In this video, he describes his 10 favorite WordPress plugins. I’m glad I watched, because several of the plugins he described could improve the functionality of my blog.

    While watching his video, I felt so happy to understand ASL! Ah, the benefits of knowing a second language! 😀