Blog Exercise: New Years Reboot, Restart, Kick Ass

“It’s that time of year when the world falls in love…” The Christmas Waltz by Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn I’d like to think that New Year’s thinking includes bringing back the love to your blog. You might not think that, but let’s go with that belief as we continue with this year’s Blog Exercises. […]

Blog Exercises: Are You Trending?

In social media, trending are topics attracting the attention of most of the people, thus popular. Unfortunately, trending topics are self-feeding, an accident along the highway where everyone wants to slow down and take a look. Then they want to tell others about it so they can look. Walking by a student glued to their […]

Blog Exercises: Ingredients of a Well-Designed Site

I was asked by a student in my WordPress class recently what defined a “professional blog,” one that met all the criteria for a well-designed, well-formed site that met web standards. What a marvelous question! We brainstormed all the elements that make up a web standard site, and mixed in personal preferences of the students […]

Blogging Tools: Jing Screen Capture and Video

One of my favorite blogging tools – okay, tool I use for teaching, writing, and research – is Jing by Techsmith. It’s a must-have tool for bloggers and blogging. Jing is free. It allows capturing still images (screenshots), basic video, and animation, and allows you to share them on the web or save them to […]

Blog Exercises: When You Assume…

One of the class projects for my WordPress college course involved the students working together on a single broken post to find all the errors in the content. Typically, this is a quick test of their basic coding skills, but this quarter’s students are not typical. They are exceptional. The goal was to identify and […]

Blog Exercises: Trending

In social media, trending are topics attracting the attention of most of the people in that moment. Unfortunately, trending topics are self-feeding. If something ends up top of the trending list, it becomes an accident alongside the highway. Everyone wants to slow down and take a look. Walking by a student glued to their computer, […]

Blog Exercises: Site Models

In “WordPress Site Models” I describe the three main formats for a site layout. They are static, blog, and hybrid. Each site model works for a variety of content and presentation of that content, though some work better for specific types of sites. A static site model, even in WordPress, uses Pages and not posts […]

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: What I Did This Summer

It’s September and many schools have started classes all over the world. Two weeks ago, I moved boxes from long-term storage out into my studio to start sorting through them, then deadlines and distracts won my attention, and there they sit, staring at me. Guilting me. With five minutes to wait for a program to […]

Blog Exercises: The Domino Effect

I recently created a domino effect on one of my sites. The Domino Effect is based upon the traditional game of domino pieces stacked standing upright in rows, typically in a straight or curved path carefully spaced close together. Knock over the first one and it falls against the second, and third, knocking down each […]

Blog Exercises: The Art of List Making

Today’s blog exercise is part two on how to make a list. In “Weekly Link Roundups” and “Making Lists” blog exercises I covered some basics of how to make a list. This blog exercise will take these exercises further to help you create interesting lists in your blog posts that pull the reader through your […]

Blog Exercises: How to Respond to a Copyright Violation

While I know that you would never violate anyone’s copyright and publish other people’s content without proper citation or permission, there are hundreds of thousands who think that if it is on the web, it’s free to use and abuse. Accusations of copyright violations are big deals. Some top journalists, writers, photographers, musicians, software developers, […]

Blog Exercises: How to Tag Posts – The Quiz

In “Blog Exercises: How to Tag Posts,” I covered the basics of how to tag your posts. The following blog exercise is a quiz to see how you would tag the following post. Read through the article on tagging posts for a review. Read the following fictional short story I wrote called “The Story of […]

Blog Exercises: Judging a Book By Its Presence

Right after the Sandy Hook School attack, a detail about the killer’s life came out in the news in the form of the book choices found in the home of the killer and his mother. Among all the books and papers was found a book on autism and another on Aspergers, which the media took, […]

Blog Exercises: Current Events for June

Been watching the news lately? It’s time to blog the news and current events for June in our Blog Exercises. For those living on the top of the world, summer is here. For those living down under, the cold is here. There are droughts and floods everywhere, part of the normal fluctuation of the seasons […]