Word11 AudioCast – UX: Developing Content to Enhance the User Experience

Live Now at WORD11 LIVESTREAM At noon PST/3PM EST Wednesday, July 27, 2011 (tomorrow), I will be presenting UX: Developing Content to Enhance the User Experience in a livestream audiocast for the Word11 Pre-Event: Prefix. It’s free and open to all, especially those interested in web publishing, blogging, and social media. I will be discussing […]

Blog Challenge: Shopping Experiences

The friend I’m staying with in Israel is a master shopper. She looks like a high fashion, classic model and everyone asks where she got her clothes and how much did she pay. She explains, proudly, that this lovely unique geometrically designed top that graces her tall slender frame cost only 10 shekels (about USD […]

Blog Challenge: Testing Your Blog Clicking Experience

What do you click on a blog? For the next few days to a week, I want you to take note of what you click on when you visit a blog. Most people either revisit blogs they enjoy or find them through search engines. When you arrive on the blog and find the information you […]

What Have You Learned from the Blogging Experience?

I ask you, my humble readers, a lot of questions, motivating you to think about how you blog, why you blog, and what your blog is for. Now I ask you a very important question. What have you learned from the blogging experience? So, what have you learned? What have you learned about web design, […]

Blog Exercises: What Are You Missing?

Frogs redefine my thoughts about amphibians annually. As a child, spring was for tadpoles and summers were for frogs in the swamps, ponds, and ditches around my country ranch in the Pacific Northwest. Moving to Oregon’s Coastal Mountain range west of Portland, my winters are spent driving up the foothills like a crazy person, avoiding […]

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: 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: 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 […]

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: Who Changed Your Life?

This is one of the special Blog Exercises this year, a chance to really celebrate who you are and those who helped make you. As we travel through life, people change our lives on a daily basis as well as for a lifetime. Today’s exercise is focused on those who stepped in your path and […]

Blog Exercises: Do You Teach or Lecture?

Do you teach or lecture on your site? We all write with a specific “voice” and “style,” representing our perspective on the information we are presenting. On this site, I’m a teacher, sharing with you lessons to help you blog, use WordPress, and publishing on the web. You may share your expertise or your experiences […]

Blog Exercises: Own Your Site and Protect Yourself

I hear it every day. A webmaster, developer, or designer does the site owner wrong and the site owner is victimized, helpless, and frustrated with what to do next. I’ve gotten calls in the middle of the night from people around the world trying to get help recovering their WordPress password because their “web guy” […]

Blog Exercises: The IKEA Effect for Bloggers

The Ikea Effect was coined by researchers who found out what we all know but rarely admit, we put too much ownership into our own brainchild ideas and concepts. In other words, we tend to fall in love with our own ideas and creations. If you have ever been around kids, you’ve probably had that […]

Blog Exercises: The Search for Like Minds

I tat. My 95 year old grandmother-in-law taught me almost 20 years ago. Tatting is 17th century lace making based upon island and coastal women looking for something to do besides fixing fishing nets for the men of the village. They got creative with their netting shuttles to make fine lace doilies, scarfs, edging, table […]

Blog Exercises: What Are Your Reasons For Blogging

We all have our reasons for blogging. Having our say, sharing our experience, teaching, learning, creative outlet, money, reputation, because they told you to…all of these are good reasons to blog, but to keep blogging you need something more. In this blog exercise, I want you to consider the more. It is the answer to […]