Blogging Art and Practice

How to Be Transparent: Complying with the FTC Disclosure Regs

Kathy Purdy — Mon, 19 Oct 2009 17:50:29 +0000

The new Federal Trade Commission (FTC) Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising took a lot of my fellow garden bloggers by surprise. Because I’ve been following the career of my friend Jenn Fowler as she’s gone from frugal blogger to Walmart Mom to social media consultant, I know that many bloggers [...]

How to Find a Good WordPress Blog Design

Kathy Purdy — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 19:22:43 +0000

Recently I was asked if I knew “anyone who is good at designing a website/blog.” I thought I’d share my thoughts with all my readers. Good Design for Free I know of a few designers, but paying someone is not your only option. There are many free designs, called themes, out there for WordPress. Some of these [...]

Six Low-Priced, Fast-Selling Netbooks

Kathy Purdy — Tue, 27 Jan 2009 22:04:44 +0000

I have an Asus (got it last April), I’ve drooled over a Dell, and after reading this review of Six Low-Priced, Fast-Selling Netbooks I’m wondering if the HP wouldn’t be even better.

How to use TweetDeck

Kathy Purdy — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 15:39:10 +0000

TweetDeck is the most useful application for managing Twitter that I’ve found. While many call it “intuitive,” some of my clients are intimidated by it. Perhaps they don’t realize it has tooltip-type hints when you mouse over the various buttons, or maybe the tips don’t explain enough. For those of you who want more than [...]

How to extract urls from MS Word 2007 hyperlinks

Kathy Purdy — Mon, 08 Dec 2008 03:30:43 +0000

Recently I have been creating a series of “cheat sheets” on various topics related to blogging and social media using Microsoft Word 2007. These documents are essentially an annotated list of websites related to a particular topic, which I intend to provide to my clients as an aid to their own education and research. Having long [...]

How to use WordPress’s gallery feature

Kathy Purdy — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 20:06:18 +0000

WordPress 2.5 included a photo gallery feature and an image uploader that uses Flash. The documentation for these features is spotty to non-existent. I have been hunting around for information on this feature and experimenting with it on my gardening site. This is what I’ve found out so far. A new template for your theme The first [...]

How to read more blogs in less time

Kathy Purdy — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 01:13:15 +0000

The day comes in the life of every blog reader when they realize they are spending too much time reading blogs…and they don’t want to give up reading any of them. That’s why smart blog readers use a feed reader to help them stay on top of the blogs they read. What’s a feed and why [...]

I got rid of Text-Link Ads

Kathy Purdy — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 19:39:18 +0000

Google Penalizes Paid Links Last fall, Google started cracking down on paid links. To understand what this means, you first have to understand that Google lists sites in its search results in part by examining who the site links to and who links to it. Some websites pay money to other websites so that they will [...]

What Happens to Your Blog Post After You Publish It

Kathy Purdy — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 18:12:04 +0000

Thanks to Doug Green (via a listserv), I learned of this fascinating animated chart demonstrating The Life Cycle of a Blog Post, From Servers to Spiders to Suits — to You. I had a clue that some of this stuff was going on, but didn’t realize the scope of it.

Asus Eee PC

Kathy Purdy — Sun, 20 Jan 2008 21:22:39 +0000

I don’t plan to make a habit of discussing products I haven’t used myself, but I saw a patron at our local public library using one of these things, and it’s gotten stuck in my head. My first reaction when I saw it was, “Oh, how cute!” My second reaction was, “I want one!” Boy, [...]