New WordPress.com Forums

Yes, all you WordPress.com users, you now have a place to call your own for support services and dialog. The brand new WordPress.com Forums are up and running. This is where, hopefully, you can get the answers you need to your questions and find others who are blogging on WordPress.com. Volunteers are answering questions in […]

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 […]

The Brute-Force Password Attack on WordPress Sites

My mother emailed me and asked if WordPress was under attack. With all the news of last week’s attack of the Boston Marathon, the attacks on WordPress and other PHP-based web publishing sites was low on the priority list for myself and others, but this is something to take seriously. As we get back to […]

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 […]

WordPress Anniversary: WordPress and Evil

As I look back on the ten years of WordPress, there is a dark side to blogging. While many blamed WordPress for the evil, like guns, WordPress doesn’t cause evil, people cause evil. In fact, WordPress, Automattic, and the WordPress Community has fought longer and harder against the evil doers in the world than most […]

The Future of Blogging – With a Glimpse Backwards

In “What’s next for blogging: I try to predict the future” by Yesterday’s news, the author, a Creative and Professional Writing Major at Bemidji State University in Minnestoa, used fantastic visuals to take us on a journey through the development of blogging and the blogging industry for a class on blogs and wikis. She makes […]

Blog Exercises: How to Publish Code

I blog about the technical side of blogging, about WordPress, WordPress Plugins, WordPress Themes, HTML, CSS, web design – code. I often blog about code. And people ask me code questions. I’ve become an expert in writing code so it looks like code on web pages. The time may come, or you may have already […]

Blog Exercises: Fix Images in Your Content

One of the most popular help requests on the WordPress forums is how to make the post text wrap around images. I wrote “Wrapping Text Around Images” in the WordPress Codex as a starting point many years ago. I explain it further in “How to Add Images in Your Post Content” on Lorelle Teaches, going […]

Blog Exercises: Gravatars

This Blog Exercise will help you update your global recognition on WordPress and all Gravatar-enabled sites. I’m going to let TimeThief of one cool site, a site dedicated to all things WordPress blogging, tips, tools, and tutorials, explain Gravatars in her post, “Gravatars for Global Recognition.” Whether you blog under your real name or under […]

Blog Exercises: The Content Project Form

In these year-long Blog Exercises dealing with editorial or content calendars, we’re working on exploring all the dates you can add to your calendar, including adding seasonal post content and other date-sensitive blog posts and articles. In this exercise, we’re going to create a content project form. The goal of a content project form is […]

How Many is Too Many WordPress Plugins?

In “How Many WordPress Plugins Should You Install on Your Site?” WPBeginner asks a question I bring up in my workshops, training programs, and college courses: How many WordPress Plugins are too many. The article brings up some valid points worth considering when choosing WordPress Plugins. Are WordPress Plugins a security risk? How would you […]

Blogrolls Gone in WordPress. How to Save Your Links.

For the past few months, rumors were flying that WordPress was going to remove the Links/Blogroll feature of WordPress. As of August 2012, it is now gone from many WordPress.com. MacManx, Happiness Engineer at WordPress.com, recently stated: The Links section was removed from the core WordPress.org software, which means that it will probably be removed […]

Prove It: Defining Your Avenues of and Communication Marketing

A news story came out today that specifically served a client of mine. It was a national news story that could help them support their current clients with helpful information, and help convert potential clients with persuasive, current event information. Unfortunately, this client has been adamant against blogs, interactive websites, and social media. In my […]

WordPress Stats and Numbers: Breaking Their Own Records

Working on developing a core of WordPress classes for Clark College and preparing for the next “Introduction to WordPress” college course in a couple weeks, I’ve put together some statistics on WordPress you might find helpful – and stunning. WordPress continues to break records set by others, but more often lately, break records set by […]

Happy Birthday, Matt Mullenweg

As I prepared my annual public “Happy Birthday, Matt” post for Matt Mullenweg, founder of WordPress (with a lot of other amazing people), I spotted the birthday greeting by Jane Wells of the WordPress Foundation. She thanks Matt for all the ways her life has been changed since meeting him, a perfect way to say […]