In 2005 I wrote a short report on optimizing WordPress for business, “Top 10 Tricks to Conquer Your Niche With WordPress”. It proved very popular, and over the years I’ve expanded and revised it, as online marketing (and WordPress itself) changed.

Now, the fifth edition has made the change offline, and it’s a ‘real world’ edition – on Amazon.com!

About four times the size of the last edition, I’ve gone into detail on using WordPress, as well a many, many beginner topics: getting a domain name, choosing good hosting for …

One of the great things about RSS is that you can get a text-only (that is, FAST) summary of a blog without wading through megabits of images and style.

RSS feed readers, for the uninitiated, make it easy to read RSS feeds, those text summaries of blogs, and simplify the task of reaching out and grabbing those text-only (mostly) blog summaries. Using one, it’s short work to review a goodly number of articles quickly.

In my case, the topic is timely: I’ve just updated FireFox to 3.6, and of course …

If you have trouble finding images for your blog posts, there is a ‘new’ place out there, EveryStockPhoto.com/ – and its source may surprise you.

It actually uses the content available from ALL the image sites out there, and gathers the details into one easy to use interface.

Traditionally, when you need an image, one source has been various photo sites with Creative Commons licenses. For example, browsing Flickr, you might see a photo that you can use if you attribute to the author.

However, while good in theory, there …

It’s true – FaceBook is moving from PHP to compiled PHP – with a performance gain of about 50% over PHP.

The move, using an in-house compiler program, HopHop, takes the original PHP code and translates it to C++ code, with then can be compiled and run on the Web server as a program.

As another benefit, FaceBook has released the HipHop compiler as Open Source, meaning anyone can convert/compile their PHP code.

C++, a language that allows very fast low-level access to computer hardware, is traditionally preferred for fast …

Since it’s start, Adsense has had one big rule – no competition.

Actually, the full rule is no contextual competition – that is, no other ads on the page besides Adsense that changed based on the context of the page. So, you can place banners and static ads alongside Adsense all you want, but put an ad that that ‘adapts’ to the blog post – and you’re breaking Adsense rules.

However, that has changed. Adsense now allowed approved partners in the contextual advertising. The difference? They go through the Adsense …