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Social Media: What It Is, How To Use It, and Where To Begin

January 26, 2010 By 13 Comments

Social media is an all-encompassing term used to describe any of several online channels that utilize the technology to facilitate social interaction through written, visual, or audible communication. Examples of different types of Social Media sites include:

The use of social media as a marketing and promotional tool and strategy is becoming more and more popular with businesses because it can be an extremely effective way to promote products and services to a targeted audience. Websites can function as a static billboard to promote products, services, or ideas – but social media opens up a dynamic dialogue with your audience, allowing for interaction and personal connection.
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Filed Under: Tutorials, Wordpress, Work Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

How To Create A Local WordPress Install | WordCamp Dallas 2009

January 17, 2010 By 7 Comments

Matthew “Spamboy” McGarity shows us how to preform a local installation of wordpress. This allows a user to have an installation of wordpress on a USB drive, portable hard drive or just their local machine. With this local install, a user now has a complete WordPress development environment separate from his or her live WordPress site.

Thanks to Dave Curlee for filming and editing this, as well as incorporating the sign language interpreters into this video, and the other videos from WordCamp Dallas 2009. You can also follow Dave on Twitter or Spamboy on Twitter.
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John P. Lecture – Jan 30, 2010: Make More Money with WordPress, Social Media and Analytics

January 12, 2010 By 6 Comments

John PWell folks, in about two weeks, on January 30th at 4pm, I’ll be giving a complete lecture on basically everything I know about how to have a successful blog. I’m going to deal with the topics of revenue generation, social media integration, analytics and measurement, and God only knows what else! It’ll probably be like a 1.5 hour lecture, so be prepared.

Now there are a lot of local folks who are always asking me for help and advice with your Websites. This is your chance to not only get a very hefty bit of information out of me, but to meet other people who are also interested in the same thing. So, be at this event because as you all know, I don’t have time to do this sort of thing very often. Also, the event is already overbooked so you need to register FAST in order to have a shot at getting in.
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Filed Under: Thoughts, Tutorials, Wordpress Tagged With: , , ,

Tutorial: Password Protect an Entire WordPress Blog

December 27, 2009 By 7 Comments

Recently I had the need to set up a couple of blogs that I only wanted people who are logged in to be able to access. After a little research and experimentation I came across the following fix.

So lets say you wanted to set up a Blog for just the use of your own internal company. Or Family. Or whatever… But you don’t want anyone to be able to access the site unless they are logged in. It’s actually a lot easier than you think. Here’s how to do it.
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Filed Under: Tutorials, Wordpress Tagged With: , , ,

Protect WordPress from Hackers – Secure that Beeotch!

December 3, 2009 By 16 Comments

Atom BombDammit!!!! I HATE SPAMMERS MORE THAN ANYONE ON EARTH! I honestly, 100% mean it when I say that I want to KILL spammers. You guys are laughing right now… “hehehe. Here goes that crazy John P. with another rant about spammers. Aww, he’s just kidding!” No! I am an ex-Marine, I own guns and knives, and I’m begging a spammer to show up at my house so I can do horrible things to him!!!! GRRRRR!!!!!

Today I got an email from Google as follows:

Dear site owner or webmaster of onemansblog.com,

While we were indexing your webpages, we detected that some of your pages were using techniques that are outside our quality guidelines, which can be found here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769&hl=en. This appears to be because your site has been modified by a third party. Typically, the offending party gains access to an insecure directory that has open permissions. Many times, they will upload files or modify existing ones, which then show up as spam in our index.

The following is some example hidden text we found at http://onemansblog.com/:

calendar acrobat download wcc adobe’s click. create watermark in adobe acrobat ea adobe acrobat professional Software Planetadobe creative suite 2 rumors adobe acrobat not finding scanner . adobe acrobat 8.01 professional software adobe acrobat 5.0. activate adobe acrobat 8 adobe acrobat contact sheet Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro Extended | Software Planetadobe acrobat 6 professional serial numbers c adobe acrobat fields sql . download adobe acrobat reader full version could not find adobe acrobat plugin

In order to preserve the quality of our search engine, pages from onemansblog.com are scheduled to be removed temporarily from our search results for at least 30 days.

Why, pray tell, would Google ban OneMansBlog from the index? Well, because some sneaky bastard somehow added a bunch of spam to the footer of my blog! HOW? My directory permissions are correct, I have all the latest versions of plugins installed and WordPress is up to date. So, let’s run down a checklist of things you should do so as not to fall victim to the spammers too:
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Filed Under: Security, Wordpress Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Chad Vader Hits on Cali Lewis in the Blog World Commercial

September 22, 2009 By 1 Comment

Chad-Vader-and-Cali-LewisThis is the greatest commercial that anyone has ever done for an event that I’ve seen. You’ve got Guy Kawasaki, Chris Brogen, and Cali Lewis… oh, and Chad Vader. :-)

Incidentally, I’ll be attending Blog World in Las Vegas as well, and I’ll be lecturing at the WordCamp Las Vegas event that will be happening right smack dab in the middle of Blog World! Yee Haw! It should be a blast.

I’ll be teaching you everything you ever needed to know to grow rich, powerful and sexy from your blog! Well, either that or I’ll give you some WordPress tips and tricks, as well as an overview of how to use your stats to improve the online experience.
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Filed Under: Videos, Wordpress Tagged With: , , , , ,

Pretty Link Pro Will Change the World (Wide Web)!

August 28, 2009 By 5 Comments

Pretty-Link-ProI’m pretty sure this is the first time that I’ve ever come out and advocated any sort of add-on, theme or plugin for WordPress that actually costs money. But get ready folks because here comes a game changer!

I heard about a WordPress plugin called Pretty Link Pro from Mitch over at Planet5D (the awesome Canon 5D camera site) and was intrigued enough to check it out. The plugin promised to do a few things that I could hardly believe:

  • Create YOUR OWN Short Links from Long URLs
  • Measure the effectiveness of Pay-Per-Click campaigns
  • Track social media campaigns

After reading through the user manual, and also seeing that Blair Williams (the plugin author) offered a 30 day money back guarantee, I decided I had absolutely nothing to lose and paid for the plugin on the spot. I’ve just spent the last 12 hours installing, tweaking, testing and using the plugin and I am absolutely in love. I 100% recommend that every WordPress user get this plugin now! And I’ll tell you why…
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Filed Under: Tutorials, Wordpress Tagged With: , , ,

WordCamp Dallas 2009: Dave Curlee – How To Add Video To Your WordPress Site

August 27, 2009 By 2 Comments

Dave CurleeOh good lord. You guys are in for a treat that I will never live down. You get to see me in my full on Pimp outfit from the brief appearance at WordCamp Dallas 2009. I can’t believe that Dave left that in the video. Oh, who am I kidding. I can believe he left it in there! Anyway, here is Dave Curlee lecturing on How To Add Video To Your WordPress Site.

Of course, all of these WordCamp videos were produced and edited by Dave Curlee. So, when it comes to this video he had to give the lecture, oversee himself being filmed, and edit and post it. Whew! That’s a lot of work!
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Filed Under: The Man's Videos, Tutorials, Wordpress Tagged With: , , , , ,

How Disabled People Use the Internet – Refreshable Braille, Screen Readers and Wheelchairs

August 26, 2009 By 3 Comments

Web AccessibilityThank to Glenda Watson Hyatt (@GlendaWH on Twitter) for sharing a fascinating article by Roger Hudson called Refreshable Braille.

This article has a great deal of significance to me because I’ve been preaching Web Accessibility since the inception of the Internet, having even served on the W3C’s original Web Accessibility Initiative, and having built HTMLHelp.com around educating people about standards compliant Web development.

Heck, I even built the theme for OneMansBlog.com from scratch to try and insure accessibility among other things… But can you believe that in the last decade, I’ve never actually seen real users navigating the Web like this? Wow. It is refreshing to see that people can do it after fighting so hard for so long to build accessible standards.

I believe every person should watch these videos, whether you are a designer or not, to understand the challenges that some visitors face when they come to your Web site. So please take 5 minutes out of your day and give this article a little attention. Thanks!
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Filed Under: Wordpress Tagged With: , , , ,
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