Google Releases Tesseract OCR Open Source Software

SearchEngineWatch announces “Google Opens Tesseract OCR Software”, which is exciting news for those of us who scan or want to covert a lot of documents to text: The Google Code Blog announced that Google has “re-released” the Tesseract OCR software to the open source community. OCR, optical character recognition, is the technology for converting text […]

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 Exercise: Category Brainstorming

In the first of my new Blog Exercises, you will begin work on clarifying the purpose and mission of your site. Take a minimum of 25 minutes to list all the words and phrases that describe what you blog about. If you are new to blogging, list all of the words describing what you wish […]

Business of Blogging: Purpose, Customers, and Content

Originally published in Blogger and Podcaster Magazine. I write for a variety of magazines and publications online and off. Blogger and Podcaster has graciously allowed me to republish my articles. When blogging began, many of us started blogging for fun. Blogging is fun. It’s a great way to express yourself, to meet and greet people, […]

The Most Powerful Life Changing Conference Event, SOBCon, Comes to the Pacific Northwest

I’ve been tortured the past few weeks on how to convince you that attending SOBConNW 2011 on September 16-18, 2011, will change your life. As usual, when it comes to my favorite annual conference, I find myself wordless. It’s that profound. If the SOBConNW Program and descriptions at the SOBCon site doesn’t convince you, maybe […]

Blog Struggles: Trackbacks Count

At a blog conference recently, I overheard the following exchange over a laptop as part of a blog review exercise: “For your blog to be successful, you need more comments on your blog posts.” “I have plenty of comments on my blog. See, this one has 14 comments.” “That post has only one comment. The […]

Blog Struggles: I Just Need Two Seconds of Your Time

How often have you been asked for “two seconds of your time” in purpose, email, or chat? I’m asked every day for those precious two seconds, and every day I struggle to say no. My day begins at five in the morning. I used to make time for exercise but more and more my work […]

Lifehack’s Writing Tips

Every once in a while, Lifehack tackles writing tips and tricks. Recently, two great articles caught my eye. Just Keep Writing! motivates you to just keep writing, inspired with quotes from famous writers on what they believed kept them writing. If you feel the writing spirit waning with your blog, these are some great motivational […]

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 […]

Lorelle at WordCamp 2008 – 260 Ways to Break WordPress

I’ve uploaded my program from WordCamp 2008 in San Francisco to SlideShare and showcased it below. I talked about how important it is that we push WordPress as far as possible, even to the breaking point, to make sure it will work across all operating systems, all hosts, all browsers, all setups – in every […]

Lessons from LTPact 2008: Cloud Servers and Gambling

I spent the past few days in Las Vegas for the Layered Tech LTPact 2008 Conference, an event sponsored by Layered Tech, the second largest web hosting and reseller in the world, among WordPress luminaries and experts and a lot of server geeks and serious online business folks. I got a chance to spend time […]

Life 101: Books That Changed My Life and Blog

One of my long time favorite authors, Peter McWilliams, has most of his books online for free. These include: LIFE 101: Everything We Wished We Had Learned About Life in School-But Didn’t DO IT! Let’s Get Off Our Buts How to Survive the Loss of a Love You Can’t Afford the Luxury of a Negative […]

Blog Struggles: When Is Your Blog Focus Too Narrow?

As I struggled to determine my blog’s focus, I debated like many about the definition of “narrow”. After all, how narrow is narrow in your niche? After years of personal debate on this issue, I came up with this answer: Your blog focus is too narrow when you run out of things to write about. […]

WordPress.com Banned Again: Why Aren’t You Concerned?

According to Brazil: Bloggers united against WordPress.com ban by Global Voices, WordPress.com blogs are or soon will be banned due to a judge in Brazil ruling against a WordPress.com blogger featuring a YouTube video embedded in the blog of a couple having sex. The details of the blogger and content in question is a bit […]

Weekly Digest: Lorelle in Oklahoma with Family, Heading to WordCamp Dallas, WordPress 2.5, SOBCON, and More News

For the first time in almost two years, the VanFossen clan came together in one place – well, at least our arm of the VanFossen family. The convenience of coming to WordCamp Dallas enabled my husband and I to make a stop first in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to spend time with family first. In a few […]