How to use CSS to prevent content theft

Copyright

Did you know that CSS can help you in making your copyright visible with scraper sites who have shamelessly stolen your content? It’s not foolproof and a smart scraper will find out how to work around this, but for any automated scraper simply stealing off your published feed, this will work.

Albeit this is not exactly a WordPress versus TypePad matter, it is interesting since access to CSS comes at a very different price inWordPress compared to TypePad.

TypePad beats WordPress: How to create your TypePad theme from scratch

So far I have praised WordPress’ functionality and made it the main reason for why I would choose WordPress over TypePad. There’s one functionality, though, where TypePad takes the lead, and that is the ability to design your own theme from scratch, even without using any CSS.

How to make real footnotes

In a recent announcement on Everything TypePad, Ben Trott, the co-founder and Chief Technical Officer at Six Apart, announced that TypePad now had the ability to add footnotes…like this: some text with a footnote ¹. Is THAT ¹ really a “footnote” function? Of course not. Let me show you how to make footnotes that really are footnotes.

Can a theme change make the Google Ads less obvious?

If you read my post 2 days ago, showing how how my blog looks like with the Google Ads that WordPress is serving to my first time visitors coming from a search result, you will know that the ads really ruin the design and visual impression of my blog. Is there a way to make the ads more inline and less protruding? A theme change maybe?

Is there really no AdSense on wordpress.com?

Google Ad for what?

You know you can’t have Adsense on your wordpress.com blog, right? Well, think again. You can’t have AdSense on your wordpress.com, blog but WordPress can. Yes, WordPress does run AdSense on your wordpress.com blog.  See for yourself, left. And if you came to this post from a Google search, you may even see the ads above this paragraph, and below, at the bottom of this post.

Ok, it’s a free service. I knew they were running ads. I read Matt’s note. Jada jada jada. I know all that. Fair enough, but this? Thanks to an observant reader of my blog I was sent a screenshot of how the ads actually appear on my blog. Look at the ad, that isn’t even remotely contextual. Then I began to search for it myself; you can read how below.

Why no AdSense on wordpress.com is a good thing

I’ve given this quite some thought after I moved my academic and scholarly blog from TypePad to WordPress. I do miss not seeing my AdSense on my blog, but on the other hand, it looks much cleaner now. If I compare my visitor stats before and after the move, the number of page views has actually increased dramatically; does this mean my visitors are stopping by and reading more of my pages, because it looks more professional without ads? Or is it just that WordPress SEO works better with Google?

How to move from TypePad.com to WordPress.com

The title for this post stems from one of the search phrases found in my stats, so I thought it would be fun to set up a step by step tutorial, especially since I have been through this myself, with all the pains and pleasures it entailed. It was a hard learning process, and a steep learning curve, but in the end I am very happy with the result.

WordPress beats TypePad (again): Pages

Back when TypePad was still in the lead as blogging platform, by the end of 2006, WordPress already had pages. Soon, TypePad followed suit, but now WordPress has taken the lead again: 1) Hidden pages and 2) Sub-Pages. Essentially these are the same thing, but they work in a different ways, depending on your theme setup. Hidden pages can be used to make pages not show up in the page navigation bar in your header, and sub-pages can be used to structure your pages, much like nested categories, that I have already talked about.

WordPress beats TypePad (again): Post or Page Revisions

Useful or Not?

I’m still trying to think of why this is useful, but it most certainly is a function that WordPress has and TypePad has not: Post revisions. WordPress keeps track of all your post revisions, from start until now, so in essence, you have full overview of how you have edited and saved your post over its lifetime. You can see your revision by going down all the way to the bottom of your screen when you are editing a post. You can also compare revisions and even restore and go back to older revisions of your post. Well, this IS useful.

WordPress versus TypePad: Sticky posts

UPDATED: This post is now obsolete. WordPress now has sticky posts.

There hasn’t been that much good about TypePad on this blog for a while because I have become so fascinated with what WordPress really has to offer, but there’s one feature that TypePad has and WordPress not that I have noticed many users are asking for in the WordPress Forums, and that is “sticky posts”. Sticky posts are posts that you can pin or stick or feature as the first post of your blog regardless of the date when it was published. It can be several years old, if you want to. In WordPress you’re stuck with the good old blog rule of newest post first, oldest post last.

Fortunately, WordPress has a workaround, sort of…