Blog Exercises: Under the Hood Spring Cleaning

One of my students in my Portland Community College WordPress class reminded me that clutter is clutter, no matter where you find it. Peter Smith reminds us that too many WordPress Themes is a waste of resources. Today, I feature his post to remind us all to clean up our sites under the hood. I […]

Blog Exercises: Clean Up Your Most Popular Posts

“It’s dated 2008. It must be useless.” This was the response to an article I tweeted out recently. Yes, the article was dated 2008. Did that mean it wasn’t a valid, timely, and invaluable resource? It was, but that’s not the point. Some people equate old with useless. With the aging population gaining the majority […]

Cleaning Up Post Tags with WordPress Bulk Edit

I recently went through a major upgrade for Taking Your Camera on the Road, one of the oldest websites in the world, on WordPress since 2003, and the testing grounds for some of the earliest WordPress Plugins and Themes. Have I got a lot of lessons learned to share with you. To begin with, I […]

Want to Help Google Clean Up Splogs?

In response to Matt Cutts’ request on how Google should work on web spam, a friend of mine gives him a very good summary of how Google can put an end to one the biggest blights on the web: splogs. In A big free clue for Google, he points out: Like many bloggers I can […]

Cleaning Up and Decluttering is Back

They say that history and fashion repeats itself, and it’s true. Cleaning up and decluttering your blog is back as a new trend, according to Jason Kaneshiro on the Blog Herald in Getting Back To Basics: Blog Decluttering: When Web 2.0 first began with Google and Craigslist, one of the “innovations” was simplicity itself – […]

Lean, Mean, and Clean WordPress Write Post Panel

Tired of a cluttered Write Post panel in your WordPress Administration Panels? Mark Jaquith has created the Clutter Free WordPress Plugin just for you. It’s pretty simple. You get to choose which elements of the Write Post panel you want to see or not see. Don’t want to see the Post Slug. It’s gone. Don’t […]

CSS Optimization: Cleaning Up Your Stylesheet Analysis

Blogging Pro has an interesting analysis on CSS Optimization that is definitely helpful if you are considering your website’s design optimization as well as your Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Just be careful using these on WordPress Themes. I have been spending some time looking at CSS Optimization tools today. I wanted something free, online, and […]

Housekeeping: Cleaning Out Post Drafts

You see them every day you open your WordPress blog’s Administration Panels. They stare at you. They are right there near the top, lurking. Haunting. You try to ignore them but they sit there, like eyes watching in the night. They are the things you have left undone, unfinished, incomplete, or in debate. They are […]

Site Optimization: Optimizing Bandwidth and Cleaning Out the Code Closet

The number one complaint by users has little to do with design elements. It has to do with how long it takes for a web page to load and how willing they are to wait for it. While most people just accept and tolerate the long waits for pages to load, they don’t have to. […]

Spring Cleaning or Fall Brush Off – Season Blog Cleaning

In Australia, Spring has sprung and The Blog Herald has “Quick Spring Cleaning Tips for Your Blog”. These are great tips, and if you are a WordPress user, be sure and check out WordPress Housekeeping and WordPress Site Maintenance on the WordPress Codex. Here are a few of my tips for cleaning up your blog, […]

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: May Random Editing Day

May. It’s starting to warm up outside in the north, and growing a bit chilly down under, but it’s that time again. It’s the May Random Editing Day. In this Blog Exercise you will need to edit five random posts from among your thousands – okay, maybe dozens of published articles. What should you look […]

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 […]

WordPress Anniversary: Comment Spam Lessons

It’s hard to believe that I’ve learned much from comment spammers over the years. I’ve learned that they are among the most hated folks in the world, yet you have to respect them as well. As I look back on ten years of blogging with WordPress on this 10th Anniversary year, I realized that comment […]

Blog Exercises: Does Your Site Look Spammy?

Does your site look spammy? How would you know whether or not your site looks spammy? It’s time for a spam check. Web design is hard, especially if you aren’t an expert. Yet, in many ways you are an expert if you are a fan of the web. You’ve seen enough sites to know the […]