Today is dragging for me so I thought I would post a little humor that my little brother has been emailing me (my type of forwarded emails Ü). Hope you enjoy! ~Paul W.

“The life of the creative man is lead, directed and controlled by boredom. Avoiding boredom is one of our most important purposes.” ~Susan Sontag

Tags are often a misunderstood element of WordPress. Many people for some reason use tags and categories interchangeably, which dilutes the point of either function.

The way I like to explain the relation of tags and categories to your blog is that of a book with chapters and an index. Categories are the chapters to a book and tags are the index to the same book. Categories should focus on high level segregation; whereas, tags are more on the granular bases with your information division.

The amount of tagging is really dependant upon the content, but if you are only adding one tag to a post you are not optimizing the value of the tag and might as well just use your categories. Having multiple tags provides several entries in your blog’s content “index,” and makes it easier for the post to be found.

If you look at the footer of MyMarketer you will notice something you might not have seen before—three miniature articles. The articles you will find focus on three areas: blog content, general web marketing, and search marketing. The titles of the articles are: Tips on Creating Great Content, How To Do Web Marketing Better, and Top Search Marketing Mistakes.

These are not your typical blog articles, but rather seriously condensed posts that are roughly 130 to 150 words and use about 20 lines of space. I call these mini articles Footer Seeds, and as far as I am aware this technique isn’t really being used in the blogosphere.

I decided to create these Footer Seeds for several reasons. First, I needed something to place in my footer. In the previous design I placed my social media efforts down at the bottom, and after I redesigned MyMarketer I moved my social media spots up to the sidebar. The new design focuses much more on the importance of social media and I felt it was pertinent for visitors to easily know where else to find me on the Internet (which wouldn’t have been achieved in the footer).

General George Patton once stated, “…an imperfect plan implemented immediately and violently will always succeed better than a perfect plan.” That is how I feel with the design and layout of the new MyMarketer.

I actually took my site down for 12 days to work and implement on the design. After almost two weeks of work I still had a lot of bugs (just try out the navigation drop down menu) and I was not completely satisfied with the design.

I’ve come to conclude that every year I need to evaluate my WordPress plugins and decide what’s valuable and what is excess. Sometimes I get in a rut and use the same plugin over and over without looking at what has recently been developed.

Recently, I have done a plugin inventory and realized there are a lot of really cool plugins that I could be using (and some old ones that are no longer necessary). From this inventory I have updated what I call my “Meat & Potatoes” plugins. These are the plugins that I use on most every new blog install. I say I add these plugins with most blogs because there are two types of blogs people setup—blogs that want comments and blogs that hate comments.

Lately, I have been getting a lot of requests on how to 301 pages in WordPress. It is actually a really simple process, but a step that makes it even easier is using a plugin titled, WP htaccess Control.

This plugin makes optimizing your .htaccess file very easy, and therefore, I have added it to my “meat and potato” plugins I use to setup every blog with. I will have to write another post on what all the features are, but in short this plugin gives you access to your .htaccess file via your WordPress admin dashboard.

To setup a 301 with the WP htaccess Control plugin, you need to go to the plugin admin (titled WP htaControl). Here go to the third menu (custom htaccess) and enter the following code (be sure to change the structure and domain for your circumstances:

Recently, I was looking through my draft folder on mymarketer, which holds all the posts ideas I’ve wanted to write but saved for a slow rainy day. I noticed that my oldest blog post idea dates back to August of 2007. I feel 33 months is a bit too long for a draft idea to stay dormant, and obviously that slow rainy day isn’t coming anytime soon.  The occasion has come to blow off the cobwebs and allow this idea to come to fruition.

My idea stemmed from an article in the Wall Street Journal, which gave some interesting data about the importance of business blogging.  I have always had a keen interest on this subject. Mainly, because business blogging is what really launched my Internet marketing career. Having seen a great deal of success with blogging, I am an avid believer that, if done correctly, blogging can be a great online tool for boosting a business’s bottom line.

It is interesting to see that almost three years later the debate continues concerning the importance of businesses utilizing blogging as a resource and a business tactic. Having just left corporate America I still believe that business blogging is not used enough as an online tool. With this in mind below are my 11 tips on how to fully take advantage of blogging as a resource for your business:

So, for the last few years I have been using a free piece of software, called Stick, that has been really quite useful. Stick allows you to add a virtual “push pin” to any widow pane or software interface. Once you add the push pin that window will always be viewed as the top window pane. This is extremely helpful when I am going from one program to another and have lots of windows open. Before this great piece of software I had to add an additional step of clicking on the window in the task bar. This doesn’t seem like a big deal, but when you have to do it several hundreds of times it gets old and fast.

I have no idea where I downloaded it.  I looked into the software properties and there is no attribute to the creator. Thus, I can’t give a hardy thank you to the designer of Stick. Really, I use this software multiple times a day, and frankly I am surprised that Microsoft hasn’t added this feature into Windows (but let’s be honest when does Microsoft really build for the user in mind, IE is a perfect of example of this corporate blindness).

Anyway, Stick is free, and as far as I can tell it’s under creative commons. I will be using another computer for the next few weeks, and this software is something I can’t live without. So, I decided to upload it to mymarketer in order for me to download it when I start using the new machine.

It might be a little strong of language to refer to Matt as a god, but he truly is amazing with what he has done with wordpress. I actually meet Matt last year at a WordCamp in Utah. The event was really good and it was also nice to rub shoulders with Matt. He really is a down to earth bloke who loves what he does. Not to mention he has a stellar piece of software.

Any one who knows me, knows that I am a wordpress geek. Plugin, themes, blogs, anything wordpress I study and analyze just about anything I can, and I do it just about every day. Pathetic…possibly, but a good career as well. Anyway, I found the below interview of Matt on WordPressOfTheDay.com and thought I would share it. I really like the cinematography done by SpeakingEvents.com (the company interviewing Matt), and I feel it gives a good insight to what wordpress really is all about. I particularly like the part that he talks about why wordpress is free. You can almost see pain in eyes as he talks about putting ads on wordpress (he is talking about wordpress.com). It’s funny and inspiring all at the same time.

If you look at my last two post (see here and here) you will notice that in one post I am displaying my code as an image and the other as regular text. In fact, looking at my last entries before the last one they were all images. Every time I tried to add the code to display wordpress would read it as regular code and make my post look funky.

I finally got wise and found a plugin that allowed me to show my code without messing everything up. The plugin is Code Everything and it is super easy. Basically, all you do is add <code> before and </code> after your coding example, and walla you see the example you want to show. I know this really is insignificant, but you have no idea how much time that this little plugin saves me (and hopefully you).