A few changes here at md.com

Hello there! If you’ve ever come by my site before, you probably notice a big change—a blog right here on the main page. (If you’ve not ever been by before, then HI!)

I’ve decided to start blogging in this space, as the more I work on client sites, the more ideas I get for posts that could be helpful. I’m going to mostly talk about WordPress stuff, perhaps a bit about blogging in general, and sometimes about working for yourself from home (like how hard it is to actually take days off…I forget what those are like!).

I’ll be tweaking the site for a bit over the coming days while I get everything just so and other pages updated. I’m glad you stopped by & hope that this blog will be helpful in the coming weeks as it starts to

The Grammar of WordPress

WordPress has its own terms for various things. This is a cheatsheet to help you get familiar with these terms:

Dashboard: The area you see when you log in to the WordPress (WP) admin area. It is the topmost menu item of the left-side admin menu. The Dashboard shows an overview of your site, such as how many posts you’ve made so far, how many comments you have, how many comments in moderation, and other bits of information.

Post: A “post” is a time-stamped entry that will show on the blog. Also called a blog post. Think of a post as being dynamic (it will eventually be pushed off of the main blog and into the archives by newer posts being published after it).

Page: A “page” is a non-time stamped entry, usually of longer pieces of information that do

Playing with Jetpack: Image galleries

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(Yes, those are pics of my kitty and of Sandhill cranes that came by my apartment recently…haha.)

Jetpack is a plugin for WordPress that brings quite a few bells & whistles to self-hosted WordPress sites that were previously only available to people using free WordPress.com blogs. When Jetpack first came out I poo-poo’d it, thinking it was just a crutch that would end up finding ways to limit self-hosted blogs. I mean, one of the reasons to have a self-hosted blog is to not be dependent on a free blogging site any more…and the idea of “connecting” a self-hosted blog to WordPress.com just seemed wrong to me.

Well, enter a few clients who were moving from WordPress.com to self-hosted…and wanted to keep their subscribers. And their stats (or at least wanted their stats to look & behave like

Good to know: The difference between WordPress.org and WordPress.com

I get a lot of questions about the difference between WordPress.org and .com, and it seems that people are often confused—and rightly so. WordPress is WordPress, right? Well, sort of.

Usually when people talk about “WordPress,” they mean blogs that people run on their own domain on their own host. This traditional WordPress-powered site is very powerful, has tons of features, hundreds of plugins & themes to choose from, and is almost infinitely customizable—Wordpress powers sites that don’t even have blogs. WordPress is definitely a content management tool as much as it is a blogging platform. This fully-featured WordPress program is found at WordPress.org

But fairly recently, WordPress started offering free blogs on WordPress.com—the key here is to note that the free blogs are on WordPress.com. You can sign up for free there & blog away & be perfectly