WordPress.com Blog Bling: Blogroll and Sidebar Bling

I’ve covered adding blog bling to your WordPress.com blog in the form of graphics and photographs, lines and smilies, fonts, blockquotes, social bookmark links. Now it’s time to add some blog bling to your WordPress.com blogroll and sidebar. The sidebar area of your blog is typically the canvas for the most blog bling. Sidebar blog […]

WordPress Sidebar Widgets Goes Full Version WordPress Plugin

What you have been asking for is now a WordPress Plugin! For those excited about the new method of customizing and accessorizing your WordPress sidebar with the new WordPress Sidebar Widgets on your full-version WordPress blogs (WordPress 2.0 only), you can get your own WordPress Sidebar Widgets Plugin. For more information on how the WordPress […]

Customizing RSS Feed Links for WordPress.com and WordPress Sidebar Widgets

With the new feature in WordPress.com blogs to add feeds to your sidebar using Sidebar Widget enabled WordPress Themes and/or the soon-to-be-released Sidebar Widget WordPress Plugin, you now have a powerful feature to add content to your blog and accessorize your sidebar. If you would like to add feeds from another WordPress blog, the feed […]

Playing with WordPress.com New Sidebar Widgets

There have been a few recent announcements about the WordPress.com Sidebar Widgets lately, especially from WordPress developer, Andy Skelton, and in the WordPress.com Blog, so what is all the fuss about? Hideously named “WordPress Widgets” is the method of accessorizing your WordPress.com sidebar on WordPress Themes which permit such interaction. Through the use of Javascripts […]

WordPress.com Widgets – Customizing Your WordPress.com Theme Sidebar

WordPress.com announces customization features for your WordPress.com Theme sidebar called “WordPress Widgets. Some of the Themes available with WordPress.com now include a feature to permit some arranging of the sidebar. If the Theme includes the Widgets, you will see a new tab in the Presentation panel called “Sidebar Editor”. Your choices for customizing your Theme’s […]

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: Does Your Site Look Spammy?

Does your site look spammy? How would you know whether or not your site looks spammy? It’s time for a spam check. Web design is hard, especially if you aren’t an expert. Yet, in many ways you are an expert if you are a fan of the web. You’ve seen enough sites to know the […]

Blog Exercises: Blasts from the Past

It’s time to dive into your archives and feature some blasts from the past on your blog. We all know we have some great gems in our archives, article series, great topics, informative and educational content. Many of these are timeless, yet they tend to get lost in the shuffle of time and search. We’ve […]

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 […]

WordPress Anniversary: WordPress and Evil

As I look back on the ten years of WordPress, there is a dark side to blogging. While many blamed WordPress for the evil, like guns, WordPress doesn’t cause evil, people cause evil. In fact, WordPress, Automattic, and the WordPress Community has fought longer and harder against the evil doers in the world than most […]

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 […]

Blog Exercises: Polls and Surveys

Gathering data on the web is an important part of the business of the web. It’s your turn to start gathering. In today’s Blog Exercises, you will be creating a poll or survey. Polls and surveys can be placed in posts or in your sidebar, depending upon the technique you choose. If you are on […]

Blog Exercises: Check Your Dates

It’s 2013. Time to update your calendars and your blog dates. Sara Tetreault of Go Gingham asked me to cover updating copyright dates on your blog, so this Blog Exercise is dedicated to that and all the dates that need changing on your site now that we are into a new year. Most WordPress Themes […]

Happy Holidays and Onward!

We survived the Mayan Calendar. We’ve survived planets lining up. We’ve survived attacks on our person, our community, our faith, and our country. Just another year. As we charge forward this coming year, here are some things to look forward to here on Lorelle on WordPress and on my other sites, and many things to […]

Exploring the Alignment of the Planets in the Night Sky

In anticipation of the planets alignment, I went digging for some cool Android apps to see the stars, and some awesome astronomy blogs to keep myself updated. Let’s start with the awesome astronomy bloggers. Blogging the Stars When I think about those blogging the stars, I don’t think Perez Hilton. I think about those truly […]