Those of you who blog: do you ever get commenters who want to have a long, in-depth conversation/debate with you about everything you’ve said in some article? I’ve suddenly started getting these and I can’t figure out how to slow them down. Responding is taking up time I don’t have. Any suggestions?

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UPDATE: if you respond to the email that says your feeds moved over successfully, Google does actually get back to you several days later with an email that indicates they’re reading the emails and getting to them as they can, but are overwhelmed at the moment. This might be the best way to make sure your problems are known to them. But do please search the forums to see if your problems are already known, … READ MORE

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About once a year, I change some of my blog feeds from full posts to summaries, just to see what happens. Every time, my feed subscriber numbers fall. My latest experiment was no exception. My unique visitors also fell (and not just due to Thanksgiving), as did the amount of comments my posts received. Surprisingly

Of course, Feedburner is about as reliable as asking my socks for the numbers. I think there’s literally no one working … READ MORE

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I haven’t played extensively with Wordpress 2.7 yet, but remember how 2.5 sucked? And we were told we could whine all we wanted but it wouldn’t help? Wordpress 2.7 appears to be a very big improvement which did indeed take into account the issues we were complaining about.

It has automatic updating built in, so you no longer need the wonderful automatic upgrade plugin. The menu that used to be across the top is … READ MORE

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I’m not a great themer. I take other people’s themes that seem to work predictably and I doctor them. My themes have to comply with everything Mark lists here, and while some people don’t worry about having your content as close to the top of the source code as possible, I think it’s crucial. I’ve run the same site both ways, run two sites simultaneously both ways, and every time the theme with the … READ MORE

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I had some trouble getting the captions to look good in Wordpress 2.6. Here’s how I solved it.

First, I added this code from the default theme to my style sheet:

/* Captions */
.aligncenter,
div.aligncenter {
display: block;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
}

.wp-caption {
border: 1px solid #ddd;
text-align: center;
background-color: #f3f3f3;
padding-top: 4px;
margin: 10px;
-moz-border-radius: 3px;
-khtml-border-radius: 3px;
-webkit-border-radius: 3px;
border-radius: 3px;
}

.wp-caption img {
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
border: 0 none;
}

.wp-caption p.wp-caption-text {
font-size: 11px;
line-height: 17px;
padding: 0 4px 5px;
margin: 0;
}
/* End captions */

That should have done the trick, but it didn’t. The problem … READ MORE

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I love Alinks and all its cool functions for making phrases on my site automatically turn into links, but one thing about it was driving me crazy:

It spits a huge block of code into your source, between the bot and your content. Go check your source code, if you use it. See that? See how far down your content starts? I don’t know why more people don’t realize this matters for SEO. I see … READ MORE

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This month, Project B-2 Bomber is hitting 25k visitors. That’s up 9k from last month - this is a big gain for one of my sites. Today, I had a major epiphany: I figured out what B-2 really means to people who visit.

Don’t get me wrong: I’ve always known what the site is about. We had a topic and we stuck to it, and the mission is pretty clear when you visit and look … READ MORE

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Konstructors has released a new admin theme for Wordpress 2.5+ that lets you:

Set a color scheme you like (they offer several options, or an easy interface to create your own)
Rearrange the admin page in a very logical fashion - you can tweak this to suit you..

The way they rearrange the page is even better than just putting everything back on the sidebar like it was in 2.3.3. Check it out, and click on the … READ MORE

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So Wordpress 2.5 doesn’t come with the ability to auto-update the whole installation after all. It also has a tendency to eat your posts if it doesn’t like the way you click publish. Gah!

I’ve found a plugin that upgrades your install automatically, but it’s got some bugs. Plus, one that I found - but there’s a workaround. First, using it in the non-automatic mode where it guides you through the “5 Easy steps” but … READ MORE

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