It’s funny, it just occurred to me that this series here in the Daily is kinda like Spaceship Earth at Epcot. Only we’re talking about the internet. 🙂 If you’ve never ridden it, it takes you from the early stages of societal technology (at the bottom) to the future up at the top. It’s funny,…
I’m a bit of an old man. Well, in “internet years”. 😉 See, I got started in this whole online thing in 1998. If you’ve read my bio, you know that it all started with a magazine article on how to start a website in 20 minutes or less. That article inspired me to create my first website…
OK, to end off the week of talking about various geeky matters of site speed, I want to talk to you about another typical source of slowdown on your homepage. The slider. A lot of people think they look cool. You’ll go to some homepage and there will be this big feature image. But, before…
Today, let’s talk hosting. After all, we’ve been talking about your site speed this week, and hosting is right there at the top of your priority list. I run my whole business off of Wordpress. If you’re doing what I do, then you likely are, too. This doesn’t mean you don’t use other systems, but…
Speedy blogs satisfy the Google gods. 🙂 And, so far this week, we’ve been talking about some ways to speed up your blog. The biggest source of blog slowdown, though, is your plug-ins. Generally speaking, the more plug-ins you run on your blog, the slower your blog will be. Each new plug-in you activate is…
I’ve got another slightly geeky (but still easy) hack you can make to give your blog another speed boost… Yesterday’s issue of The Daily talked about removing orphaned settings from your WP_OPTIONS table to speed up your site. In there, I talked how I initially ran a speed test on my site using GTMetrix. This is…
OK, let’s get practical to start off the week here. And a tad geeky. 🙂 Last week, I was working on my new course for Lab members. This means I was logged into the Lab as a member testing things out. As I did so, I realized that the site was SLLOOWWW. Like, it would take…
Working for yourself requires some self-discipline. There’s no boss hovering over you to keep you on track. There’s rarely any strong deadlines and there’s no threat of being fired. We need a big ol’ dose of self-discipline to keep us on track. And sometimes we look for “hacks” to help us out with that. 🙂…
If you’ve been with me for a little while, perhaps you remember my 30 Day Blog Transformation Challenge. In fact, judging from my recent Daily survey, a few of you may have found me from that! Very cool! For those of you not familiar with it, it was a 30-day video series I did several…
In my recent survey to you fine folks here in The Daily, I asked about your biggest challenge. And, I got quite a few of you who felt pretty snowed in by how to get started. “There seems to be so much to do!” So, if that was you, don’t feel alone. But, my job…
Today is the 100th issue of The Daily. It started out as a grand experiment. I didn’t know what the impact would be. I didn’t know if I’d be able to keep up with it. I didn’t know whether anybody would care to hear from me that often. This was back in October, if I…
There’s a small trend going around in the world of blogging to simply get rid of the sidebar altogether. Personally, I like the simplicity and the lack of distraction. Plus, that sidebar always ends up getting pushed way down on mobile devices. And more and more traffic is mobile. According to ComScore, users spend about 69%…