All posts by Mitch Mitchell

I'm an independent consultant in many fields, so I have a lot to share.
Blogging, Writing

How To Write A Pillar Post

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You don’t see people talking as much these days about writing pillar posts. Actually they are, but they talk more about epic posts or high quality posts or in-depth posts.

pillar ice cream cone

Back in the day we used the term “pillar” to denote long, detailed posts that acted like pillars on old Roman buildings. Their purpose was to help you show others that you knew what you were talking about, thus driving traffic to your blogs, making search engines happy, and giving you something special that you could use to promote yourself.
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Blogging

Should We Quit Blogging? The List

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Years ago on Problogger, written by Darren Rowse, on a post called Should I Stop Blogging, he listed 20 questions people should think about if they’re trying to decide whether they should stop blogging or not. I found it intriguing, to the point where I wrote an article, part of which makes up this article, and I responded to 4 of the items on the list with my perspective on them.

A friend & me; what I looked like when
I started blogging here

At that time, I was in my first year of blogging here, and I was posting something almost daily, which I did for 3 years, so I wasn’t close to thinking about stopping blogging. Even now I’m not thinking about stopping my blogging, but I know I’ve cut way back in the frequency and the amount of blogging I do.

As I get closer to my 6th decade on this planet (next year), I wonder how much longer I’m going to try to keep up with 5 blogs. Three of them are lacking to an extent, but on the two I pay the most attention to, I don’t feel like I give everything needed to be successful.
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Blogging

The GDPR Paradox

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I normally have a new blog post every Monday. Last week I missed it because I was trying to do some troubleshooting within my blog theme. The problem I have with the theme involves this stupid European Union thing known as GDPR, or General Data Protection Regulation.

By now, most bloggers and everyone else knows at least a modicum about it. For those that don’t, and don’t want to follow the above link, here’s the down and dirty about it.

In essence, this is a privacy regulation that the European Union has come up with that’s supposed to protect the privacy of the general public. It sets in place standards that websites, blogs and any entity that’s online need to set up to alert users that any information they give you might lead to your being tracked or being sold for monetary purposes (or not) or give information to anyone who might want to track you down.
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Social Media

Setting Your LinkedIn Privacy Preferences

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Last week I was going through Flipboard when I came across an article about LinkedIn privacy. I knew I’d set up my site to protect some of my information, but I never thought much about the advertisements that show up now.

That’s because I got on LinkedIn in 2006, back before they were trying to be Facebook, and they didn’t have advertisements. Now they have advertisements along with the newsfeed, something else they didn’t have a long time ago, and track a lot of other information that I hadn’t thought of.
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Internet

Easy Ways To Create Tough Passwords

22 Comments

Last week Twitter discovered a breach in their system that could have allowed someone to download the passwords of every user of their platform. They send out a message recommending that everyone change their passwords as a just in case measure, while indicating that they didn’t think anyone else had discovered the issue.

this would be an interesting password

There was a lot of grumbling about it; not the breach itself but in the need to create new passwords. I understand it; I hate changing passwords all the time myself. However, I don’t think my issue is the same as the issue of many others.
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