A Google Voice phone booth via Search Engine Land
With all of the excitement around this week’s addition of placing phone calls from Gmail accounts and Google’s campaign to spread awareness of its Google Voice service, you’d think it would be impossible to miss these great services. Namely, given that Voice has been around for more than a year you’d think news organizations would have taken to the benefits it would give reporters—and cost savings it could bring a company. Many larger media companies go so far as to buy reporters a work cell phone, which with the advent of Google Voice, is a costly and unnecessary expense.
If your news organization hasn’t tried using Google Voice yet, then why not now?
Voice works like this: You can choose to get a new number from Google for free or you can use your existing phone number with some limitations. Let’s walk the route of getting a new number from Google to show what Voice could do for reporters and newsrooms:
Read on…
I’ve often heard that WordPress and other open source platforms are very insecure and that basing any large operation on them is a huge risk. I’ve also heard that WordPress is less secure than many of its open-source peers, like Movable Type.
But Qualys’ study with its BlindElephant open-source security tool shows that only 4 percent of WordPress sites have critical vulnerabilities. Meanwhile, as CMSWire points out, other open-source platforms have much higher percentages of extensive vulnerabilities:
- 77 percent of Movable Type sites
- 91 percent of Joomla sites
- 95 of WikiMedia sites
- 69 percent of Drupal installs
WordPress vulnerabilties by version compiled by BlindElephant Web Application Survey Report.
Read on…
Shortly after its debut, the Twitter tweet button caused browsers to crash when a visitor went to a page sporting it. And not just the little guys were affected; it caused errors on big sites like Mashable.
The incident illustrates why it’s not necessarily a good idea to implement the Twitter button on your site. Here’s five more:
Read on…
WordPress is commonly heralded for its out-of-the-box search engine optimization, but one weakness is in its title tag structure.
Title tags are used by search engines to rank pages, and they’re also what users see on search engine results pages. Bad title tags can drastically impact whether your content gets found. This post will cover how to write good title tags and how to easily implement them on your WordPress-powered site with a great plugin, All in One SEO Pack.
This is an example of WP Journo's title tags in Google search engine results.
Read on…
I was taught in j-school that a story should be more than talking heads—that it should get beyond the standard said this, said that and actually look at the issue.
I bring this up because there’s a story Romenesko just shared published by The Chronicle of Higher Education that stumbles over the same old talking points without really any depth or insight.
“For college newspapers, prepackaged online versions are yesterday’s news” looks at the vague “trend” that student editors are looking for more flexibility than what College Media Network’s College Publisher can offer. It throws out buzz words I’m kind of tired of, like “templates.” And it uses two not-particularly exemplary examples of student newspapers that left College Publisher for an open-source platform (see disaster here and here).
Read on…
One of the great new features in WordPress 3.0 is a flexible navigation menu system that once set up on an existing theme will make editing its menus a breeze.
Justin Tadlock has a thorough post on how to integrate this functionality in all sorts of creative ways. But it may be too confusing for the average WordPress user. Here you’ll simply learn how to update your primary blog navigation with the new function.
The function gives you the ability to edit your navigation menu in a drag and drop interface and control each menu item’s:
- Name
- URL
- Link target and relationship
- Title and description
- CSS Classes
Read on…
College student newspaper adviser Michael Koretzky had a post over at The Huffington Post today that turned me into a troll. I commented. In fact, I commented harshly.
Why? Koretzky’s post, headlined “College Journalists Are Good at Consuming Multimedia but Bad at Making It. Why?,” was wrong to the point of seeming confused.
It all starts with Koretzky explaining that he judged a college newspaper website competition and was aghast at how bad all the entries were. Apparently, multimedia is Koretzky’s word for news websites, already demonstrating a fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between multimedia posted on a site and the website itself. He went on to explain that for college journalism students, the print edition is still the most prestigious and important product of a news organization—all because of students’ psychology.
But he’s wrong. Take my word for it; I’m a recent college graduate and former editor-in-chief and online editor of a student newspaper, one that I believe (and was frequently told) had a better web presence than most.
Read on…
