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 […]

Creating Footnotes in WordPress

Among the many techniques students and clients request in my WordPress and blogging workshops and classes1, requests for creating footnotes in WordPress are rare, but they do happen. There are very distinctive differences between traditional writing and web publishing styles.2 Footnotes have been replaced by links to cite a reference or resource to support the […]

Writing for the Web Course

February 18 – March 25, you will find me teaching “Writing for the Web” for Clark College Corporate and Continuing Education on Mondays from 1:30-4:30PM in the West Coast Bank Building in downtown Vancouver, Washington, just across the river from Portland, Oregon. Come join me! This is the first class of its kind at the […]

Help Needed with WebVisions WordPress Theme Developers Panel

Webvisions is in Portland, Oregon, May 16-18, 2012, and I’ll be there again this year leading an awesome panel of WordPress Theme designers and developers, and I need your help. For over eleven years, Webvisions has been the go to conference for exploring the future of design, content creation, user experience, and business strategies on […]

Managing Multiple Authors: Managing Writers in a Multiple Author Blog

In this series on managing multiple bloggers in WordPress, I want to now focus on the content, specifically managing the editorial voice and purpose of a site with multiple bloggers. There is a huge caveat to this topic. Every blog is unique, as are all the voices within it. It is often that uniqueness that […]

Managing Multiple Authors: Author Bio Box WordPress Plugins

In the last article in this series on managing multiple bloggers in WordPress, I explored how to customize the author bio box on a single post page using some basic WordPress template tags and code. In this article in the series, I’m going to explore a wide variety of WordPress Plugins that will help you […]

Managing Multiple Bloggers: Author Content Management on WordPress

In the last article I talked about what’s most important to the author and their readers, covering recognition when it comes to researching and developing a website design to accommodate multiple bloggers. In this article, I want to cover the research you need to consider when it comes to content management, which represents the “Aggregation” […]

WordPress 2.6.2 Mandatory Upgrade

Ryan Boren has announced the mandatory WordPress 2.6.2 upgrade has been released and WordPress users are required to download WordPress 2.6.2 and upgrade immediately. This mandatory security upgrade adds protection for a SQL Column Truncation and other security and bug fixes. There is a full changeset and list of changed files to help you find […]

Blog Struggles: Negative Campaigning Isn’t Just For Politicians

With all the negative campaigning and nasty spin by the media wrapped up in election campaigns and conventions, it surprised me to find a connection between a politician commenting on negative campaigns and my continued defense of bloggers attacking other bloggers and going negative. I thought it worth talking about in my ongoing series on […]

WordPress 2.3 Tag News

The implementation of the new WordPress 2.3 built-in tag system has not come without some joy and pain. Here are some bits of news and tips to help you with the new WordPress tags. What is the Difference Between Tags and Categories? A category is a table of contents for your blog posts, segregating your […]

Tags Arrive on WordPress.com Blogs

With the announcement of the built-in tag feature in the upcoming release of WordPress 2.3, I’ve been waiting for WordPress.com to get tags as we are the beta testers of the WordPress World. Well, today they arrived. At the bottom of your Write Post panel’s editing box, you will see a new form for Tags. […]

Weekly Digest: Recovering from WordCamp, Lots of Interviews, CNet Calls, Two Months of Guest Bloggers, and Too Much More

Well, after writing about how to create this Weekly Digest Post here, and announcing that the next issue would be skipped, returning after WordCamp 2007, I didn’t anticipate being so from civilization on my way up the California and Oregon coast. Without Internet or cell phone access! ARGH! So we’re back on schedule with my […]

Happy Taggiversary to Technorati

Technorati’s second birthday is today, so kudos and salutes should abound in celebration. To honor their birthday, they are releasing new and updated Tag Pages, part of their constant striving to become better and more reliable as a social networking service and specialized search engine. Technorati revolutionized the blogosphere and the web by taking full […]

Writing Effective, Attention-Getting Headlines and Titles on Your Blog

If it bleeds, it leads. Punchy. Catchy. Attention-getting. Insightful. Instructive. Incentive. Luring. Fishing. Bait. Hook. These are all terms used to describe an effectively written title or headline for an article. The words chosen must provide a powerful incentive to make the reader want to read. To make them want to buy the magazine, newspaper, […]

One Year Anniversary Review: WordPress Tips, Tricks and Techniques

This is a blog about WordPress and I’ve written a lot about how to use WordPress from every angle. Part of the challenge of writing about WordPress over the past year has been the issue of writing about WordPress, the full version program where you can do just about anything you want, and writing about […]