WordPress Upgrade Preparation Checklist

The more you prepare your blog in advance for the upgrade, the easier it will be to make the transition without complications.

I just uploaded the files overtop of my old files, but Lorelle’s nine tips for making sure your upgrade goes well are closer to the right way to do it.

Are You Building Your Personal Brand?

The risks to exposing yourself to your customers and community (figuratively speaking, of course) aren’t nearly as severe as you may think; and the rewards are huge. By creating a powerful personal brand you’ll be differentiating yourself from others in your organization and industry, it will encourage more interesting job opportunities, you’ll be compensated more by an employer afraid to lose you, you’ll increase your visibility, and in time you’ll be able to understand yourself better and will be more confident.

I’ve never been wild about the idea of branding myself. It seems… limiting. I have several online personas, and some of them are doing stuff that has nothing to do with money making (except that they make some). This article is great food for thought.

Plugin: AntiLeech Prevents Content Scrapper

AntiLeech can detect a splogger bot using its User-Agent string, or by IP address. You can enter a User-Agent or an IP address into the Options panel of your WordPress blog. In addition to all of that, AntiLeech will produce a robots.txt output from the User-Agents that you’ve specified in the options page, assuming you don’t already have one. Download the plugin now and prevent RSS or content scrapper.

Something to add to your Wordpress arsenal.

Random But Practical Affiliate Site Tips

If I make a typo of a common word I correct it. However if I typo a product, service, company name, event, etc I leave the typo the way it is.

Having a natural typo can sometimes bring good traffic to a page because if you naturally mispell something others might also.

Now, that is interesting. So are a lot of the other tips, some of which come strictly from the level of experience someone like Mark has.

The Demise of Borders Books: Death by Internet

Although the company used last week’s announcement that they’re seeking a buyout as an opportunity to blame a tight credit market and competition from discount chains like Wal-Mart, Borders’ disappointing performance stems from a failure to take e-commerce seriously.

I used to love Borders. That chain really had everything going for it, except that in the late 90’s they scrapped plans to make an online ecommerce website and redirected their homepage to Amazon.com… which then became my bookseller. It was like Borders threw in the towel before the game was even half over.

The problem was that K-mart bought Borders in order to bail out Waldenbooks, but Borders management understandably left, and Kmart got bored. Borders managed to buy its way back to independence from Kmart, but by that time Barnes & Noble and Crown were everywhere.

There’s room for a parable here about a man who needed to cut some glass, and failed to notice that the tool someone gave him to do it with was a hefty, quality diamond.

What Is A Favicon And Why Use One

Visit almost any popular website and have a look in the address bar. To the left of the URL you will see a 16×16 pixel image or icon. If you then bookmark or favorite it you will see that icon when you scroll through the list. If your browser supports tabs you will also see the icon in the tab. In most cases the icon is a static image unless you use Firefox or Flock.

A lot of you probably have had favicons for ages, but for those of you who don’t, this is a good article to check out.