Blog Exercises: Own Your Site and Protect Yourself

I hear it every day. A webmaster, developer, or designer does the site owner wrong and the site owner is victimized, helpless, and frustrated with what to do next. I’ve gotten calls in the middle of the night from people around the world trying to get help recovering their WordPress password because their “web guy” […]

Blog Exercises: How Many Words in a Link?

How many words should you put into a link? Is there a rule? There isn’t a rule but there are good standards and practices. These state that two words should be the minimum, and only enough words to compel someone to click through to the linked source. The words must also imply the link’s destination […]

Blog Exercises: The Don’ts of Blogging

Did you know there is a Blogger’s Code of Conduct? It’s on Wikipedia. Initiated by Tim O’Reilly, it is as follows: Take responsibility not just for your own words, but for the comments you allow on your blog. Label your tolerance level for abusive comments. Consider eliminating anonymous comments. Don’t feed the trolls. Take the […]

7 Blogging Steps Even Veteran Bloggers Forget

Originally published in Blogger and Podcaster Magazine and updated. I write for a variety of online and offline magazines. They’ve graciously permit me to republish my articles. Participating in a recent multiple guest blogger event, I edited and review posts by many top bloggers before publishing. I was rather stunned to find that even veteran […]

Question: What Will You Not Blog About?

In What Will You Not Blog About? on the Blog Herald, I asked readers to tell me what line they will not cross when it comes to blog content. What will you NOT blog about. The responses have been very interesting. A few bloggers take a no-holds-barred approach, blogging on everything and anything they want. […]

Are You Abusing Your WordPress Pages – and Your Blog?

Here are two of the most important definitions you need to know about your WordPress blog: Post: An article published within a blog and displayed in chronological order within multi-post pages such as the front page, category, searches, archives, tags, and other page views. Page: A pseudo-static web page which holds content on a blog […]

Weekly Digest: Celebrating Two Years of Lorelle on WordPress.com With Guest Bloggers and Memories

Instead of my normal weekly digest, I’m going to do two things this week. First, I want to celebrate all of the wonderful guest bloggers who have honored this blog over the past month with their fabulous posts about blogging, and those who will be making a repeat performance or joining us for the first […]

WordCamp 2007

I barely know where to begin describing the incredible experience that was WordCamp 2007 this past weekend in San Francisco. I’m sure that everyone has been following the live blogging from the conference and the information and trackbacks on the WordCamp 2007 official site and the unofficial WordCamp Report, so you probably know more about […]

Google Gives Tips to Eastern European Bloggers

While most of us living in a higher tech world should know these things, in honor of the expansion of Google into Eastern Europe, the Google Webmaster Central blog offers advice and tips for Eastern European webmasters and bloggers. In 2006 we ramped up on international webmaster issues and particularly tried to support Eastern Europe. […]

How To Spot a Splog

After publishing “One Year Anniversary Review: Splogs – The Dark Side of Blogging”, I had several people ask me how to know if a blog is a splog or spam blog. Here are some simple clues to look for. In a Splog, Nothing Adds Up Nor Matches Splogs, spamming blogs, are often little more than […]

One Year Anniversary Review: Reviews of the Reviews

Wow. One solid month of reviews of articles over the past year. What an amazing retrospective, huh? An anniversary or birthday can be a time of celebration as well as reflection, and this past month writing about the past year’s worth of writing has been an amazing step back through time, thoughts, choices, decisions, and […]

One Year Anniversary Review: Blogging About Bloggers

I’ve had fun over the past year blogging about bloggers. The first batch of bloggers I blogged about were the first bloggers on WordPress.com, followed by bloggers blogging about Hurricane Katrina, which was of special interest to me since I was in its direct path. A fun article on bloggers blogging about unusual topics was […]

One Year Anniversary Review: Keywords

Keywords are words used in the post content area of your blog that help searchers find you on search engines. They are the words that you use repeatedly throughout your post and blog to help search engines categorize you, and people searching with search engines find the right combinations of words to find your blog. […]

One Year Anniversary Review: Comments on Comment Spam

Comment spam is one of the biggest blights on the Internet. As far as I’m concerned, comment spam is the single most despicable and destructive force on the Internet today. Yes, we have problems with censorship, government infringement, copyright infringement, and other abusive issues, but comment spam is a plague that infests everyone. Part of […]

Blogging Rants: Tangential Blogging Can Lose Readers

Over the past couple months in my travels, I’ve been interviewing a lot of old and newly found family members on their life and family history for my own needs and my new family history blog I’ll be starting soon. Today, I heard an interesting family story that I want to share with you. When […]