The first rule of blogging: Don’t cut and paste from Word.
The second rule of blogging: Don’t cut and paste from Word.
Why is transposing copy from Word bad? For starters, Word imposes a lot of HTML formatting onto any chunk of text. Just about everyone uses some kind of template in Word, which in turn can [...]

Why add a poll?
For one, it’s incredibly easy to do.
Polls are also one of the best ways to get your readers engaged with the blog and the topic you’re blogging about. Whereas posting a comment requires the reader to put some thought into what they have to say — not to mention taking the time [...]

As your blog begins to gather a head of steam, and more and more comments from readers begin popping up, you may be wondering how you can better showcase those comments. It’s easy.
As you may have already seen, some blogs have a slightly different comments widget in the sidebar, which displays short excerpts. Adding this [...]

Blogroll — the word might have an incredibly geeky ring to it, but if you’re looking to build up your blogging cred, nothing can things jump-started quite like creating a blogroll. Put simply, it’s a list of links to other sites you like. They can be ones you read on a daily basis, ones you’d [...]

Why bother with photos?
Well, for starters, when you write a story for print, wouldn’t you rather that it always have an image attached to it?
In our current, web-surfing world, readers can sometimes scan upwards of 100 websites a day. Photos help to quickly orient you to the content on a site, and make you that [...]

If the title of this blog sounds a tad militaristic, fear not: The goal here isn’t to put you through a series of endurance-testing drills, or to act like a drill sargeant straight out of Paris Island.
That said, the notion of boot camp — and all the discipline and hard work it conjures — isn’t [...]