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 […]

Help Visitors Navigate Your Site: Make a Site Index

This lands in the brain as “why didn’t I think of that”. A long time writer both of non-fiction and technical writing, on paper and computer, I adore indexes. I’ve created many of them within my word processor and think of them whenever I’m doing a book. Why didn’t I think of doing one on […]

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: Current Events for May

Been watching the news lately? It’s time to blog the news and current events for May in our Blog Exercises. Have you enjoyed blogging the news? I’ve only asked for one newsworthy blog post a month. Some of you have gone a bit overboard, while others still struggle to find something from the news to […]

Blog Exercises: Site Policies and Bloggers Code of Ethics

It’s time to start working on all of your site policies, one by one. So far, we’ve touched on some of these in Blog Exercises: The Don’ts of Blogging, Blog Exercise: Taking a Risk With What You Blog About, Blog Exercises: Comments and The Blog Bullies, and Blog Exercises: Quoting and Blockquotes. The basic policies […]

Blog Exercises: How to Tag Posts

Categories are your site’s table of contents. Tags are your index words. While it is simple to explain the two basic organizational and navigation elements of a WordPress site, coming up with tags for each post is a struggle many bloggers battle. Tags represent micro-categorization of your site’s content. It helps the visitor find closely […]

Blog Exercises: Know Your Pageviews

In this Blog Exercise, it is time to learn some website jargon, specifically, what are all the web pages of your site called. I teach web publishing with WordPress and web design courses at two colleges, and I’m stunned that students don’t know at the lack of proper names for all the parts of a […]

Blog Exercises: Polls and Surveys Follow-up

In Blog Exercises: Polls and Surveys I asked you to create a poll on your site asking for input from your readers. Today’s exercise is on creating a follow-up poll. In that exercise, I invited readers to respond to the question, “What publishing platform are you currently using?” The answers to that are typical, skewed […]

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 Exercises: Honor the Past with Anniversaries and Birthdays

Every year I celebrate January 11, the birthday of WordPress founder, Matt Mullenweg. The first week in April, I celebrate CSS Naked Day, a day to turn off the CSS designs on your websites world-wide to pay tribute to web designers. Later in April is the Day of Blog Silence, honoring the victims of violence […]

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 […]

Blog Exercises: What’s Your Site’s Tagline?

In Blog Exercises: What is the Name of Your Site?, the Blog Exercise explored whether or not your site title was still appropriate for your site. Today’s exercise examines your tagline, the subtitle of your site. Not all site designs or WordPress Themes display the tagline, but it is there under the hood. Search engines […]

DuckDuckGo: The Search Engine You Need to Meet

Recently, DuckDuckGo has been turning up in my referrers list. Curious about the name, and thinking it was a spam site, DuckDuckGo needed investigation. Seems I’ve been missing out on what could be the major competition to Google as a search engine. Here is a quick summary of what I learned about DuckDuckGo. It is […]

Expand Your Writing Abilities: Novel-in-a-Day Project

Last year, Literature and Latte, the creators of the powerful Scrivener writer’s program, shook the writing world with an innovative “Write a book in a day” project. They are doing it again this year. This form post for Novel-in-a-Day 2: The Revenge details the information. The event is Saturday, October 20, 2012, 2100 UK time, […]

What You Most Need to Know About WordPress

At the recent WordCamp Portland 2012, I was asked by several attendees to cover the basics of WordPress and we came up with What You Most Need to Know About WordPress. Here are the “notes” from that unconference presentation. The Difference Between Categories and Tags I hear this question at WordCamps, from readers, students, and […]