Blog Exercises: Feed Readers

Without the feed reader, my blogging life would be seriously hard work. Feed, commonly misidentified as RSS, is the proper name for the contextual version of your site as distributed through various feed types such as RSS, Atom, XML, etc. They are basically your posts stripped of your website design, read like articles in a […]

Blog Exercises: Schedule Blogging Time

When do you blog best? I do my best blogging between 8AM and 1PM, then in the evening between 8PM and 11:30PM. When is your best time for creative thought, writing, and blogging? I blog professionally in addition to teaching, training, and public speaking on blogging, WordPress, and social media, so blogging is my life. […]

Blog Exercises: How Many Posts?

How many posts do you need to publish a year on your site? Have you counted? Do you schedule them in a way to count each post over a day, week, month, or year? At my peak, I pushed 1,975 posts a year. Yes, someone counted. The number frightened me. I had to break it […]

Blog Exercises: How to Publish Code

I blog about the technical side of blogging, about WordPress, WordPress Plugins, WordPress Themes, HTML, CSS, web design – code. I often blog about code. And people ask me code questions. I’ve become an expert in writing code so it looks like code on web pages. The time may come, or you may have already […]

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: Clean Up Your Most Popular Posts

“It’s dated 2008. It must be useless.” This was the response to an article I tweeted out recently. Yes, the article was dated 2008. Did that mean it wasn’t a valid, timely, and invaluable resource? It was, but that’s not the point. Some people equate old with useless. With the aging population gaining the majority […]

Blog Exercises: Weather Reports

February is a month of dramatic weather for many parts of the world. Sometimes January is fierce, and February slows the season down or speeds it up with floods, snows, rains, and sudden bursts of warm temperatures, creating a false Spring, fooling trees and flowers. Sometimes January was the lamb and February brings devastation from […]

Blog Exercises: Trackbacks

Trackbacks are like an invitation to a party. It is also like legitimate gossip. Trackbacks are notes telling you that someone is talking about you. Trackbacks are part of the important connections that form the true sense of the “web” on the Internet. WordPress and most modern publishing platforms generate trackbacks automatically. As common as […]

Blog Exercises: Quoting and Blockquotes

In “Copyright: How to Quote and Cite Sources,” I explain all the details you need to know about how to quote and cite other sources. Let’s review for this Blog Exercise. According to International Copyright Law, you are allowed to quote from original sources without violating copyright law if you copy content in accordance with […]

Blog Exercises: Weekly Link Roundups

Many bloggers publish weekly or monthly link roundups, highlights of some of the interesting sites they’ve found on the web. Most use a variety of automation techniques to generate this link list, bookmarking the web pages to a bookmarking program that helps them generate this list and release it once a week. It’s a lazy […]

Blog Exercises: Random Edit Day February

It’s time for another Random Editing Day in the ongoing series of Blog Exercises to flex your blogging muscles. As outlined in the original exercise, your task today is to find two random previously published posts and edit them. Use the list in the original exercise as a review on what to look for when […]

Blog Exercises: Current Events for February

Every month in this series of Blog Exercises I will ask you to check the news and report on something in the news that relates to you and/or your site’s purpose. It may directly relate or indirectly. The first Current Events exercise was in January. It’s another month and time to blog the news and […]

Blog Exercises: Category Cross-Pollination

In these Blog Exercises, I am faced with a category quandary. For the most part, these are blogging tips, so they should go into my Blogging Tips category as well as Blog Exercises category, right? Maybe right. These Blog Exercises are meant to have some form of order, though they may be done in any […]

Blog Exercises: Fix Images in Your Content

One of the most popular help requests on the WordPress forums is how to make the post text wrap around images. I wrote “Wrapping Text Around Images” in the WordPress Codex as a starting point many years ago. I explain it further in “How to Add Images in Your Post Content” on Lorelle Teaches, going […]

Blog Exercises: Category Counting

Think of categories and tags this way: Categories are your site’s table of contents. Tags are your index words. In general, most sites should have 5-12 categories max. Each category should represent a “body of work,” a collection of posts related to a focused topic. When you find a blog with dozens of categories, what […]