Come one, come all- and learn how to make Google your best friend- without having to pay for placement.

All the tips, tricks and skills to build a site that you can manage- and gets results.

See the Sign-up links above to get registered.

These will be held at Nehemiah University, 750 S. Main Street Dayton OH 45410

LOCATION CHANGE. Full day seminar, Sat July 28, from 9:00 am to noon, then 1:00 to 4:30 pm

Intro course in the morning- $79 Advanced in the afternoon – $79 or the whole day- $139.

Websitetology 101: Intro to Web 2.0, including Blogs, using a CMS, Search Optimization, building community

Our 101 course- everything you need to know about how to have a web site that gets you to the top of Google without knowing HTML. We introduce the concept of blogs, using a CMS (Content Mnagement System), how to evaluate your web stats to build better content, how to build community with your customers and make your site a must visit daily asset to your business. We focus on the use of the Open Source blogging package WordPress. $79 (There will be a $15 surcharge for walk-ins- please register at least 12 hours in advance)

WordPress Intensive seminar: The secrets to great content and how to manage a site.

We show you how to use WordPress- to manage your content- and keep your site up to date- as well as making use of Categories to optimize your site for search results. 3.5 hours of step-by-step feature tour with an emphasis on how to build an effective site. We’ll cover some plug-ins that can make your life easier- and give your site extra power. $79 (There will be a $15 surcharge for walk-ins- please register at least 12 hours in advance)

Location: Nehemiah University, 750 S. Main Street Dayton OH 45410

Thank you. If you have a group and want to arrange for short introduction to Web 2.0 and how they win the search game- we can work a group rate- or if you want to host the seminar for your professional organization (ad club, Chamber of Commerce etc.) we can split revenues with you.

Instead of giving away trash and trinkets- or “promotional items” to your clients- help them grow their business by hosting the seminar for them- as a sponsored event- or by buying them admission at a discount. Please contact the chief websitetologist at [email protected]

Of course your WordPress Dashboard can tell you the same thing- but, a few minor fixes and WP is at 2.2.2

WordPress › Blog » WordPress 2.2.2 and 2.0.11
Today we have two security-related releases available for both users of our main 2.2 branch and the legacy 2.0 branch. As these releases include only security and minor bugfixes they should not cause any plugin or theme compatibility issues, so you have no good excuse not to upgrade.

This weekend, we also upgraded to PHP 5- and only had a few things break. Mostly due to older plugins. We’ll give a full report once we’ve tracked all 100 or so installs that we have of WP.

About half of my posts on The Next Wave site seem to get trackback comments by a site “University Update” – the only thing is, there are no humans involved with “University Update”- it’s just a bot stealing my content.

I mark each trackback as SPAM- but, I can’t get my content off their site. Why do they do this? To aggregate content for search engine optimization- and then to hope to score some cash from Google Ad Sense click throughs.

Once again- if Google wasn’t so powerful, and if so many lame sites didn’t pay out huge cash to get hits through buying ad words, we wouldn’t have this problem.

The bots- scrapers, are talked about at length in the following CNET article which quotes Lorelle VanFossen who writes extensively about WordPress.

Please don’t steal this Web content | CNET News.com
automated digital plagiarism in which software bots can copy thousands of blog posts per hour and publish them verbatim onto Web sites on which contextual ads next to them can generate money for the site owner.

Such Web sites are known among Web publishers as “scraper sites” because they effectively scrape the content off blogs, usually through RSS (Really Simple Syndication) and other feeds on which those blogs are sent.

One of the questions that comes up often in the seminar is about what constitutes “Fair Use” and how much to use via the PressIt function of WordPress. My answer isn’t great, but I believe it works: always cite the source, don’t put it on your site unless you contribute something to the meaning, or understanding- making it more useful than it was in it’s original version.

This is where scrapers fail- they just copy and steal. Google should easily be able to see the original publisher- and be able to identify sites that are entirely made up of stolen content and vote them off the island- the problem is, that’s how Google makes a lot of money- and according to their ethos- getting filthy rich isn’t considered part of their “do no evil” mantra.