From the monthly archives:

August 2009

Selecting a blog platform – Part 2: Selfhost or not?

After reading Part 1 in this series, you will agree with me that selecting the right blog platform, the software you will use to create and maintain your blog, is critical. Which of the four platforms we are considering will it be? WordPress, Tumblr, Typepad – Movable Type or Blogger? Your right selection will be [...]

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Selecting a blog platform – Part 3: Functionality

Part 1 of this series showed how critical it is to choose the blog platform suited for your needs, before you start. in Part 2, we covered one of the first questions you need to ask yourself: will I selfhost my blog or not? Today, we’re covering a topic which is just as critical in [...]

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Selecting a blog platform – Part 4: Ease-of-use and support

In this series, we looked at the criticality of choosing the right blog platform and how the different blog platforms differ in functionality and in the way they host the blogs. Now, let’s concentrate more on you, the blogger. Do you want to concentrate on writing posts, without spending too much time on fiddling with [...]

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Selecting a blog platform – Part 5: Layout, design and navigation

So far, we have covered some basic questions before you can make a solid choice which blog platform to use: selfhosting your blog or not, what functionality you demand, and what ease of use and support you can expect. With this triple pack, you can more or less decide on a blog software. Unless…, if [...]

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Selecting a blog platform – Part 6: Customizability

To make a solid choice which blog platform to use, we looked at factors like selfhosting your blog or not, what functionality you demand, ease of use and support as well as design, layout and navigation features. Some bloggers are very particular about their tools, and want it just the way they like it, in [...]

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Selecting a blog platform – Part 7: The bottom line

Making the choice which blog platform to use? Ask yourself: “Do I want to selfhost my blog or not?”, “What functionality do I want?”, “How important are ease of use and support, design, layout and navigation features and customizability for me?”… Looking at all of these factors, here are my bottom line recommendations:

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Evidence of the social media revolution

In case you still needed convincing social media is not a trend, but a revolution: There are over 200,000,000 blogs in the world and 54% of bloggers post content or tweet daily. It took Radio 38 years to reach 50 million users. TV did better: 13 years, the Internet 4 Years and iPod 3 Years. Facebook on [...]

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How does your blog score on PageRank?

A PageRank (PR) is one of the main ways to check a website’s “ranking” amongst its peers. Am I talking Chinese here? “PageRank” is Google’s rating (between PR0 and PR10 on an logarythmic scale) of ‘how valuable’ your site is to the web community (and hereby I shamelessly summarize 234,000 books and 1,234,000 articles written [...]

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Analyzing 200 nonprofit blogs

I took advantage of the long weekend here in Rome to do a major redesign of the back end engines in my network of blogs and social media tools. Over the past two years, I have collected over 300 sites which cover aid and humanitarian issues, development and philanthropy, advocacy and “social media for a [...]

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Changing a Blogger template

If you are a serious blogger, you will not only write blog posts, but also tweak your blog layout. You will add widgets, fine-tune the layout, add navigation features, icons etc… This takes up a significant amount of time and effort. As an example of “The Life of a Blog Master”, take a look at [...]

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Comparing Yahoo, Bing and Google searches

Microsoft’s new search engine Bing has been released for about three months now. Have you checked how it returns keywords related to your blog? Or even more importantly, how would Bing compares to Google and Yahoo searches? Michael Kordahi made it fun to compare the three search engines on his Blind Search site: Enter any [...]

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