Yes, you too can get a FREE ABTheme permanent key - the key to unlocking the greatest SEO-enabled WordPress theme there is - ABTheme! The way of course is simple - become a member of ActiveBlogging. Currently, AB members get free credits every month, and the ‘price’ for the unlock key is set at 1,000 points currently. Members can check on their current points in the membership section - just log in, and view your...

From time to time the question arises - should I use HTML email instead of text email? Let me tell you a little story... I subscribe to the TigerDirect email list. It’s one of the few I open all the time that comes from a store, and I read it right away. Or at least I used to. You see, awhile back they tweaked their emailing, and the link that I clicked on each time...

From time to time I like to get input from my members on various topics. Enter surveys. Although you can add permanent surveys to your blog (for example, with a plugin called Democracy, which I discussed in the April 2006 issue of “The ActiveBlogging Report“), there’s times you want something simple. Enter SurveyMonkey. I’ve used them a few times, and found the service quite good. You simply set up your questions, then activate the survey,...

I’ll answer the title question quickly - no, there are many others. A quick look on the search engines for “free blog” and “blog open source” will reveal many sites willing to host your blog, or provide you with free software to do it yourself. So why WordPress? In 2004, when I started working with WordPress, my main goal was to understand what all this ‘blogging’ was about. I’m not a big fan of writing...

Awhile back, WordPress had a bug - drafts and future articles could be read if you knew what to look for. For example, if you used the ?p=NNN parameter (as I mentioned in my article on shorter email links for WordPress), you could view this article with the link: http://ActiveBlogging.com/?p=211 Whether it was a future post, draft, or visible. WordPress has since fixed that, but there still is a small gap in the feature. If...

A quick tip - when you’re emailing post links from your blog to someone, you can set the link from the site like this: http://ActiveBlogging.com/info/how-to-email-wordpress-post-links-without-line-wrap And risk going off the right edge of the email line - and potentially getting it cut into two. Or you can shorten it to something like this: http://ActiveBlogging.com/index.php?p=210 Or, even shorter, http://ActiveBlogging.com/?p=210 This works because the ‘?p=‘ is the parameter for the post ID, and that uniquely identifies a...