Web Publishing Archives | The Digital Reader

Making Your Own Custom Facebook and Twitter Share Links/Buttons for Beginners

14 May, 2018 // 2 Comments

Share buttons for social media such as Facebook and Twitter are a great way to grow your audience organically and let your readers support your work by sharing it their social media networks. The [Read More ...]

Thirty Minutes a Day is All It Takes to Automate Your Social Media Activity, But I Don’t Recommend it

23 April, 2018 // 6 Comments

As I am sure you know, there aren't enough hours in the day to get all your work done. This is why we are always looking for new ways to automate tasks, and why I started the Tech Tools for Authors [Read More ...]

I’m Leaving Twitter

12 April, 2018 // 29 Comments

The problem with Twitter is that the folks who run the show don't understand their userbase or their product. We can see this in how Twitter's more useful features such as hashtags and quote retweets [Read More ...]

Tech Tools for Authors #4: Social Media

11 April, 2018 // 2 Comments

Authors have to juggle a lot of balls in today's book industry. Not only do they have to write that next book, they also have to market it, balance the ledgers, woo their fans on social media, do [Read More ...]

Infographic: Social Media Cheat Sheet

10 April, 2018 // 3 Comments

A picture is worth a thousand words, and nowhere is that more true than on social networks. This is why it is incredibly important that the media you use on social networks fit the standard sizes. [Read More ...]

Two-Thirds of Tweeted Links are Posted by Bots, and Other Not Terribly Useful info

9 April, 2018 // 1 Comment

If you ever wondered just how many links you see on Twitter were shared by a person, the answer is: not too damn many. We still don't know what impact they have, though. From Pew Research Center: In [Read More ...]

Twitter Changes Rules to Crack Down on Bots, Bans Mass Tweeting and Duplicate Accounts

21 February, 2018 // 1 Comment

A few weeks back Facebook and Twitter were humiliated by a NYTimes piece that detailed the back alley practices of the social media industry, and now the latter is finally doing something about the [Read More ...]

Salon.com No Longer Lets You Read Stories for Free – Wants to Use Ad-Blocking Readers’ CPUs to Mine Bitcoin

13 February, 2018 // 16 Comments

In what is almost an ironic twist on the material cost of online advertising, Salon now wants readers who run security extensions, err, block ads, to lend Salon their CPUs so that the publisher can [Read More ...]

How to Delete Your Twitter Timeline (and Why You Should)

8 February, 2018 // 5 Comments

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Twitter is a great place to share jokes and engage in debate, but it is also accepted that one's Twitter timeline exists only to be weaponized by one's [Read More ...]

Amazon launches a TTS Plugin for WordPress That Turns Blog Posts Into Podcasts

8 February, 2018 // 5 Comments

The phrase Amazon Polly may bring to mind Amazon's dominance of the book market, but it is actually a text-to-speech platform that Amazon launched in December 2016. Now Techcrunch reports that Amazon [Read More ...]

Why Blocking Ads is About Security, and Always Has Been

5 February, 2018 // 4 Comments

I have long held the view that blocking ads in a web browser is a basic and standard part of web security. You should be blocking ads for the exact same reasons you should use a firewall, malware [Read More ...]

Chrome Will Start Blocking Ads on Noncompliant Sites on 15 February

20 December, 2017 // 2 Comments

by Ron Amadeo Back in April Google announced its plans to add an ad-blocking component to Chrome, and now they've set a release date. It turns out that this is less about the end user than about [Read More ...]

Tweet-Archiving Service Storify is Shutting Down

12 December, 2017 // 0 Comments

Launched in 2010, Storify was a service you could use to create a narrative by collecting tweets into a single web page. The service just announced it is going to shut down on 18 May, 2018. Thank [Read More ...]

DBW’s Archive Were Deleted During the Sale – Did You Lose Your Work?

27 November, 2017 // 1 Comment

When Digital Book World was sold last month to Score Publishing, its archives suffered the usual fate of blogs with guest posts and sloppy record keeping: The posts were taken offline. Like many web [Read More ...]

Guest Post: How Websites Watch Your Every Move and Ignore Privacy Settings

27 November, 2017 // 0 Comments

Hundreds of the world’s top websites routinely track a user’s every keystroke, mouse movement and input into a web form – even before it’s submitted or later abandoned, according to [Read More ...]