Holiday Season Request: Open Your Internet Access Points

I’ve made this an annual request for the past few years: Please Open Your Internet Access Points During the Holiday Season. No matter where you live in the world, the next couple months are filled with some form of traditional, cultural, or religious holiday. Family members will be taking time off from work and their […]

Blog Exercises: How Long Are Your Paragraphs?

How long are your paragraphs? Have you measured them lately? One of the telling differences between traditional writing and writing for the web is the length of the paragraph. Look at the example below. Which is easier to read? On the left, the paragraphs are huge, long blocks of text. On the right, the paragraphs […]

Blog Exercises: Comments Policy

We started with the Bloggers Code of Ethics in our blog exercises on site policies, starting you off on the right foot by knowing where you will draw your lines in the sand when it comes to your rights and responsibilities as a blogger. In this Blog Exercise, we are going to tackle the next […]

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 […]

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: 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 Add Headings to Your Post Articles

I’ve mentioned using headings in your post articles throughout these Blog Exercises. Let’s look closer at these HTML tags that help you structure and increase the readability of your blog posts. Headings are HTML tags used to set the section or subsection titles within your blog posts. They divide your content into sections, but they […]

The Secret Recipe of Comment Spam Comments

Mr. Louis Vuitton just sent me a message in my blog comments I’d like to share with you. I share this touching message because it is highly educational when it comes to the art of spam comments, and serves to remind us of why we love having Akismet, the best comment spam fighter, on our […]

Blog Exercises: Speed Blogging with CoLT

I’d like to introduce you to the work horse I use for speed blogging. It’s a web browser add-on for Firefox called CoLT. It stands for Copy Link Text. I will be offering a variety of web browser tips and tools to make blogging faster and easier throughout these Blog Exercises, and of all of […]

Blog Exercises: Where Are You?

After agreeing to take on a writing assignment regarding Oregon history, I happily settled down to do a little preliminary online research. Because some of the towns I needed to research were located in areas I was not completely familiar with, I was relying on their local websites to point me to what I needed […]

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: Bottom Up Editing

What if you blogged from the bottom up? In this Blog Exercise I’d like you to take a look at the article you are working on, preparing to publish it on your site, and take the last paragraph and put it at the top. We are often locked into our basic language education that taught […]

Blog Exercises: Trackbacks

Trackbacks are like an invitation to a party. It is also like legitimate gossip. Trackbacks are notes telling you that someone is talking about you. Trackbacks are part of the important connections that form the true sense of the “web” on the Internet. WordPress and most modern publishing platforms generate trackbacks automatically. As common as […]

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 […]