DevTopics

Just a few years back, if you wanted to host a WordPress blog on your own website, you avoided GoDaddy at all costs.  WordPress and other mainstream Web applications simply didn't work on GoDaddy shared hosting without a lot of extra work.  As a result, GoDaddy quickly gained a reputation as a cheap Web host that's good only for regular HTML web sites.  Over time GoDaddy support for Web applications improved, but installing WordPress still required extra work.  GoDaddy also introduced automatic installers for WordPress, but the result was usually a non-standard installation and code that was a few versions too old.

Fast forward to today.  With GoDaddy's new Hosting Connection, you can install the latest version of WordPress and many other Web applications such as Joomla with just a few mouse clicks.  It really couldn't be much easier.  Following are step-by-step instructions to install WordPress on GoDaddy shared hosting:

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Popularity: 7% [?]

Social news sites first became popular when Digg.com launched on the Web in 2004. A social news site enables its users to submit news stories and vote on them. The most popular articles percolate to the top of the list and are rewarded with a huge surge in Web traffic. A candid discussion of each article often appears. The most popular social news sites are Digg, Reddit and StumbleUpon, which recently hit 2 million registered users. DotNetKicks is an excellent social news site for .NET programming.

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Popularity: 6% [?]

Tags: Blogging, cybernymity, Digg, Reddit, social news, StumbleUpon

Today is May 15th, "Bloggers Unite For Human Rights" day.  Human rights represent one of the most agreed upon ideas—that all people are born with basic rights and freedoms that include life, liberty and justice.  This year marks the 60th anniversary of the "Universal Declaration of Human Rights" adopted by the United Nations.

After a year of blogging, it's easy for me to forget what an awesome privilege it is to have an international platform for my thoughts and ideas.  As an American, I take for granted that I can say just about anything–as long as it's true–and not fear for my life.  Given that you are reading this article, you likely live in a country with similar freedoms of thought and expression, so you also have reason to be thankful. 

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Popularity: 5% [?]

What do you do if original content from your website or blog is stolen and republished in full on another site?  You fight back!

A splog or "spam blog" is a blog that steals content from other web sites, then aggregates and republishes the content on its own blog.  Splogs are created primarily to make money from ads shown on the splog and/or promote affiliated web sites.  Splog owners are too dishonest, lazy or stupid to create their own original content and instead thieve yours.

Splogs are harmful because they effectively steal a portion of your blog's search engine ranking, traffic and ad revenue.

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Popularity: 3% [?]

What makes a C# blog good?  Pretty much the same thing that makes any blog good, but with a focus on C#, of course.  Good C# blogs have:

• Useful news, information, tips and code samples
• Regular updates
• Original content, not a splog or news feed
• Good organization, including categories and tags
• Healthy discussion and user comments
• Personal insight and humor, but not too much personal drivel

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Popularity: 2% [?]

Tags: C#-Blogs

The leading SEO (Search Engine Optimization) sites will tell you that placing an ad after the first post in your blog's home page is particularly effective.  This is because the ad is essentially embedded in the blog content, hence your readers are less likely to develop "ad blindness" and skip over the ad as usual.

To place an ad after the first post in your WordPress blog main page:

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Popularity: 8% [?]

Tags: Ad-Blindness, AdSense, Blog, Blogging, Google, Tips, WordPress

Blogs are becoming an important and prevalent method for software developers to share knowledge, tips and code.  Unlike code-sharing sites that have publication guidelines and restrictions, blogs are typically privately-owned, which gives developers freedom to deliver and format their content in many ways.  But this freedom can also result in a poor experience for the blog reader, ranging from code samples that won't compile, to the equivalent of a messy desk where nothing useful can be found.

Following are several tips for software developers to write and manage their blogs, and to make the blogs easier to use and navigate for their readers.

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Popularity: 6% [?]

Tags: Blog, Blogging, categories, Live-Writer, More-Tag, Spam, Spam-Blog, Splog, Splogger, Splogging, Tags, Visual Studio, Web, WordPress

Copyright infringement is the sincerest form of flattery.

What's a Splog?

A splog or "spam blog" is a blog that steals content from other web sites, then aggregates and republishes all or some of the content on its own blog.

Splogs are created to promote and increase search engine ranking of affiliated web sites, and/or to make money from ads shown on the splog.  Typically splogs are automated, but they can also be manual copy & paste.  A recent study indicated that 56% of all blogs are spam, and there are over 575 thousand splogs reported.

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Popularity: 6% [?]

Tags: Anti-Piracy, Blog, Blogging, Content-Piracy, Content-Theft, DMCA, Fair-Use, Spam, Spam-Blog, Splog, Splogger, Splogging, Web

There is a bug in WordPress v2.1.3 and a few prior versions that may prevent you from adding categories to your WordPress blog. 

When you attempt to add a category, the error message "You do not have permission to do that" will appear in a pink box.

To solve this problem in Internet Explorer 7 (IE7):

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Popularity: 10% [?]

Tags: Blogging, categories, Tips, Web, WordPress