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Author: Mark Cahill

Building Blog Readership – An Evolving World

Building Blog Readership – An Evolving World

When I started this site in March, after I stopped working with Vario Creative, where I had previously been blogging, I expected that the same traffic building steps that had worked for me before would work here.  After 5 months, I can safely say, that’s not the case. You see, when I started blogging at Vario, the important keys to getting readership were Technorati position and getting trackbacks from other sites.  In today’s world of sploggers and spammers, the trackback…

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WordPress as a Small Business Content Management System

WordPress as a Small Business Content Management System

I’ve been telling everyone for a while that WordPress is a Content Management System – now I’m ready to prove it.  I’ve set up a small site for The National Gallery and Gift Shop in Sutton, MA using WordPress and I’m thrilled with the way it’s turned out.   Before I mention the features of what has been setup, you need to know one thing – I was able to train them how to enter content, manage their calendar and…

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Week 4 – Online Community Building Field Test

Week 4 – Online Community Building Field Test

The march to success continues.  This week: We’ve jumped to 112 registrations from the first day of our trial. We’ve had several users starting to post on their personal blogs. I had a request to create a new forum for the Bicycle Commuter – and got the forum up in a couple minutes. We were helped by the news today that Lance Armstrong will return to next years Tour De France. Again, I’ve been too busy with normal responsibilities both…

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Online Community Building Field Test – Week 3

Online Community Building Field Test – Week 3

(If you didn’t read the first post in this series, you really ought to start here…) I was really, really caught up with other issues last week, but even with that, the experiment somehow managed to continue rolling along on it’s own, which honestly is a big surprise to me. The cycling.com server was upgraded to use the Akamai Dynamic Site Accellerator system, which has greatly increased page rendering speeds.  It’s not something a user would generally notice, but a…

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Newspaper Deathwatch: Attacks from Without, Attacks from Within

Newspaper Deathwatch: Attacks from Without, Attacks from Within

Another really bad week in which to be a lover of print media. Yesterday came the stunning announcement that The New York Times Company ad revenues for all papers had declined 18% in July when compared with last years numbers. Even worse, especially if you’re a member for the Boston Globe or Worcester Telegram staff, the ad numbers for the Time’s New England Media Group dropped 24% vs. last year. Keep that in mind for a couple minutes…we’ll come back…

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The Dark Side of Cloud Computing

The Dark Side of Cloud Computing

We’ve all done it. Try to email something to a friend and Outlook, or whatever mail client we use accidentally selects a different contact to send to. It’s not such a big problem when you’re sending pictures of the baby, or directions to the weekend barbeque, but what happens when you accidentally send sensitive information to the wrong person, like a journalist. The problem is utterly compounded when you give accidentally give access to your information sitting out in the…

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Full On Winston Wolfe Mode

Full On Winston Wolfe Mode

Sorry for the lack of updates.  I’ve been in full on Winston Wolfe mode for the past week and a half as I got pulled into a time critical project to upgrade performance using Akamai for 15 or our websites, some of which I’ve never seen before. The good news is that the Akamai DSA product is for real – an incredible boost to performance that requires very little work to set up and very real benefits. This sums up…

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Week 1 – Community Building Field Test

Week 1 – Community Building Field Test

(If you didn’t read the first post in this series, you really ought to start here…) We’re moving right along on Cycling.com – and it’s beginning to look like the site now has a pulse! Things improved dramatically after we got our login issue fixed.  Here are the basics for the week: 40+ users registered Several new photos added Comments starting to come in 2 new regional cycling groups were created by users The first weeks poll had 65 votes…

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