Every blog is unique. Every blog’s community of visitors—and their tendency to leave comments or their style of comments—is unique as well.
Here, I’ve been blessed with a great community of blog readers, and as part of my website resign, I tried to find a better comment system to help.

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Blog Commenting: Building a Community

A few weeks ago, I hinted that I’ve been busy working on a secret project. If you’re visiting this post online, you can see the evidence of that project right here: a brand-spanking-new website! Shiny!

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Secret Project: A New Website!

We’ve probably all heard stories about ebook formatting problems, but we can be at a loss for how to tell a good formatter from a bad one. What issues should we watch out for? What questions should we ask? Even if we traditionally publish, we might want to judge whether our publisher knows what they’re doing for ebook publishing.

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Formatting for eBooks: Tips and Pitfalls — Guest: Angela Quarles

Many writers will search in MS Word for red flag words that indicate telling. But there are a lot of those words, and that would be a lot of searches. That’s where macros can help, and today we’ll learn how to build our own trouble-searching macros with a few secret weapons.

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Fix Showing vs. Telling with Macros & Word Lists

We want to clean up our story the best we can because copy editors often charge a “messy manuscript” premium. Yet it can be difficult to self-edit at this “polish” stage. For one thing, this step can be tedious to the extreme. Even with MS Word’s “find and replace” functionality, there are many words to check, and it’s hard to remember them all.

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MS Word Trick: Using Macros to Edit and Polish

If one thing is constant with Google, it’s that they always change. Over the past couple of years, they phased out most of Google Friend Connect and stopped supporting Feedburner. However, I realized recently that I hadn’t talked about their latest changes. Some of their recent changes have been good (Google Authorship), others bad (Gmail’s Tabbed Inbox),

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Google’s Fickleness: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

My two WordPress workshops are next week, so this is the last time I’ll mention them here on my blog. Try to contain your disappointment. *grin* Today, I’m summarizing the questions and answers from the Facebook chat about WordPress I did last week with Lisa Hall-Wilson. Facebook makes looking through old posts a hassle, so I wanted to

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Ask Jami: WordPress Questions and Answers

Months ago, I wrote about the death of Google Friend Connect (GFC). Many people who used the GFC social media and feed reading service couldn’t believe that Google would drop a service used by so many. When it died, people lost blog readers and newsletter subscribers. Rumors are swirling that Google is at it again, this

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Goodbye, Feedburner! Hello, Ownership of Our Platform

So in the last post, I explained how I decided on the infrastructure of my website. Yadda, yadda. Boring. But this time, I’ll talk about the magic of website creation. For those of you that do this stuff for a living, this will probably all be old hat. Er, yeah, I didn’t actually intend that

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A Perfectionist’s Guide to Website Creation, Part Two

As this post makes abundantly clear, I now have a blog. A whole website, in fact. If I were anyone else (i.e. a sane person), I would have set up a simple blog on Blogger and called it done. However, in case there was any doubt, let me state for the record, I am not

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A Perfectionist’s Guide to Website Creation, Part One