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 […]

Mind Blowing WordPress Plugins

In Dallas, August 29, 2010, at OpenCamp I presented “Mind Blowing WordPress Plugins.” Here are the WordPress Plugins and more features during my presentation. Let me first define what my qualifications for a “mind blowing WordPress Plugin” were, as I had to sift through thousands of Plugins and then filter down to include the following […]

Mind Blowing WordPress Plugins: Officers Directory and Contextual Help Menus

I will be presenting a session on “Mind Blowing WordPress Plugins” at OpenCamp in Dallas, August 27-29, 2010, and I want to introduce you to some of the WordPress Plugins I will be talking about to tease and tempt you, as well as to showcase the innovations that are out there in the WordPress Plugin […]

Annual Reminder (and some options) to Backup Your WordPress Blog

Having suffered from numerous computer crashes and server breakdowns, in spite of their promises, trust me when I say you need to make backing up your WordPress blog a part of your regularly scheduled maintenance and housekeeping. Futurosity offers “8 MySQL Backup Strategies for WordPress Bloggers (And Others)”, an interesting compilation of tips to help […]

Writing With Post Excerpts and Feed Excerpts in Mind

I recently described how to change full post displays to excerpts on multi-post views of your WordPress Theme. If you use post excerpts on your WordPress or WordPress.com blog and excerpts in your feeds, you need to think about writing with excerpts in mind. An excerpt is one of two things. First, it is the […]

Just a Reminder About Freedom: Blogging Comes With a Price

It is common knowledge that China has spent billions of dollars on creating the “Great Firewall of China”, known in official circles as the “Golden Shield”. This is essentially the blocking, mostly by keyword, of information the Chinese government feels is “unhealthy” for its citizens. This can range from political dissent to pornography. Within the […]

Blog Exercise: New Years Reboot, Restart, Kick Ass

“It’s that time of year when the world falls in love…” The Christmas Waltz by Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn I’d like to think that New Year’s thinking includes bringing back the love to your blog. You might not think that, but let’s go with that belief as we continue with this year’s Blog Exercises. […]

Blog Exercises: Are You Trending?

In social media, trending are topics attracting the attention of most of the people, thus popular. Unfortunately, trending topics are self-feeding, an accident along the highway where everyone wants to slow down and take a look. Then they want to tell others about it so they can look. Walking by a student glued to their […]

Blog Exercises: Unfinished Business

In this ongoing series called Blog Exercises, let’s tackle your UFOs. In quilting and sewing, UFO stands for Unfinished Objects. We all have them, in our work, our personal lives, and on our blog. Do you have a to do list hanging around your desk or locked in your phone regarding your blog? It’s time […]

What I Wish Hillary Clinton Would Say Tonight

I’ve been asked repeatedly to make my views on the US 2016 Election public, even though it goes against all this site stands for, an unbiased educational site to support WordPress users and bloggers. In light of current events, and the impact the web has had on those events, the time has come for my […]

Blame WordPress For the World’s Problems

Let’s call this person “wise” using air quotes to give you a description of where they come from in life. This “wise” person confronted to me at a public event to announce that WordPress was evil and must be destroyed. “After all,” he informed me soundly. “While WordPress says it supports freedom of speech, it […]

Blogging Tools: DownThemAll Browser Add-on

DownThemAll! Firefox Extension is another tool for your blogging toolbox. As a reminder, most power bloggers use Firefox or Chrome web browsers. Not just because they are “better” in the terms of meeting web standards, but also because of their powerful extendable features. Browser extensions, add-ons, or plugins allow you to extend the features and […]

WordPress School: Copyright Policy

We’ve started our mini-series on adding policies to your WordPress site with some basic information and details on how to organize and structure policies on your site. It’s time to evaluate the five different policies featured on almost all websites regardless of topic or goals in Lorelle’s WordPress School free online course. Remember, we add […]

Blog Exercises: Life Happens While Making Other Plans

“Life is what happens to you when you are making other plans.” In this ongoing series of Blog Exercises, I’ve covered much about the philosophy of blogging, and the challenges that come with blogging over time. One of the most common excuses to pause or stop blogging is “life happens.” Examples include: Blog Exercises: Self-Control […]

WordPress School: The Links in WordPress

In Lorelle’s WordPress School free online course today we will explore the most important thing on the web: links. Specifically how WordPress automatically generates links on your site and how you can add these same links within the content and elsewhere on your WordPress site. So far in this course we’ve covered the topic of […]