Writing is hard. It is work. It takes time, and energy, and commitment. It will exact a toll on all your emotions and sap your energy the moment you decide, “This thing I’m working on… I want to do it well.”
Writing isn’t easy. Being lazy is easy.
On Rewriting Content
One of the worst things you can do to someone contributing to your blog is to tell them, “Blogging is easy!” and then, when they submit something for you to publish, you rewrite the whole thing.
If you do this, the message you just sent to your writer is that they are incapable of doing something “easy”.
Advice For New Writers
Never trust a writing coach that says, “Writing is easy.” These simple words, intended to encourage, just foment self-doubt the moment you struggle with something.
Today I Learned: How To Produce Great Content
From Scott Brinker’s 3 Important Lessons for Marketers from Google’s CIO:
To produce great content, you need great people. Treating it as a craft. Bringing real passion to it. Producing fewer pieces of higher quality that are worth reading. Worth sharing. Worth loving. Because one amazing piece that impresses everyone who sees it, spreads like wildfire, and magnetizes your purchasing funnel can actually pay far greater returns than a larger, cheaper schlock brigade.
Today I Learned: Technical Writing Corollaries To Smart Software Design
Getting frustrated understanding the value of some important approaches in technical writing? Think of it this way: topic-based authoring is the content equivalent of a loosely coupled system. Structured content is the equivalent of a service oriented architecture (SOA).
Today I Learned About SEO Killers
From Jill Whalen’s 18 SEO Killers You Must Clean Up and Avoid for 2013:
Forget about old-fashioned link building. Google now really does consider it to be web spam. (Yay!) If you can add a link to your own site just by submitting it somewhere, you can assume that it won’t count for much (or anything) by Google. In other words, forget about useless directory submissions, article directories, link wheels, forum signatures and comment spam. That’s all done, kaput, a useless waste of time.
Instead, hire real writers and put them to work writing blog posts and other informational content on a regular basis. Be sure that what they’re writing is truly of interest to the people who might buy your products or services (aka your target market).
Today I Learned About The Value Of Convenience
From Gerry McGovern’s article, New Thinking: Convenience Trumps Security, in CMSWire:
Making things convenient for customers makes good business sense. It delivers tremendous return on investment. So, why don’t more organizations focus on convenience?
Organizations are generally very good at measuring costs, but they are usually very poor at measuring the value that derives from making customers’ lives easier.
Today I Learned About Opportunities
Opportunities are seldom easy to exploit. Often they demand working to exhaustion, a brilliant team, and a willingness to risk failure for a prolonged period of time.
It’s important, therefore, to recognize what’s an opportunity and what isn’t…and be ready to push hard when you see one.
Hey Microsoft: Your Ad Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means
Text on a page. It should be so simple.
Unfortunately, writing is something wrapped in a great deal of subjectivity. What seems perfectly clear to the writer might come across as meaning something entirely different to the reader. Sometimes this leads to rather delightful, if unintended, interpretations of a text.
Here’s an example:
Hey Microsoft… This ad, it doesn’t mean what you think it means…
Seems to me like Microsoft is encouraging people to switch away from their Windows Phone…
The WordPress Bot Attack
So, there’s plenty of news about the 90,000 node bot that’s currently trying to gain admin access to WordPress sites by brute-force guessing admin passwords.
There are a number of things you can/should do to harden your site against this type of attack…the most important being to USE STRONG PASSWORDS!
I installed the Limit Login Attempts more out of curiosity. I’ve seen it recommended in a number of places, but was curious what it would do against a 90,000 node bot. Seems to me like it wouldn’t be that effective…
Still, moments after installing, I get this report:
90,000 nodes on the bot trying to brute force passwords for WordPress. This is what I see after installing the Limit Login Attempts plugin…
Each lockout stops an IP from logging in (or trying to) for 20 minutes. After 4 lockouts, you’re banned for a much longer amount of time.
Not the best solution, but it at least shows me that I’m being targeted…
If you host a WordPress site, you really need to make sure you are using strong passwords for your admin accounts. There are also a host of other steps you can be taking to harden your site against attacks.
Please add good resources in the comments!
Plug-ins Worth Considering
- Limit Login Attempts – Probably a useful plugin in general, but of limited utility against a botnet composed of 90,000 nodes…
- Better WP Security – This one looks kickass and I see it recommended frequently, but make sure you have solid backups and have tested recovery before throwing it on an established site. …And yeah, read the manual first.
In The News
