Blogging Tips « Lorelle on WordPress

Category Archives: Blogging Tips

Lorelle has been blogging since before blogging was a term. Starting on USENET and CompuServer forums, she shared her expertise, stories, and training programs with thousands, now millions from around the world. This category includes a variety of tips aimed at blogging in general. For more specific blogging help and information, see Writing, Blog Babble about bloggers and web publishers, Blog Challenge to help you improve your blogging skills and website, Blog Struggles on the challenges of a full-time professional blogger, Blogging News on the industry, and WordPress Tips for information related specifically to blogging with WordPress.

Blog Exercises: Make an Elephant Out of a Fly

March 22, 2013 – 4:22 am

G.I. Gurdjieff said, “We have made an elephant out of a fly.” A friend of mine and fellow college professor, Mark Smith, is a dedicated follower of George Gurdjieff, a Russian spiritual leader. He’s been sharing some of his teachings with me. This one caught my attention and immediately had to be added to these […]

By Lorelle VanFossen | Also posted in Blog Exercises, Blogging, Writing | Comments (1)

Blog Exercises: How Much Does Your Blog Cost?

March 21, 2013 – 4:05 am

How much does your blog cost? It should be a simple question. Do you have an answer? The costs associated with a blog are the costs associated with any website. There is the cost of the domain name, if you choose to have a custom name. In general, it is about USD $15 a year, […]

By Lorelle VanFossen | Also posted in Blog Exercises, Blogging | Leave a Comment

Blog Exercises: Preview Posts

March 20, 2013 – 4:54 am

Do you preview a post before publishing? If not, consider adding this extra step to the publishing process. Why? I’m human. So are you. We mess things up. No matter how careful you are, you will make mistakes. That’s life. By double checking what your post will look like before you release it to the […]

By Lorelle VanFossen | Also posted in Writing, Blogging, Blog Exercises | Comments (5)

Blog Exercises: How to Tag Posts

March 19, 2013 – 4:16 am

Categories are your site’s table of contents. Tags are your index words. While it is simple to explain the two basic organizational and navigation elements of a WordPress site, coming up with tags for each post is a struggle many bloggers battle. Tags represent micro-categorization of your site’s content. It helps the visitor find closely […]

By Lorelle VanFossen | Also posted in Blog Exercises, Blogging, WordPress Tips, Writing | Comments (6)

Blog Exercises: Blasts from the Past

March 18, 2013 – 4:33 am

It’s time to dive into your archives and feature some blasts from the past on your blog. We all know we have some great gems in our archives, article series, great topics, informative and educational content. Many of these are timeless, yet they tend to get lost in the shuffle of time and search. We’ve […]

By Lorelle VanFossen | Also posted in Blog Exercises, Blogging, Writing | Comments (3)

Blog Exercises: Speed Blogging with CoLT

March 15, 2013 – 4:01 am

I’d like to introduce you to the work horse I use for speed blogging. It’s a web browser add-on for Firefox called CoLT. It stands for Copy Link Text. I will be offering a variety of web browser tips and tools to make blogging faster and easier throughout these Blog Exercises, and of all of […]

By Lorelle VanFossen | Also posted in Blog Exercises, Blogging, WordPress Tips, Writing | Comments (3)

Blog Exercises: Check Your Site Title Tag

March 14, 2013 – 4:40 am

Do you know what the title of your site is? Not the name of your site or the title of your post, but the HTML <title> tag for your site buried in the source code. In HTML, every website is required to have the <title> tag in the <head> of the source code HTML structure. […]

By Lorelle VanFossen | Also posted in Blog Exercises, Blogging, Web Design, WordPress Themes, WordPress Tips, Writing | Comments (10)

Blog Exercises: Know Your Pageviews

March 13, 2013 – 4:28 am

In this Blog Exercise, it is time to learn some website jargon, specifically, what are all the web pages of your site called. I teach web publishing with WordPress and web design courses at two colleges, and I’m stunned that students don’t know at the lack of proper names for all the parts of a […]

By Lorelle VanFossen | Also posted in Blog Exercises, Blogging, WordPress Themes, WordPress Tips | Comments (2)

Blog Exercises: March Random Editing Day

March 12, 2013 – 4:58 am

It’s time for another Random Editing Day in the ongoing series of Blog Exercises to flex your blogging muscles. Consider this exercise in March as a little spring cleaning exercise. Get out your broom and start sweeping your old posts. As outlined in the original exercise, your task today is to find three random previously […]

By Lorelle VanFossen | Also posted in Blog Exercises, Writing | Comments (2)

Blog Exercises: Experiment with Emptiness

March 11, 2013 – 4:17 am

In “Meditation on Emptiness,” the author writes of the Buddha nature: The Prasangikas say that this teaching is an example of giving to the ’cause’ the name of the effect, for the emptiness of the mind of each sentient being is what allows for change of that person’s mind, and this emptiness is being called […]

By Lorelle VanFossen | Also posted in Blog Exercises, Blogging, Writing | Comments (3)

Blog Exercises: How Many Posts Can Your Audience Handle?

March 8, 2013 – 4:03 am

In “Blog Exercises: How Many Posts? the exercise asked you to consider how many posts you should publish within a specific time period on your site, such as by day, week, month, or year. The goal was to set self-deadlines and monitor how many posts you felt were appropriate to publish within that time period. […]

By Lorelle VanFossen | Also posted in Blog Exercises, Blogging, Writing | Comments (4)

Blog Exercises: Polls and Surveys Follow-up

March 7, 2013 – 4:50 am

In Blog Exercises: Polls and Surveys I asked you to create a poll on your site asking for input from your readers. Today’s exercise is on creating a follow-up poll. In that exercise, I invited readers to respond to the question, “What publishing platform are you currently using?” The answers to that are typical, skewed […]

By Lorelle VanFossen | Also posted in Writing, Blogging, Blog Exercises | Comments (1)

Writing for the Web Course Starts June 3, 1013

March 7, 2013 – 4:02 am

I will be teaching “Writing for the Web” at Clark College Corporate and Continuing Education in Vancouver, Washington, Tuesdays and Thursdays, June 3 – July 8, 2013. The class will be at the West Coast Bank Building in downtown Vancouver, Washington, just a few minutes from downtown Portland, Oregon. Writing on the web is now […]

By Lorelle VanFossen | Also posted in Announcements, Blogging, WordPress News, Writing | Leave a Comment

Blog Exercises: Where Are You?

March 6, 2013 – 4:33 am

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 […]

By Lorelle VanFossen | Also posted in Blogging, Writing | Leave a Comment

Blog Exercises: Trackback Check-Up

March 5, 2013 – 4:15 am

It’s time to check your trackbacks. In Blog Exercises: Trackbacks and Blog Exercises: Backlinks you learned about trackbacks, the automatic process of a site linking to yours and generating a comment-like notification to alert you of the link to your article, and helping your readers discover what others are saying about your article. In this […]

By Lorelle VanFossen | Also posted in Blog Exercises, Blogging | Comments (1)