Historical errata for Technical Blogging, Second Edition

In the second paragraph under “Readership Expectations” the last sentence should be “Nevertheless, you may wonder what realistic traffic expectations should be for your first MONTH of blogging.” Missing the word MONTH or similar in there. It now says “…for your first of blogging.” Thanks!

In the section “Readership Expectations” the sentence “… traffic expectations should be for your first of blogging.” is missing a word between “first” and “of”. My guess is that the sentence should read “… traffic expectations should be for your first year of blogging.”

In the section “Readership Expectations” the parenthesis “(And less of vanity metric as well.)” should probably read “(And less of a vanity metric as well.)”; i.e. the word “a” is missing between “of” and “vanity”.

In the subsection “Which TLDs?”, the sentence “They are not my first choice, but they can work and the latter lands itself to some neat souding domain names” probably should read “They are not my first choice, but they can work and the latter lends itself to some neat souding domain names”, i.e. “lands” should be replaced with “lends”.

In the subsection “Static Site Generators: The Hacker Way”, the sentence “… ability to store your blog under revision control through tools like Git,” should read “… ability to store your blog under revision control tools like Git,”, i.e. the word “through” is unnecessary.

In the section “Blogging Services: The Easy Way”, the sentence fragment “… it guarantees a long-form communication channel with their customers should their main site become unavailable” should probably read “… it guarantees a long-term communication channel with their customers should their main site become unavailable”, i.e. “long-form” should be replaced with “long-term” (I think).

In the section “Select a Hosting Service”, under the “Shared hosting” bullet point, the sentence “Often running you only
a few dollars a month, shared web hosting is the most inexpensive option.” should probably read “Often costing only
a few dollars a month, shared web hosting is the most inexpensive option.”; i.e. “running you” should be something like “costing” or “costing you”.

The sentence at the bottom of the page: “Many existing hosting companies encroached in this space …” is missing a verb after the word “companies”. Perhaps it was intended to be “Many existing hosting companies have encroached into this space …”.

In the section “Enhance WordPress with Plugins”, in the first item of the first subsection, the word “keyworks” should be “keywords”.

There is a superfluous full stop in the sentence “… but Yoast SEO is flat out the best one. in my opinion.” just after the words “best one”. It might have been intended to be a comma, but it might not actually be necessary.

In the bullet point about caching plugins, the sentence “Among premium options WP Fastest Cache and WP Rocket stands out.” should be “Among premium options WP Fastest Cache and WP Rocket stand out.”, (i.e “stands” should be replaced with “stand”) so that the verb matches the noun number in the sentence.

Hi! Tip 15 seems to be out of context: the text talks about blog themes and doesn’t really mention fonts, but then the tip about font size turns up, which surprised me while reading it. I can see how this would be relevant for the choice of theme, however perhaps it might be an idea to talk about font sizes in the main text as well?

BTW: you’re right about the “long-form” thing, sorry for the spam! I realised that “long-form” was what you’d meant after having read further.

At the end of the subsection “WordPress.com Stats”, the sentence that ends with “is good an idea.”, should read “is a good idea.”

Just before the section “Encourage Social Media Sharing” the last sentence of the preceding paragraph ends with “is prominently at the top of your page”; I don’t think the adverb is correct in this situation and that the text should either be “is prominent at the top of your page” or, if you want to use the adverb form, then “is placed prominently at the top of your page”. Hope this helps!

In the subsection “Include an Employer Disclaimer”, the first sentence reads: “… it’s likely that your employer has
employees guidelines …”. This is missing an apostrophe to mark the possessive; however, it might be easier to just use “employee guidelines” instead.

In the paragraph just before the section “Set up Your Blog for On-page SEO”, the sentence “It may paradoxically helps bolster the number of clicks …” should be “It may paradoxically help bolster the number of clicks…”.

In the subsection “What about AMP pages?” the sentence “Accelerated Mobile Pages ( AMP ) is a technology …” should read “Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is a technology …”: there is extra space after the opening parenthesis in the PDF, however when I pasted the text here there was an extra space before the closing parenthesis as well.

In the section “Take Action” the bullet point “Add a an employer disclaimer …” should read “Add an employer disclaimer …” (there is an extra “a”).

In the second to last sentence at the bottom of the page, the sentence reads: “Above all, they won’t subscribe, perform your calls to actions, or come back to your blog again.”, the item “perform your calls to actions” should be “perform your calls to action”, since this is already in the plural and using the plural on “action” is unnecessary. Hope this helps!

In the second full bullet point on the page, the sentence “Yes, it should include your focus keywords, but it needs to reads naturally.” should read: “Yes, it should include your focus keywords, but it needs to read naturally.”, i.e. “reads” -> “read”.

In the sentence after Tip 25 reads: “… and it’s trying to decide where to invest their limited time, …”. The word “it’s” seems to be referring to the reader (mentioned in the beginning of the sentence), but it seems that the sentence is using “it” in place of the reader, which I don’t think is correct. Perhaps you meant “is”, i.e. “… and is trying to decide where to invest their limited time, …”?

The sentence at the top of the page: “… if you have paragraphs that displays as 3 or 4 lines at most on a laptop screen …” probably should read: “if you have paragraphs that display as 3 or 4 lines at most on a laptop screen”, i.e. “displays” -> “display”.

In the “Quotes” bullet point, the sentence “… and tend to grab the skimming reader attention.” should read “… and tend to grab the skimming reader’s attention.”, i.e there is a possessive missing from the word “reader”.

In the last line of the page, the sentence reads: “Especially if it leads you to include many parenthesis …”, I think you mean “parentheses” here.

In the paragraph before the “Develop Your Own Voice” section, the parenthesis “Yes, more gesturing that is even normal for an Italian!” should read “Yes, more gesturing than is even normal for an Italian!”, i.e. “that” should be replaced with “than”.

In the last paragraph of the page, I think the phrase “make mental note of what worked” should be “make a mental note of what worked”.

In the section “Keep an Idea File”, the sentence “Even Google autocomplete feature come be useful to come up with ideas with vast appeal.” should probably read “Even the Google autocomplete feature can be useful to come up with ideas with vast appeal.”, i.e. there’s a missing “the” before “Google” and the first “come” should be “can”.

In the second bullet point on the page, the phrase “If you are not a designer,” might be better as “If you’re not a designer,”, since this matches your informal, relaxed writing style more.

In the section “Use Blogging Clients”, the phrase “and others blogging platforms.” should be “and other blogging platforms.”

In the third paragraph on the page, the sentence “I love photography 6 and I’m sometime asked” should read “I love photography 6 and I’m sometimes asked”, i.e. “sometime” should be replaced with “sometimes”.

In the third paragraph on the page, I think the sentence “I usually oblige without requiring a few” should be “I usually oblige without requiring a fee”, i.e. “few” should probably be “fee”, however I’m just guessing. Nevertheless, “few” should be a different word, since the required “a few of something” is not obvious from the context.

In the third paragraph, there’s an “is” missing in the sentence “This more of an issue …”, i.e. it should read “This is more of an issue …”.

In the section “Consistency Is Queen” the sentence “When you have chosen, and perhaps even publicly announced your posting schedule, you should try to stick to it for a period of at least a few months” the first comma is acting as an opening parenthesis and I think you probably need another one after “announced”. Unfortunately, this adds what could be too many commas in the sentence, so it might be necessary to remove the one after “schedule”. Another option would be to put the parenthetical expression “and perhaps even publicly announced” between em-dashes. Just a suggestion! :-)

In the last paragraph on the page, the sentence “Tuesdays, Wednesday, and Thursday are very effective.” should probably read “Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday are very effective.” to be consistent with how the other weekdays are written.

In the fourth paragraph in the “Find Guest Bloggers” section, in the sentence “… simply because my Write for us page … ”, it might help to make “Write for us” italicised in order for it to stand out more from the text. The text is in italics in the “Take Action” section, it looks good there and making the text be in italics would be more consistent. Just a suggestion!

In the section “Assign Priorities to Tasks”, the sentence “There real points of having a TODO list …” should read “The real points of having a TODO list …”; i.e. “There” -> “The”.

In the second to last paragraph of the page, the sentence “of various degree of importance” should read “of various degrees of importance”, i.e. “degree” -> “degrees”.

In the second to last paragraph of the page, the sentence fragment “every day as you plan your next day plan can be a lot of work” seems to have one “plan” too many. I think what’s meant here is “every day as you plan your next day can be a lot of work”.

In the last paragraph of the page, the sentence fragment “shows what a TODO item might looks like in Things” should read “shows what a TODO item might look like in Things”, i.e. “looks” -> “look”.

In the paragraph before “Figure Out Where Your Time Goes”, the sentence fragment “and the specific program you chose,” probably should be “and the specific program you choose,”, i.e. “chose” -> “choose”, since the sentence is in the present tense.

In the second to last paragraph on the page, the phrase in parentheses “( pomodoro means “tomato” in Italian)" has an extra space after the opening parenthesis.

Three lines from the bottom of the page, the phrase “and taking 10 minutes breaks,” should be “and taking 10 minute breaks,”, i.e. “minutes” -> “minute”.

The third paragraph on the page starts like so: “Although, not entirely irrelevant today, 1 ,” (where the “`1” here is the footnote number). I suggest that the comma after the “1” should be removed; I think that the comma after the “Although” is unnecessary. In other words, “Although not entirely irrelevant today, ” reads better, at least to my ear :-)

In “Choose and Register a Domain Name”, the end of the sentence “redirecting the exiting one” should be “redirecting the EXISTING one”

Tip 39 reads: “Install a SEO extension for your browser”. It might be better to use “an” as opposed to “a” here, since the “S” in “SEO” reads as “ess”, hence “an” is probably more appropriate.

In the paragraph before Tip 40, the sentence “with varying degree of authority.” should be “with varying degrees of authority.”.

Just before “Tip 42” the phrase “are rejected out right” should be “are rejected outright”; in this case “outright” is a single word.

In the third to last paragraph on the page, I have the feeling that the sentence “If you included links to your site in the press release, carefully selected your anchor texts …” should actually read “If you included links to your site in the press release and carefully selected your anchor texts …”, i.e. the comma should be replaced with “and”, as this makes the sentence as a whole flow much better.

In the paragraph before the “Participate in the Community” section, the sentence “They’re still a worth your time, though.” should read “They’re still worth your time, though.”, i.e. the “a” is unnecessary.

In the paragraph before “Tip 43”, I think that the phrase “… or as too aggressive of a self-promoter.” could be better written as “… or as an aggressive self-promoter.”. Alternatively, if you wanted to use more of the original phrase, then it would probably be better to remove the “of”; that’s something more often used in spoken English, not necessarily in written English. Just a suggestion :-)

In point 2 of the ordered list, it might be better to replace “use or not hashtags as appropriate” with “use or not use hashtags as appropriate”.

In the last paragraph on the page, the sentence “Sometime the answer will be no, …” should read “Sometimes the answer will be no, …”, i.e. “Sometime” -> “Sometimes”.

In the last paragraph of the page, the phrase “send many thousand people” probably should read “send many thousands of people”.

In the “Promoting on Quora” section, I have the feeling that “questions and answers site.” is better written as “question and answer site.”, or perhaps even “question-and-answer site.”.

Just before the code snippet, there is this text: “In the front matter of your post, where you specify your title, you’ll need to include The code tag should not be here. as well as shown in the example below:”. Something went wrong here as text is obviously missing from the sentence (which looks like it was meant to be multiple sentences). Unfortunately, I don’t know what the fix is in this case, so I can’t help more than to point out the issue.

Just before “Tip 48”, the text “… you aim those article …” should read “… you aim those articles …”; i.e. “article” -> “articles”.

In the “Key Site Usage Metrics You Need to Consider” section, under “Pageviews”, the text “the total number of page viewed …” should be “the total number of pages viewed …” (“page” -> “pages”).

In the section “Key Site Usage Metrics You Need to Consider” under the “Sessions” item, the text at the end of the item “… the session end.” should read “… the session ends.”.

In the “Key Site Usage Metrics You Need to Consider” section, the item heading “Average Session Duration” is missing a colon at the end; it should read “Average Session Duration:”.

In the last sentence of the page, the text containing the footnote mentioning the “Genius” URL has too many commas. It might be best to remove the comma just after the word “Genius” and to leave the comma just after the footnote number.

In the “Analyzing Traffic with Google Analytics” section, the first sentence could probably be better written without the extra “of” after the word “outside”. I.e. “It is ultimately outside the scope of this book …”

In the second paragraph on the page, the sentence ending in “… about your site at glance.” should read “about your site at a glance.”, i.e. there’s an “a” missing before the word “glance”.

The last sentence of the second paragraph on the page doesn’t actually contain a verb (well, the parenthetical phrase “the metrics we discussed in the previous section” does, but that’s not the main sentence). I propose to change the beginning of the sentence to read “This tab includes the metrics we discussed in the previous section, a real-time tile for people presently on your site, …”.

Also, I think it would be better to say “time of day” in the list of metrics as opposed to “time of the day”.

The first sentence of the third paragraph reads “Keeping an eye on your home alone …”, I think this should read “Keeping an eye on your home tab alone …” (i.e should use “home tab” instead of just “home”). Perhaps “home” should be capitalised as well, since it was capitalised in the previous paragraph.

Just after “Tip 50”, I suggest that “aka” actually be written as “a.k.a.”, however PragProg might have rules about how such abbreviations are supposed to be punctuated and it might be ok as it is.

In the paragraph after “Tip 50”, the word “Thusly” is a bit archaic. It might be better to change this to “Thus” or “Hence”.

In the page’s final paragraph, the text “… post of yours happen to go viral …” should read “… post of yours happens to go viral …”. I.e., “happen” -> “happens”.

In the second paragraph on the page, the text “… the analytics built-in into that particular …” might be better written as “… the analytics built into that particular …”. I definitely have the feeling that “built-in into” is too many “in”s. As an alternative, “… the analytics built-in to that particular …” might be more what you wanted to say.

In the fifth paragraph on the page, “Ahrefs” is misspelled in the second sentence. I.e. I think the text “Ahfres, Moz, and similar tools …” should actually read “Ahrefs, Moz, and similar tools …”.

In the bullet point about group chats, there’s a missing closing parenthesis after “(Internet Relay Chat)”.

In the point about “Nitpick criticism”, I think the text “… this type of comments, …” should be written as “… this type of comment, …”.

In the subsection “Disagreement Criticism” the text “It’s also fine to sometime end …” should read “It’s also fine to sometimes end …”.

In the example comment at the top of the page, the text is missing a space between the comma and the “of” following it. Also, I don’t think the comma after “of course” is necessary. Perhaps “a new battery, of course it will last longer.” is a better alternative?

In the sentence directly before the section “Your Mantras When Dealing with Criticism”, the text “… should one of your article hit the homepage.” should read “… should one of your articles hit the homepage.”; i.e. “article” -> “articles”.

In the “As an Employee” subsection, the sentence “Second, your blog acts as a résumé/curriculum vitae of the sort.” might be better written as “Second, your blog acts as a sort of résumé/curriculum vitae.”.

In the “Providing status updates during outages:” bullet point, I think the text “echo such brief posts from social media” should be “echo such brief posts to social media”, however I’m not sure, so I thought I might point it out just in case it’s not what you intended. The context implies that blog posts will also go to social media, hence I get the impression that “from” should actually be “to”. However, perhaps you mean that the Twitter posts go to your status page.

In the first bullet point on the page, I think the comma in the text “(particularly of people not, just offices).” should be after “people” not after “not”. I.e. it should read: “(particularly of people, not just offices).”. At least, that’s where I felt that the pause implied by the comma felt most natural.

In the first sentence of the last paragraph, there is one too many “a”s. I.e. the text “… your blog is a a low …” should read “… your blog is a low …”.

Just before “Tip 67”, in the text “The Passionate Programmer ( USA , UK , Canada ).”, there’s an extra space after the opening parenthesis.

In the fourth bullet point on the page, the second to last sentence starts like so: “Beside, you are offering …”, this should be “Besides, you are offering …”.

Just after “Tip 68”, the text “… I’ve make decent …” should read “… I’ve made decent …”.

At the top of the page, the text “… much greater than 24 hour.” should be written as “… much greater than 24 hour.”. I’d also suggest that “greater” would be better written as “longer”.

In “Tip 69” I think, to be consistent with the rest of the text, that you should replace “one off” with “one-off”.

In the paragraph just before the figure, the text “… income. if that’s your goal. is …” uses full-stops (periods in US English) instead of commas. I.e. the text should read “… income, if that’s your goal, is …”.

In the “How the Pros Do It” section, the text “(the before mentioned lead magnet).” should probably be written as “(the before-mentioned lead magnet).”, i.e. “before-mentioned” should be hyphenated.

In the “Blog vs. Company Site” subsection, the text: “Stripe Billing^2 ,” probably should put the footnote after the comma, instead of before, as is currently written. Putting the footnote after the comma would be consistent with how footnotes are used in the rest of the text.

In the section “Case Study: How I promoted DB2”, the text “(on my blog” is missing a closing parenthesis. I think this should be “(on my blog)”, but I’m not 100% sure, so you might like to look at the sentence to make sure this is the right place to put it.

In the paragraph before the section “Other Approaches to Selling More”, the text “AYour ultimate goal” should read “Your ultimate goal” (the “A” should be removed).

In the second paragraph after “Tip 77”, the text “because your and your writer’s” should be “because you and your writer’s”.

In the sentence just before “Tip 79”, I would recommend to swap the words “has certainly” to be “certainly has”. I get the feeling that the sentence “This approach certainly has SEO advantages.” reads better.

In the last line of the page, the text “… advertising is judt the tip …” should be “… advertising is just the tip …”, i.e. the word “just” is spelled incorrectly.

In the quote at the top of the page, there’s a question mark that seems out of place. The text reads “When I hear people debate the ROI of social media? It makes …”, perhaps this should be “When I hear people debate the ROI of social media, it makes …”

In the last line on the page, the text “… a good place where to promote …” should read “… a good place where to promote …”, i.e. the word “where” is unnecessary.

In the section “Brand Your Social Properties”, I think the text “Much like you customized your blog …” is missing the word “how”, i.e. it should be written as: “Much like how you customized your blog …”.

In the fourth paragraph on the page, the phrase “… but reversed it on its head.” is usually written as “… but turned it on its head.”; you might like to use the more common expression here. Just a suggestion!

In the fifth paragraph on the page, the text “… whether doing so it’s appropriate.” probably should be “… whether doing so is appropriate.”. I.e. “it’s” should be “is”.

In the fifth paragraph on the page, the text “Start out on the right food …” very probably should be “Start out on the right foot …”.

In the second paragraph on the page, the text “… or widget that invite people …” should probably be “… or widgets that invite people …”, i.e. “widget” -> “widgets”.

Just before “Tip 85”, the text “(after all other humans …” probably should have a comma after “all”, i.e. it should probably be “(after all, other humans …”.

At the top of the page, the text “… but if the spacing make sense, …” should be “… but if the spacing makes sense, …”, i.e. “make” -> “makes”.

At the bottom of the page, there are the two examples of tweets where the spacing is supposedly different. Unfortunately, the second example is split across a page boundary and it took me a while to work out what you really meant (I think you mean that the second example is better because the first two lines are split vertically from the second two lines). Perhaps this example will be shifted by other edits in a later edition, however you might want to make the example a bit clearer, just in case things are still split across a page boundary in the future.

In the fifth bullet point I think the text “… to keep tab of discussions …” is intended to be “… to keep tabs on discussions …”, i.e. “tab of” -> “tabs on”.

In the second-to-last paragraph, the text “… can escalate to treats or attacks …” should be “… can escalate to threats or attacks …”, i.e. “treats” -> “threats”.

The links to examples of technical blogs all use http. But I’d bet that every one of them is https these days.

Upon reading the text “Your server will need a web server such as Nginx and MySQL …”, for a split-second I thought you meant that MySQL was a web server. Perhaps rewording slightly would make the components clearer, for example something like: “Your server will need a web server such as Nginx, as well as MySQL …”.

There is an extra space before the word “publications” (just after the opening parens) in the third line on the page.

In the second paragraph on the page, the text “… will carry you forward once you started.” should probably be either “… will carry you forward once you’re underway.” or “… will carry you forward once you’ve started.”. I get the feeling that there’s a slightly better flow to the sentence with one of these variations.

In roughly the third paragraph on the page, the text “… you’ll need to include canonical_url as well as shown …” needs a comma after “well” to break up the sentence, i.e.: “… you’ll need to include canonical_url as well, as shown …”. This stops the text reading “as well as”, which is much the same as saying “and”, which isn’t what you mean here.

In the third paragraph, the sentence: “You’ll likely don’t need it for a blog, however.” should read “You’ll likely not need it for a blog, however.”

At the end of the first sentence, I think the text “… full-fledged blog.” should be “… fully-fledged blog.”