Jun 7th, 2007 by Michael
More and more large companies are choosing WordPress as their blogging software of choice. The latest example I’ve become aware of is the CNN Political Ticker website. Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress, comments that the folks at CNN are a part of the WordPress.com VIP program.
May 29th, 2007 by Michael
This past month, I became aware of the great, free web service offered by the team over at OpenDNS. For the uninitiated, OpenDNS is an alternative DNS. Every time you access the Internet, you use Domain Name Servers or DNS. Typically, your DNS is provided by your Internet Service Provider (ISP). However, switching to the DNS servers provided by OpenDNS will almost certainly enhance your web browsing experience by making it:
Safer
OpenDNS protects you from phishing — bad websites trying to steal your personal information. When you try to go to a phishing site, we let you know. We also let you block individual websites from loading. This helps you manage your network to better protect your family or your co-workers from websites they shouldn’t be visiting.Faster
You use DNS every time you use the Internet. The speed of your DNS service determines how quickly websites load for you. That’s why you want your DNS service to be blazing. OpenDNS is so fast because we run some of the largest DNS caches around and do it on our own high-performance network.Smarter
The address bar is how you navigate the Internet. We make your address bar more intelligent. With OpenDNS, you can create shortcuts that let you type something easy-to-remember into your address bar and leap straight where you want to go. And we’ll correct your common spelling mistakes, on the fly. That means when you are typing fast and type yahoo.cmo instead of yahoo.com, you still get there.More Reliable
Little is more frustrating than intermittent Internet outages. When your DNS service isn’t working, you can’t access the Internet. When you start using OpenDNS, your days of dealing with DNS-related downtime will be over. We know reliability is important, and we stand behind ours.
A month into my switch to OpenDNS, I can certainly attest to the quality of their service. I really like how OpenDNS catches my mistakes when I mistype a domain and either redirects me to the correct website or provides me with relevant search results. In addition, I’ve noticed improvements my overall browsing speed.
If I’ve peaked your interest, you can find out more by visiting the OpenDNS website.
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FYI: If you plan to use a Dell computer with the OpenDNS service, you’ll find this post interesting.
May 25th, 2007 by Michael
I just installed the reCAPTCHA WordPress plugin. It works like similar CAPTCHA plugins, but with a literary twist. From the reCAPTCHA website:
Over 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved every day by people around the world. reCAPTCHA channels this human effort into helping to digitize books from the Internet Archive. When you solve a reCAPTCHA, you help preserve literature by deciphering a word that was not readable by computers.
Now you can take part in preserving literature by commenting on this post! Let me know if you have any problems using reCAPTCHA.
May 24th, 2007 by Michael
Today I needed to receive a fax, and the free service at K7.net came in handy. From their website:
Sign up for K7, the world’s leading web-based unified messaging system that channels your free voicemail and fax messages directly to your e-mail. K7 Unified Messaging provides you with a free phone number. This number enables you to have your voicemail messages and faxes delivered directly to your computer. You also have the option to view and listen to your messages right here on the K7 Web site.
A quick and easy sign-up resulted in me receiving my own fax number within a matter of minutes.
May 23rd, 2007 by Michael
Having designed and developed websites for the past seven years, lately I’ve found WordPress’ feature set, usability, extensibility, and open source community make it an ideal CMS solution for many of my clients. Now as a way of generating some interaction with my peers and marketing my abilities, I have added my own WordPress blog to my wenderhost.com domain.
In the coming weeks and months, I have a list of article ideas that I plan to work through. As I write, I’ll be drawing upon my expertise as a technical writer, graphic designer, PHP programmer, and freelance consultant. If you subscribe to my blog, you can expect tutorials, WordPress Themes and Plugins, and other tips, tricks, and insights from my perspective as a freelance solutions provider.
Just this week, I’ve started things out with these offerings:
Finally, you’ll notice that this blog is quite new. As of this post, it is three days old. However, I’m no newbie to blogging as I’ve been posting on my personal site since September of 2001. Rather, I’ve started this blog to provide a better channel for talking about my professional endeavors.
Plus, as a fun experiment, I am interested to see what some good content and some frequent updates will do for my page rank and visitor count. Since its inception (circa the Fall of 2006), I’ve maintained wenderhost.com primarily as a static site featuring marketing material for services that I provide to my clients. During that time it has served well as a “virtual business” card to which I have referred prospective clients. As of today, the Google PR for the homepage is 3 out of 10, and last month five unique visitors came here each day. I am interested to see if and when these numbers will climb.
In the meantime, feel free to read a post, subscribe to my feed, or download a plugin. And, of course, incoming links are always welcome! 
May 23rd, 2007 by Michael
I have seen at least one other WordPress Subpages Widget out there; however, I wrote this one before I found the other one. Check out my WenderHost Subpages Widget for more details, a demo, and the download.
