Blog Exercises: Preview Posts

Do you preview a post before publishing? If not, consider adding this extra step to the publishing process. Why? I’m human. So are you. We mess things up. No matter how careful you are, you will make mistakes. That’s life. By double checking what your post will look like before you release it to the […]

WordPress Tips: Previewing Your Post in WordPress

I fought for a long time to get Post Preview put into the Write Post Panel of WordPress. We were so thrilled. Prior to that, we had to have at least two browser windows open, one with the Write Post Panel and the other with the preview of the post in the WordPress Theme. Now, […]

How to Turn Off Snap Shots Link Preview on WordPress Blogs

Snap Preview Anywhere, known as Snap Shots, Snap Shots Integrator, mShots, and many other names, is considered by many as one of the most annoying “gimmicks” on the web, continues to be enabled by default on WordPress.com blogs. Many new bloggers are still “testing” this gimmick which allows a thumbnail preview or feed view of […]

Are Web Page Link Previews Here to Stay?

According to Read/Write Web’s article, “Browster is Gone, But Are Web Previews Here to Stay”, the first company to produce programming to preview web pages is now gone, but there are many others battling for popularity on the web. I recently made my opinion very clear that I find Snap Preview Anywhere exceptionally annoying on […]

WordPress.com, Please Stop Using Snap Preview

It appeared that without warning, and WordPress.com blogs have been hit with one of the new blights on the web: Snap Preview Anywhere. Planet Mike just pointed out that my blog is now littered with Snap Preview Anywhere link page previews. When you hover over any link on my site, it loads a preview of […]

Preview of Upcoming Changes in WordPress 2.0.5

Mark Jaquith and BloggingPro have the scoop on the changes in the next upgrade release of WordPress 2.0.5. While the changes are mostly under the hood, the best improvements I found from their notes are: WordPress Database Backup continues to be supported with improved security. Plugins sorted by Plugin name not filename. WEEE! User descriptions […]

Comment Live Preview Placement

A feature I really appreciate on many blogs, including WordPress blogs, is the comment live preview feature. This is a feature that allows the writer to see what they are writing in the comment form as they write. To be honest, there are two forms of comment preview. One is the live preview which displays […]

New Write Post Preview – Real Live Preview

Users of wordpress.com woke up this morning to a new feature, one I’ve mentioned before and also described in my post on The Perfect WordPress Dashboard. It is the ability to “see” your post preview in your WordPress Theme – giving you a live preview of what your post will look like when published using […]

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 […]

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: 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 […]

Blog Exercises for March

March was a busy month in my Blog Exercises series. Wow, are we already done with the third month in this year long series? The participants explored a wide variety of blog exercises on editing, blogger identity, content organization, and web writing. There were exercises to motivate and inspire you, and help you inspire your […]

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 […]

Check Out the New Media Manager in WordPress

WordPress.com users were greeted with a new Media Manager over the weekend. This is the new media uploader coming in WordPress 3.5 when it releases December 5, 2012. For most of us, this is a long-awaited, dream come true. The clunky WordPress Image Uploader is gone, replaced with one more visual and easy-to-use. The announcement […]

What My First WordPress College Class Taught Me

As the last day of class approaches for the world’s first WordPress College Course at Clark College in Vancouver, Washington, and the next one begins in a couple weeks (filling fast), I’d like to share some lessons my students taught me about WordPress – and teaching. They taught me humility and pride. I stand truly […]