In an upcoming webinar on April 2, learn tips on site design, SEO, monetization, and mobile optimization.

It’s been possible to export your posts, images, and other content to an export file, and then transfer this content into another WordPress site since the early days of WordPress. This basic WordPress import moved content, but didn’t include other important stuff like themes, plugins, users, or settings. Your imported …

Our next webinar will introduce you to the ABCs of eCommerce.

Starting a new website can be a bit overwhelming but we’re here to help! Beginning Monday, April 20th, WordPress.com will host free, 30-minute live webinars to cover those initial questions that come up as you start to build your website. Each day will cover a different topic, all designed to …

In March 2020, EPA announced a new website for finding key EPA resources about the Coronavirus (COVID-19) virus. Additional information can be found on CDC's Coronavirus (COVID-19) website, a list of Disinfectants EPA's Pesticide Program recommend (today) to ward off spreading the virus, and CDC's list of symptoms to watch for.

Removed From Troubles (Open for application) Goodreads.com

Due to the continuing serious illness of this site's owner, Bunny, caused by a devastating knock to her recovery back in May 2013, it will very sadly no longer be possible for the foreseeable future at least, for this site to continue to be updated. Existing submissions will remain on the site, but no new submissions can be posted, and she unfortunately remains far too ill to be able to continue to offer advice or respond to any emails. She desperately needs absolute rest, and is simply physically incapable of running her sites, responding to emails, or frankly everyday normal activities we tend to take for granted. Please know this is the last thing she would have wanted, obviously, and this continued situation has become a great source of pain to her, but sometimes in life you are just caught in storms, not of your own making, that you simply cannot avoid, however much you wish it, and however undeserved. Bunny had already long ago made provisions at her own expense, for all of her NFP sites to continue in the event of her death, etc and for all existing submissions to remain, in her prolonged absence, to make sure the sites could continue, and to be a source of solace, as is, even when she could not. We have tried our very best to continue to update the sites for as long as possible in her absence, in the hope that she would one day be able to return to them, but unfortunately the devastation and shock caused by the unexpected and undeserved knock she received, and the subsequent continued deterioration of her health caused by the ongoing stress of it all, has now made this, for the foreseeable future at least, impossible. We are very sorry this is not the better and more hopeful news we were hoping to be able to convey, but we hope the existing content on the sites will continue to make them a source of comfort to those in distress, as Bunny always intended them to be. Warmest Regards Dee

It’s been an odd set of months. I got busy with Drop-In Time and then very un-busy. I’ve been keeping...

At Let Grow, a wise mom named Kate Sundquist admits that while her kids were already good at playing, they certainly weren’t good at filling hours and hours of free time, playing by themselves. (Read the piece here.) So she her and boys created a schedule. “While these routines might seem restrictive or even the […]

You read that right. Joanne and I visited a Masonic Cemetary. Alone. It was one of the most calming experiences of my life. We were kind of invited, by the town, and when we arrived, we were definitely welcomed by the residents. This all started when, in the brochure listing the “town attractions” that we received in St. Helens, were two cemeteries. The addresses as well as short descriptions were listed, as well as a short missive asking us to please be respectful and not make loud noises. It sounded really creepy and really interesting, so both of us jumped at the chance to drive out there right before sunset. They weren’t what I expected at all… Well, the first one was actually roped off with a “no trespassing” sign hanging from it, so we didn’t go inside. It was right alongside the highway in Oregon, across some old train tracks, visible from the road, and named and marked on a tourist map, yet they didn’t want visitors. I wonder what happened there. In any case, we headed for the other cemetery. This one was removed from the main road, and rumored to be a lot larger. It was also known to be haunted, but visitors were welcome as long as they were respectful. Off the map it was, but when we arrived, it was also gated off. A sad Joanne looks through the gate at the second destination that was cut off from us. Ah, but unlike the other cemetery, this one didn’t have a “no tresspassing” sign. There was a clear path around the sides of the gate, the ground bare of grass and obviously well-traversed. Apparently a lot of people walked around the gate. Maybe they just didn’t want us to drive. We decided to walk. There was even a sign. And a long, winding, steep road through the forest.  It was quite a hike to reach the top of the large hill where the cemetery was supposedly located, but the view was breathtaking. It took us a good ten or fifteen minutes to reach the top, and the road was quite steep. For some reason, to the immediate right of the trail, someone had been excavating land for quite some time, and there was a deep quarry. Why someone would dig a quarry next to a burial ground is beside me. I don’t doubt that the residents were unhappy about it. I wondered if maybe I would feel some spirits, but I didn’t expect what really happened to me. As soon as I stepped off of the road and onto the grass, a calm unlike anything I’ve ever felt descended upon me. It enveloped me in a warm cocoon, and Joanne and I immediately separated and wandered quietly alone between the gravestones. I know, 100%, that not only was I welcomed, but that the residents were happy to have me there. I talked a bit with some of the gravestones, but mostly wandered about, amazed at how much serenity I felt. We must have spent around a half hour wandering quietly alone, together, before we left in order to return to the festivities in town. But I’ll never forget the experience. It was something really, really special. I took some video footage too, but I’m not sure yet whether I want to use it. We’ll see! Someday, I’ll set up a tripod and get a shot of me walking like this. But for now, have Joanne instead. ???? <3

Hey Everyone! I've been hard at work for the last month or so on doing a small update to the website. The most obvious thing you'll see is it's gotten a bit of a facelift which will hopefully make it a little easier to use. I've also tried to streamline things a bit so we don't have as much server strain when Hamlet puts out a new page.

Additionally, we've put in a new fanart section that features a whole bunch of awesome Starfighter fanart done by sexy Starfighter fans from around the world!

The games section is also improved, sporting games to some of our favorite awesomely talented artists.

If you don't watch HamletMachine on DeviantArt, check out the extras section too, where I've added a bunch of her recent Starfighter drawings.

Wow, ok that's it for now I swear! -Thisbe

Hello Everyone! I just want to quickly let you all know about a couple of improvements we've made to the Starfighter site. Starting last week, every comic page of Starfighter has had a link below it to its own comment section. We're using the Disqus comment system, which I imagine many of you are already familiar with. It's been working well so far and we hope you all like it! Even though it's only been up for short while, your response has been wonderful. Hamlet and I have both really enjoyed getting to hear all of your thoughts on the comic so far!

One other small change - you'll notice a new latest page link in the upper right hand corner of every page on the Starfigheter website. I wanted to make it easier for all of you Starfighter veterans to reach the new page each week. Hopefully you'll all find this more convenient!

Thank you all so much again for your enthusiasm in the new comments! Oh! And also, Hamlet's just finished the latest page. I'd say now would be a good time to give that new link a try! -Thisbe

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication or Rich Site Summary; it's an XML based content format for distributing things like news, headlines, content, etc. These are popular because instead of relying on them to bookmark your site and return later, their RSS reader keeps your site fresh by showing them your latest posts as a simple headline. So every time that you add content such as a blog post or article they get to see the update, plus a direct link to that post.

If you're brand new ot creating websites or blogs you may feel a little like a deer caught in the headlights of a truck when it comes to figuring out what things your site needs. There are thousands of things to choose from such as GIF files, videos, widgets, slide shows etc. But before you start getting carried away adding these things you need to add the basics, call them your core fundamentals if you will. Without these your site won't be as effective as what it could be, and won't attract the traffic that you want.

Having a privacy policy for your website or blog is a way to declare to your viewers and subscribers on what happens with any information that’s collected on them, why it’s being collected, and how that information is being stored. This is a vital component to your site if your site is for business, or if you have a website that uses affiliate type advertising in order to earn revenue such as Amazon or Google Adsense. In fact not having a privacy policy will get your affiliate account banned on most sites, so apart from that and covering your back to protect yourself from legal action are good enough reasons to have privacy policy.

It seems there are literally thousands of sites that promise to promote your website or blog…..but for a price. The best known one is Google Adwords where you pay so many cents per click depending on the competition of the Keywords you want top rankings in. And while this will get your website to the top page in Google not everyone has the budget to fork out hundreds of dollars in advertising. But you can promote your site for free using some of these methods. Most of these are going to take time to build up before you start noticing huge amounts of traffic, but they will work if your willing to put the time in.

If you’re new to websites or blogs you might not have heard of “pinging your site”. Using ping is another free seo tool in your arsenal to help get your site indexed and more traffic. Basically it works like this, a ping is basically the equiviant of you shouting at the top of your lungs “Hey over here”. It sends a notice to the search engines and directories that you have content in need of indexing, or that content has been updated.

Using twitter is a great way to promote your website or blog and increase traffic. If your new to twitter and never used it before it works like this. You get 140 characters to write a short statement or advertisement depending on what you’re using the site for. Most people tweet simple things like there not feeling well or changes in their social life. All that’s fine but you want to use it to promote your website, so here are some simple things to optimize your tweets to get the maximum traffic return.

Traffic we all want it, so how do you get it? You’ve picked your topic, and you got your site up so how do you get visitors to your site. Getting website traffic can be frustrating at the very least, a major agonizing pain at the worst. Here are some tips on how to get website traffic.

When it comes to how to get website traffic, not all traffic types are equal and hold the same value. Many who are new to websites or blogs think that all traffic is one and the same. And while the number of visits might look good you have to actually look at the numbers to see the real story behind those numbers. This is one reason why using sites like Google Analytics or other traffic stat sites is important when it comes to unstanding what kind of traffic your getting. To understand if the traffic you’re getting is good or not you have to know what types of traffic are out there, they are 1. Social Traffic 2. Paid Traffic 3. Word Of Mouth 4. Search Traffic 5. Return Traffic

First off what is a favicon? If you look at the browser bar on this webpage just before the sites URL address is a small picture. When it comes to helping make your website or blog stand out there a huge benefit. They allow your readers to find your web pages easily if they have many browser windows and tabs open at once. If a visitor bookmarks your site in their favourites list the standard “e” icon is replaced by your picture helping your link stand out from the rest so they can return to visit. And they can also be used to help brand your site. Who would have thought a tiny 16x16 picture could help that much.

When it comes to ways you can increase traffic to your website there are dozens if not hundreds of ways to get more traffic. Depending on your website, the content or products you’re trying to get viewed, and the amount of time you can invest each day on your site, not all of those hundreds or ways are going to be as effective. You also want to avoid anything that could be considered “Black Hat SEO” as these types of tricks to increase your traffic may work in the short term, but get your website kicked out of search engine rankings.

One of the corner stones of SEO is to get back links from other related sites, talk to anyone who knows even a hint of what search engine optimization is about and they’ll all tell you this. It’s what makes the internet….well the internet. But when it comes to linking to sites one you have to be especially careful of are sites that are considered “bad neighbourhood sites”

When it comes to trying to get your site to rank well on search engines many focus on trying to rank for the most popular keywords, the ones with high volumes of traffic with the hope that hundreds or thousands of people every day visit their site. The reality is that chasing after the most popular keywords will be almost impossible to rank for. If your website or blog is brand new this will be a fight you can’t win, the large companies that rank number one for these types of keywords spend fortunes to dominate those positions.

If you’ve had a website or blog for some time you know that in order to rank well in search engines your site needs quality one way back links pointing to it. Most of us know about link exchanges, link farms, reciprocal links and so on. While some of these are good and others you should avoid (link farms for example) one you might not have heard of is 3 way linking.

Leaving comments on blogs and websites. It doesn’t matter if the site is a “do follow” or not, building links through comments can help get the word out about your site. Comments are also a good indicator if you’re doing something right and can give you great feedback. Of course in a perfect world every comment would be a good one, the reality is that at some point your going to get bad comments or comment vomit if you will. Self centered crap that’s there to only advertise their site, bash yours, and all other types of garbage that adds nothing of value.

Do people hate your website? This is a question you should ask yourself if your finding your site isn’t performing the way you would like it to. If your finding that people aren’t visiting your site for very long or aren’t coming back at all here are 10 things you should look at that could be killing your website traffic. This isn’t to bash your site or trash talk or brag about how much better my site is over yours (there are things I have to fix) this is just to point out some things that could be hurting how it performs.

How many times has this happened to you when searching online? You find several links to sites that look like they have the information you’re looking for. However when you go to those sites you find only a few ads and nothing but a couple lines of useless text. (If you’re lucky to even find that) So you go back and look around some more and find another link that takes you to another site like exactly like the first one,..............well maybe the color is different. After a bit more searching and running across several more websites like this, you either luck out or find the information you’re looking for, or get pissed off and give up. If this happened to you I don’t need to tell you how frustrating MFA websites are.

So you’ve created your website, now all you have to is launch it and just sit back and let the hordes of traffic come to you………right? Wrong just because you slapped a few pages together doesn’t mean your website is ready for the world. There are some very important things to do before you launch your website to give it the best possible chance. Using a pre-launch checklist before you launch your website is your opportunity to fix any problems and add any last minute changes before that all important launch. In this post I’ll give you a list of what to do before you launch your website...........

Traffic, if you have a website or a blog you want to get website traffic and as much of it as possible. It doesn’t matter if your site is to make money, to connect with others, for a business, or display your love for all things kittens, if you’re a site owner you want traffic. So how do you go about getting website traffic? Here is a list I put together of 100 different things you can do to get traffic to your website. These aren’t in any particular order of importance and not all of them will work for each site the same way. Some sites will have better results with some of these options then others..................

Regardless of your niche and what you use your website or blog for, SEO plays a huge role in getting your site noticed online. SEO though isn’t just optimizing your site by using some tricks and writing lots of content. There are also lots of free seo tools available online you can use to where your website stands, and what needs to be fixed or improved. Here is a list of 20 of what I think are some of the best free seo tools available.............

It’s no secret that having great content on your site is the corner stone to getting visitors and keeping them interested. But what happens when you can’t come up with any ideas? It can be frustrating trying to come up with something you hope your visitors will like on a regular schedule if your mind is blank. Fortunate there are lots of places to find content ideas for your website. Here is a list of 11 places to look for website content ideas..................

Everyone who knows anything about SEO (Search engine optimization) can’t stress enough the importance of trying to increase traffic to your website by ranking well in the search engines. I mean let’s face it if your site isn’t optimized your not going to get very much traffic, and those dreams of getting all the people in the world to visit your site isn’t going to happen. But while SEO is important to your site, there’s something else you should be doing as well and that’s SMO............

So your website loads slower then old people Fu%@ing. Nobody likes a slow website, not the search bots, and especially not people who will leave rather then wait for a page that takes forever to load, let’s be honest our attention span is getting shorter all the time. On top of that Google’s recent Panda update looks at a sites load time to determine where it’s going to site in search results, either way you look at it your website loading time is a big deal............ So how do you speed up your website loading time? Here’s a list of 10 tips for optimizing your website to load faster.........

If you use some type of analytics to monitor your websites performance you’ve probably seen its bounce rate. So what is bounce rate exactly? It can be defined in a couple of different ways; it can either be an indicator to the number of visitors who view only one page of your site and leave. Or the number of visitors who leave your site after a short amount of time (usually only a couple of seconds)............

Back in the day if you wanted your website or blog to get indexed fast by the search engines, you would submit it to website directories. Are they still worth submitting to today? For the most part yes. Submitting your site to website directories can still be an effective way at building back links that’ll help you rank higher in search results and should be part of your overall SEO strategy. This is especially true for new websites and blogs were getting back links from other webmasters can be difficult..........................

1. Children in US and UK dying from syndrome linked to COVID-19  World Socialist Web Site
2. Rare illness linked to coronavirus kills New York five-year-old  9News
3. Coronavirus US: Andrew Cuomo’s sad announcemet about chld infections  NEWS.com.au
4. Some children with COVID-19 showing symptoms similar to Kawasaki Disease  NEWS10 ABC
5. New fears around 'entirely different chapter' of coronavirus after boy dies from rare illness  Yahoo News Australia
6. View Full coverage on Google News

read more

When Sam Goree and his colleagues came across articles and blog posts that claim or ask that websites today look very similar to each other, they were intrigued. Unfortunately, since these articles didn’t have an empirical study to back them up, they ran a test to determine whether this claim had any truth to it, and if so, the reason behind it.

We ran a series of data mining studies that scrutinized nearly 200,000 images across 10,000 websites.

And what did they find out? Websites, indeed, were becoming very similar.

More details about this study over at Fast Company.

What are your thoughts about this one?

(Image Credit: 200degrees/ Pixabay)

Security researchers are sounding the alarm over newly discovered vulnerabilities in some popular online learning management system (LMS) plugins that various organizations and universities use to offer online training courses through their WordPress-based websites. According to the Check Point Research Team, the three WordPress plugins in question — LearnPress, LearnDash, and LifterLMS —

Show Notes for Episode 4: Subscribe to the Internet Musician Podcast with iTunes: As a musician, you need a good website.  You know that. But you really don’t need to spend years trying to understand the technology. You also don’t want to spend tons of time working on your site without knowing if you’re doing things […]

What is the big thing about targeted Internet traffic? And why do so many people want to know how to drive traffic to their website? Here are 2 facts that will help you understand why you need targeted Internet traffic to your web site.

My plan is to give you 2 very easy techniques to get some real targeted web site traffic to your money site or Blog. One of the major issues that new marketers face is getting traffic.

Are you asking yourself - how do I get more traffic to my web site? Well if you are, you are in luck, because I have 3 quick suggestions for you.

Do you want to know how to get more traffic to your blog? Well, I am going to reveal the advantages of press releases to boost traffic to a website. Once you know this your business will explode!