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: 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 […]

Blog Exercise: Category Brainstorming

In the first of my new Blog Exercises, you will begin work on clarifying the purpose and mission of your site. Take a minimum of 25 minutes to list all the words and phrases that describe what you blog about. If you are new to blogging, list all of the words describing what you wish […]

Adding, Deleting, and Changing a WordPress Category

Time to add a new category to WordPress? Have enough content within a specific topic and want to add it to your category lists? Changing your mind about a category name and wish to change it? Want to delete an entire category worth of posts because you don’t want to cover that topic anymore? Adding […]

WP-SNAP WordPress Plugin: Alphabetized Index Listing of Posts for Category Pages

Many people use their blogs like encyclopedias, wikis, or great repositories of information. Or for handling collections of information such as quotes, poetry, recipes, code, research, or facts. Others write reviews of books, movies, television shows, and technology. So wouldn’t it be slick to be able to sort through the collection of posts in alphabetical […]

Sort Posts By Category Now Available in WordPress

CELEBRATION! As of today, there is a new sort posts by category in the Manage Posts Administration Panels of WordPress.com blogs. I’ve been pushing and shoving, teasing and begging for this feature for so long, some WordPress developers have grown gray hairs in the process. It’s so easy to use. Just click on the the […]

WordPress Category Feed Links in Your Post Meta Data Section

I’m a huge fan of all the fabulous volunteers on the WordPress Support Forum. Recently, one of them, known as Otto 42 of Ottodestruct.com, solved a huge problem I had, and I want to share his brilliance with all of you. The challenge was to create a list of feeds by categories in which that […]

An Interesting Use of Category Tags in wordpress.com

Jacob Appelbaum’s blog on Hurricane Katrina is an amazing read, but it also features an interesting use of categories as tags. I’ve talked about the difference between categories and tags, the limitations of using categories as tags, how to manually add Technorati and search tags to wordpress.com, and an even easier method for adding tags […]

Show Just One Category in WordPress Categories

Tip Applies to the Full Version of WordPress A challenge come up on the forum for a user who had a very interesting wish. When clicking on a category from the main page, he wanted a page showing the categories, but ONLY the categories from that category, not the children of the categories. Let me […]

Blog Exercises: Prepare for Summer

It’s Editorial Calender check-in and check up time. May is the shift from spring to summer. From blossoming flowers to green leafed trees casting shade, the weather is changing, bringing warmer days to the northern hemisphere and colder temperatures down under. For those of us living in the Pacific Northwestern United States, we are experiencing […]

Blog Exercises: How to Write about Something Someone Else Wrote

In the early development of the web, blogs were classified as echo chambers, vessels of redundant content as every original idea was shared, reshared, quoted, and spread across the web at rapid speed. Some estimates state that less than 2% of all the content on the web is original. It’s mostly regurgitation of the same […]

Blog Exercises: Excerpts and Continue Reading

Encountered the front page of a blog where the posts ran on and on and on and on, stretching across the length of the page? Do you ever wish you had more control over the length of your posts on the front page of your site? This Blog Exercise explores the use of the “more” […]

Blog Exercises: How Long Are Your Paragraphs?

How long are your paragraphs? Have you measured them lately? One of the telling differences between traditional writing and writing for the web is the length of the paragraph. Look at the example below. Which is easier to read? On the left, the paragraphs are huge, long blocks of text. On the right, the paragraphs […]

Blog Exercises: Dissecting Post Categories

In a recent article, Noah Weiss shared his struggle to figure out categories and tags on his personal site. I know many of you following these Blog Exercises have also struggled to figure out your categories, so I thought Noah’s site would be a perfect example, He has gratefully given me permission to rip his […]

Blog Exercises: List Your Resources

In “Blog Exercises: What Are Your Reference Articles” your blog exercise was to identify your reference articles from within your site and list them on a Page or in a post as a reference list. Today’s blog exercise is to identify and publish your resources beyond your site, the reference material and sources you count […]