When I launched this site in late March, I had a few ideas about who I thought would be interested in the kind of material I post here. But to be honest, the site’s readership ahs grown a lot faster than I’d expected — we touched 600 RSS/Email subscribers yesterday, and a couple hundred people also visit […]
Angela Booth, a writing coach and author of numerous books, ebooks, and blogs for writers, selected The Writer’s Technology Companion as the first Writing Blog of the Day today. Here’s what she was kind enough to write about the WTC: Dustin covers all those techy things which you should know as a writer, but were […]
Considering I’m supposed to be semi-retired this week, it’s been pretty busy around here, huh? I posted an epic piece about writing effective blog posts at Problogger yesterday, and I think a lot of my readers here would get a lot of value out of it. The basis of the article is a chapter in one […]
If you’re blogging, there’s a little bit of HTML code you should know. Yes, there are plenty of WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) tools out there that require no coding, from the visual editor in WordPress to offline blogging tool like Windows Live Writer (which I’ll write about in another post). But […]
So far in this series, I’ve talked about plugins that would be useful for just about any WordPress site. Today, I want to talk about a few plugins that are designed specifically for the needs of writers. The first three deal with formatting, allowing you to easily produce article series (like this one), a table […]
Like anything else technological, a website needs to be maintained and backed up. There is a lot that can go wrong with your website — hackers could get in and mess with your files, your web host could experience a hardware failure and not have sufficient backups to restore from, you could accidentally delete a crucial file […]
One of the keys to building a successful website is making it easy for your users to read and participate in your site. The two most important ways are built in to WordPress: all WordPress are comment-enabled, and all WordPress sites create an RSS feed so that readers can subscribe in the reader of their […]
The #1 hassle of running a website is the inevitable flood of spam that, if left unattended, will fill your posts’ comments sections. Most of these are obvious attempts to get either click-throughs (people clicking on the links to see what’s up) or link-backs (links from your site to theirs which affect their site’s rating […]
One of the reasons I recommend WordPress as the backbone of your writing website is that it is very easy to extend what WP can do using plugins. Installing a WordPress plugin is easy — for the most part, you just upload the folder to the wp-content/plugins folder on your server, go to the “Plugins” tab in […]
I surf the web a lot. Well, not “surf” – I have the web come to me in my trusty RSS reader, courtesy of Google. The point is, I see a lot of stuff out there on the Internet that might interest you. Here’s some of what I’ve come across lately: 25+ Pieces of Writing Software You […]
