How to Avoid Orphans in Blog Titles (Wordpress)

I'm a proofreader by day, and I am constantly noting orphans (or widows, depending on who you ask), which is a single word or maybe even two small words that break to the next line, creating an awkward, unbalanced appearance. I noticed this happening recently on my Wordpress blogs but didn't have much of a clue how to fix it. Here's how: you simply add   in between words with no spaces before and after, like this:

Add these characters in between words

Doing this creates a single unit out of the three words that will break to the next line together if the title runs too long.

Disqus.com: A Total Con Game?

I recently came across a service called Disqus that offers a free service that puts comments on your blog along with some nice features. At first glance, it's a seemingly innocent service that can remove some headaches such as spam for people who use blog engines like Wordpress.

However, if you are running a blog to generate money, I cannot stress the following point enough: Do not use Disqus for your comments. What Disqus does is take your comments and create essentially their own content from them. If you do a Google search for a post on your site and add the word Disqus to them, your will discover that Disqus.com has created their own blog out of your comments and also each of your posts, whether the posts have comments or not. They are using your comments and your blog to generate traffic to their site. Brilliant con, I have to give them credit.

Google Reader's Notes Feature

I've been waiting a long time for the new Google Reader notes feature. What I don't like is the focus on the social angle. Basically, when you create a note, the default is that your note will be shared and viewable by your friends. There is a checkbox to keep the note private, but I think the note should be private by default.

Also, the notes feature could be so much more powerful. I want to keep a searchable database of personal notes for news stories in Google Reader. I've always had a strong desire to record quick initial commentary on news stores in Google Reader so I can come back to my thoughts later and perhaps expand upon them. I want to be able to export those notes sorted by labels to Google Docs to create a printable document.

I mean, how great is it to record notes right alongside the source material. This has always been my dream with eBook readers. Could you imagine being able to write notes electronically in the margins on an eBook reader?

Here's an example of my vision for Google Reader notes. Say you've just bought a bunch of plants for your apartment. You come across a New York Times article on the best way to water plants. You think this might be a good idea for your plants, so you write a few quick notes about having to buy a new watering can, etc. Then a few days later, you come across a Wired article about a new gadget that measures the amount of sunlight hitting your plants. You also write a quick note to check out Amazon.com for this gadget and to also move one of your plants to a south-facing window. You also tag each of these posts with a label like "Plants." When you felt like it, you could come back later to the topic of your plants and revisit both these posts viewable in a personal book dedicated to to plants complete with source material (created by labeling each with "Plants").

Anyways, I think the notes feature is a big step in the right direction. Let's hope they keep adding features.