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: Blog a Conversation

In this ongoing series called Blog Exercises, today you will blog a conversation. “I don’t want to.” “Sure, you do.” “Nah. Don’t want to.” “This is a chance to improve your blogging.” “Uh-huh.” “This is a change to improve your writing skills.” “Nope.” “You will do it because I said so. Got it?” “Okay.” Writing […]

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 […]

Presentation: Blog Your Passion

The following are the presentations notes for my workshop called “Blogging Your Passion” at Making it in Changing Times in 2015. In 2010 I was in Chicago for SOBCon, the Successful Online Business Conference, and I had an amazing encounter with a woman on the crowded downtown streets: …I was storming away from the last […]

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: 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: I Don’t Have Any Comments

I hear this complaint frequently from new and long time bloggers. “I don’t have any comments. How can I get more comments?” First of all, let me explain something and I want you to read closely. You don’t want comments. Yes, that’s right. You do not want comments. At least not comments from anyone. If […]

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 […]

The Giant Blog Exercise Check List Part 1

July is the midway point of these Blog Exercises and time for a Giant Blog Exercise Checklist to help you keep score of the exercises you’ve done, and what’s left undone. I’ve arranged the blog exercises by similarity, tasks related to each other, rather than chronologically. If you are playing catch up, you might wish […]

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 Exercise: When Was the Last Time You Got Personal

I walked into a friend’s home and found the fridge covered with refrigerator art from her seven year old. The traditional home often features such childhood artwork but this was extremely precious as the child has learning disabilities and drawing. The artwork was beautiful. I stood there transfixed at the crude scribbles, trying to find […]

Blog Exercises: Spell Checkup on Categories and Tags

Oh no! I was writing out a tag in WordPress and the auto-suggest feature popped up with a misspelled tag name! Yikes! Today’s blog exercise is to clean up your tag and category names to ensure you’ve not made the same mistakes. To review your category names in WordPress, go to Posts > Categories and […]

Blog Exercises: Sex Changes and Age Matters

I often get comments that say “Thank you, sir” or emails through my contact forms addressed to Mr. Lorelle. In France, “Lorelle” is a last name as popular as Johnson in English countries. I understand that “Lorelle” is a tough name to identify with a sex. Not the point. I live online in a world […]

Blog Exercises: Preview Posts

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 […]

Blog Exercises: How to Tag Posts

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 […]