Are you a wimp when it comes to making out a wish list for the holidays? Let geek mama show you how to construct a wish list...no matter your gender.

You may have heard about “Shop Local” campaigns, but you may have felt that this is a retail deal. Not so – in this article, Linda explains how “Shop Local” campaigns can work to a service business's advantage, too.

Linda offers some great deals for designers – open source Web sites and sources that are easy on designers' wallets, because they're free.

The timing is auspicious...Twitter dons a new face just prior to Halloween. Linda looks at the results and asks...Is it a mask or for real?

In this article, Linda lays out 51 Web apps that you may be able to use for your home or independent design and development business.

In this article, Linda takes a new look at Google’s Blogger as an option for eliminating self-hosting.

The social networking scene changes constantly. In this article, Linda points to a few sites that have altered their formats – are the changes good or bad? Only you can decide...

The job market is slim right now, but some folks seem to have found their niches. How do you evaluate a job offer? In this article, Linda offers some tips on how to evaluate that job offer to learn whether or not it is right for you.

An avid Mashable fan, Lindatalks about a recent article about marketing brands for clients...and how you can apply some principles for yourself as you market your goods and services.

If you've invested in a hosting service and have decided, after this last malware attack, that you've had it up to here with hosting Web sites, Linda offers some alternatives for you in this article.

If you've thought about publishing your blog, how would you go about that project? In this article, Lindatalks about some possibilities for spreading your blog around like butter.

In this article, Linda draws attention to Venture Capital and the mediums that seem to interest big money. In the process, she points to resources outside the ordinary to find job opportunities.

Linda becomes paranoid in this article, as she speculates on the darker side of social media and how it could, in the future, “own” its users.

If you've dreamed about becoming a radio personality, or if you have a message you think would be more insightful if read out loud, what's stopping you from adding audio (or a podcast) to your blog? In this article, Linda provides some examples and feedback on how audio can enhance your blog entries.

In part 2 of a look at HTML5, Nancy will show you how to add CSS to the previously unstyled document from part 1 and why there are some differences you need to watch out for.  In this week’s article, we are going to dive into styling the document created in part 1 and show a couple of ways styling can be done without breaking the rules.

Previously, Linda wrote about how to get started with connecting your WordPress (WP) blog with social media. In this article, she provides even more ways to make your blog totally social, with a list of 25 plugins  for WP and more.

Infographics, or information graphics, are making a comeback across the Web. Have you thought about using an infographic for your resume? Linda explores this option in this article.

Privacy issues have resurfaced with Facebook over the past few weeks, and Linda covers it all this week – including issues that have taken a back seat to the main Facebook privacy settings.

If you have blog content, you may want your readers to share that content. In this article, Linda offers a variety of ways to help your readers share what you've written. The focus in this article is on Gravatar, avatars and linking to social media through WordPress Global.

HTML5 brings a whole host of new goodies to web design including the new local storage facility where data can be stored on the client where it is easily accessible. Cookies have been the only data storage mechanism on the client that the browser has access to for many years and although they have served us well in that time, they do have their limitations such as the constraints on their size and per-domain limitations. Now we no longer have to worry about these issues and can work with local storage instead.

Local storage has many benefits; in an application that requires frequent access to stored data, reading or writing the data from or to their own computer is always going to be much faster than by sending AJAX requests to the server. We also have access to a much greater size (the draft specification recommends an arbitrary size of 5 megabytes) so we aren’t constrained to the limit of just 4 kilobytes that a cookie allows.

In this tutorial we’ll look at how to build a cool site-monitoring widget that allows you to monitor the status of multiple sites. If you maintain a large number of web sites checking that each one individually is up and running could be a time-consuming chore, but with this widget we can instantly see if any sites are down.

We’ll use jQuery to build the interface and communicate with the server and we’ll use PHP and the cURL extension to actually check each site is up and running by making a request to the specified sites and checking which response headers are returned. We’ll also be using MySQL to store the URLs of the site’s we’ll be monitoring; it’s not strictly required, there are a number of alternative storage methods we could use including a plain text file, a PHP array, a JavaScript array, etc, but MySQL is probably the most robust method and it means we can easily add new sites to monitor.

What if you uploaded a blog, committed to backups, installed all the right plugins (like a firewall) and kept WordPress up to date and still get hacked? In this article, Linda explains how to handle that situation.

Hold onto your socks – WordPress is about to release version 3.0. What does this mean? Linda explains all in this article...

What if you're too busy to run a blog? What if you want to use WordPress as a static site with a store? In this article, Linda will answer both those questions with ways to resolve your goals.

In past articles, Linda mentioned that she uses the Hybrid Theme for WordPress. In this article, she points to other themes that WordPress feels are totally compatible with that blogging platform.

If you're concerned about how to label your users in your WordPress blog, never fear. Linda defines those roles so that you don't allow strangers total access and deny friends the same access.

In this article, Linda tackles some issues that can help others notice your blog through the use of Permalinks, feed and subscriptions.

One of the final steps to making your blog SEO friendly is to use WordPress tools to push that blog over the edge. In this article, Linda shows you how to get that WordPress SEO advantage.

If you have trouble building blog content that gets noticed, you might need help with structure and SEO. Structure, along with words that make searches engines happy is what Linda tackles in this article.

A blog requires content, especially if you expect readers and if you want to make money from that readership. In this article, Linda discusses writing issues such as how to find content, how to make a writing plan, and how to maintain a consistent schedule for your writing.