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Why Does Gravatar Want My Google Apps Contacts?

After a successful return to WordPress.com from WordPress Multisite, I began rooting around the Settings and Tools and Appearance areas for my WordPress.com account to discover any new joys that were added during my inattention.

I found I could now add my “Google Profile” as a “verified” external service via Gravatar.  I clicked to continue to complete the verification process for my “Public Profile.”

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The Definitive Answer on VaultPress and WordPress Multisite Pricing

UPDATE – April 9, 2012:  The Boles Blogs Network is now back on WordPress.com.  We are keeping this article published in case it might help others in the future.

If you’re running your own WordPress Multisite installation, you know having a proper and secure backup plan is a must in today’s wretched world where bad people love to tear down good things instead of building them up from scratch. Backing up your WordPress files and database on a regular basis are not tough tasks, but they can become cumbersome and gruesome if your schedule overcomes you and if you then allow your self-serving security needs to become lackadaisical.

Enter VaultPress! VaultPress is built by Automattic to cleanly and invisibly secure your WordPress installations and VaultPress now supports WordPress Multisite. The catch is that pricing for WordPress Multisite VaultPress protection is confusing. Today, I have the proper answers for you in detail.

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New iPads Arrive: Typekit Fonts Now a Blogging Necessity

Today was a busy and glorious day. Our new iPads arrived three days early from China and we enjoyed setting them up via iCloud and experiencing our first, if limited, tastes of LTE on Verizon. In Jersey City, LTE comes and goes in our apartment. Sometimes it flickers to life. Other times, we’re stuck on 3G with no way to understand the why or wherefore of being pressed off the LTE network. Here’s a quickie screenshot I was able to grab of my iPad on LTE with two service bars active. 5.67 Mbps down and 0.19 Mbps up.

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How to Migrate Your Blogs from WordPress.com to WordPress Multisite on Pair Networks VPS

UPDATE – April 9, 2012:  The Boles Blogs Network is now back on WordPress.com!  We will write another article explaining the why and how of moving back.  We’re leaving this article online because it might benefit someone else seeking to export their WP.com blog to a standalone WordPress installation.

Welcome to my first new article since the Boles Blogs Network had to leave our hosting setup on WordPress.com because of a strange billing anomaly that threatened the viability of our publishing network core.

Here’s what happened…

Two years ago, when I moved my blogs from a self-hosted Movable Type installation over to WordPress.com, I had the expert help of Automattic employee Lloyd Dewolf (Budd) — who is no longer with the company — to get all my thousands of posts imported into WordPress.com blogs.  As a blogs-warming gift, Lloyd waived the fee for domain mapping for the first year for all my imported blogs.  We added a few other blogs during that first year, and I paid the domain mapping fees.

A year passed.

I paid for another year of domain mapping upgrades for all 14 blogs.

Another year passed.

I am now unable to renew, and pay for, my domain mapping upgrades as you can see in the screenshot below.  There was a major “Upgrade” to the way WordPress.com now handles their shopping cart that somehow broke my ability to pay my way on the service. Notice there’s no “Renew Now” button for me to click for BolesBlues.com?  The domain mapping says it was purchased by “wpcomvip” and not me and that’s a problem.

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How John Biggs and Tech Crunch Blew Up the Boles Blogs Network!

This has been a wild week with Apple threatening me with takedown notices and Tech Crunch riding to the rescue and then reflecting on what it means to be a blog publisher and dealing with threats from Apple Fanbois and lessons in legality from anonymous amateur Copyright commenters.

One lesson I learned this week, is that if you contact Tech Crunch for feedback and advice — as I did when I wrote asking if they’d ever seen a Takedown Notice like the one Apple sent me — you better make sure you tell your story first, or Tech Crunch will beat you to the publication punch — and that’s precisely what happened to me, and I couldn’t be happier about it!  Here’s why:

Tech Crunch’s John Biggs took my inquiry and ran with it and published the Apple threat letter and I was amazed by the power of that simple article.  Bigg’s story currently has 44 comments, 192 Facebook Likes, 609 Tweets, 153 LinkedIn Shares and 41 Google+ mentions.  However, those numbers only begin to tell the story of the real Tech Crunch muscle in the marketplace.

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The 2012 State of the Boles Blogs Network

As we move forward into 2012 — I always prefer to look ahead than over my shoulder — it’s time to determine where we’re going and how we plan to stay on that path in publishing 14 blogs in the Boles Blogs Network.  Here’s the full list of the blogs we tend to every single day for you:

Urban Semiotic
WordPunk
Boles University Blog
Boles Blues
Panopticonic
RelationShaping
Memeingful
10txt
Scientific Aesthetic
GO INSIDE Magazine
Dramatic Medicine
Carceral Nation
Celebrity Semiotic
The United Stage of America

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Creating a Publication Network with Google+ Pages

Yesterday, Google finally made Google+ Pages available to the masses.  I immediately logged in and started creating pages for all the web properties I own, and I’ll tell you why I decided to spend an afternoon clicking and linking on Google+.

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