WordPress School: Blavatars

About a month ago in Lorelle’s WordPress School free online course you added a Gravatar image to your WordPress.com test site. A Gravatar image and profile is linked to your email address and displays on any WordPress (and many other services) site in the world when you use that email address to comment. Another visual […]

Blog Exercises: Choose an Appropriate Gravatar for Your Readers

All WordPress sites have Gravatars integrated into the core. Gravatars are Globally Recognized Avatars, images that represent you in blog posts comments, featured author images (integrated with Gravatars), author images, BuddyPress, and other Gravatar-enabled features. Near the beginning of this year of blog exercises, you were asked to add or update your Gravatar to represent […]

Blog Exercises: Who Do Others Think You Are?

Today’s blog exercise was inspired by Kathy Holmes in her post, “Who are you today?” Lorelle’s “What Makes You Special?” blog exercise links to “Who the Hell Are You?” and both got me to thinking, not only about who I am, but who I am today and who people perceive me to be. Some people […]

Blog Exercises: The Outsider

During a writer’s convention this weekend, someone familiar with my site and these Blog Exercises asked me why I was handing our all this information to help others blog better, use WordPress better, and migrate their site from personal to professional. I had a pat answer then, but today, I have another. …Assumptions like these […]

Blog Exercises: What’s the View Through Your Binoculars

One of my favorite things is a framed picture by Matt Mullenweg of an old set of mounted binoculars. The eye pieces are worn and the blue paint on the metal binoculars looks like it’s not the first coat of paint it has seen. It’s wonderful, and I find new meaning in it every time […]

Blog Exercises: What Makes You Special?

A client greeted me with an over-enthusiastic hug yesterday. “I’m so glad to be working with you! You made me find myself again.” “Were you lost?” “You have no idea how lost I was.” I was confused. He lives in my neighborhood, walking distance from my front door. “Here.” He handed me a huge stack […]

Blog Exercises: What Are Your Reasons For Blogging

We all have our reasons for blogging. Having our say, sharing our experience, teaching, learning, creative outlet, money, reputation, because they told you to…all of these are good reasons to blog, but to keep blogging you need something more. In this blog exercise, I want you to consider the more. It is the answer to […]

Blog Exercises: Where Are You?

After agreeing to take on a writing assignment regarding Oregon history, I happily settled down to do a little preliminary online research. Because some of the towns I needed to research were located in areas I was not completely familiar with, I was relying on their local websites to point me to what I needed […]

Blog Exercises: Update Your Author Description

Who are you? What do you do? How do you let the world know who you are on your blog? We’ll dig into your About Page later. For now, this blog exercise is dedicated to updating your profile on your site. In my popular series, “Managing Multiple Bloggers in WordPress,” I covered more than you […]

Blog Exercises: Your Byline

What does your byline say about you? Is it your name? Your identity? Or is it admin? The byline is the author name, the name of the person who presumably wrote and published the article, who the article is “by.” In traditional media, this is a coveted credit. In traditional newspapers, a byline was a […]

Blog Exercises: What Are You Talking About?

“What ya talking about?” The first time a southerner from North Carolina hit me with that question, I was stopped in my tracks. I had to think. I was talking. In fact, I was saying something eloquent and intelligent. Something I needed the other person to understand. Clearly I wasn’t making my point. At the […]

Blog Exercises: What’s Your Site’s Tagline?

In Blog Exercises: What is the Name of Your Site?, the Blog Exercise explored whether or not your site title was still appropriate for your site. Today’s exercise examines your tagline, the subtitle of your site. Not all site designs or WordPress Themes display the tagline, but it is there under the hood. Search engines […]