Blog Struggles: When Spelling, Grammar, and Punctuation Interferes With Your Blogging

Discussing the challenges associated with blogging, a participant in a program I presented recently told me about how she tends to obsess over punctuation. My friends tell me I need to read that book, Eat, Shoots, and Leaves about punctuation. I’m obsessed with commas and ellipses. I love using them. I like how they sound […]

WordPress.com Bloggers Now Have Spell Check

The WordPress.com blog announces Spellchecker for WordPress.com blogs. You can now spell check your posts in WordPress.com. Unfortunately, for those of us who know better and stay totally away from the often unfriendly WYSIWYG Rich Editor, we’re out of luck. I am not happy with the developers of WordPress.com for ignoring a good portion of […]

I FOUND YOU – ONLINE SPELL CHECKER!

Firefox Spell Check Firefox now features spell check by default in their Internet browser. Misspelled words are highlighted with a red wavy underline, similar to word processing programs. Right click on the highlighted word and choose from the correct spelling in the right click menu. It’s not perfect, and the misspelled word isn’t recognized until […]

The Hunt for Online Spell Checking

NOTE: The latest version of Firefox now comes with built-in spell check. Faced with a repaired but not fully stocked laptop, I needed some of my writing spell checked. Instead of panicking, or digging through storage boxes of my computer disks for my word processing program, I realized that I was connected to the Internet […]

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 […]

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: When Will You Not Link?

There are few people I hate in this world. I think I can count them on one hand, mostly on two fingers. We all have them, people who did us wrong and taught us to disrespect, dread, dislike, and even hate them. As tolerant as we wish we all were, that’s just the way of […]

Blog Exercises: Make an Elephant Out of a Fly

G.I. Gurdjieff said, “We have made an elephant out of a fly.” A friend of mine and fellow college professor, Mark Smith, is a dedicated follower of George Gurdjieff, a Russian spiritual leader. He’s been sharing some of his teachings with me. This one caught my attention and immediately had to be added to these […]

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 […]

Blog Exercises: Clean Up Your Most Popular Posts

“It’s dated 2008. It must be useless.” This was the response to an article I tweeted out recently. Yes, the article was dated 2008. Did that mean it wasn’t a valid, timely, and invaluable resource? It was, but that’s not the point. Some people equate old with useless. With the aging population gaining the majority […]

Blog Exercises: Comments and The Blog Bullies

No matter what we do or say, there will always be bullies and mean people. Some are mean intentionally, some can hurt unintentionally. And then there are those moments when we read the black letters on the white screen too much in-between the lines and come away feeling sick to your stomach. Welcome to the […]

Blog Exercises: What Are You Talking About?

“What ya talking about?” The first time a southerner from North Carolina hit me with that question, I was stopped in my tracks. I had to think. I was talking. In fact, I was saying something eloquent and intelligent. Something I needed the other person to understand. Clearly I wasn’t making my point. At the […]

Happy Anniversary WordPress: The Beginnings

On August 16, 2005, Lorelle on WordPress became blog ID number 72 on the brand new WordPress.com. The first post was appropriately titled “Lorelle on WordPress” to introduce the site. Looking back, it’s amazing how true to form that I’ve kept the mission of this site all these years later as proposed in the first […]

Blog Exercises: Random Editing Day

Welcome to the first “Random Editing Day” as part of the Blog Exercises series. The purpose of Random Editing Day is to help you edit and upkeep your site, but also to revisit and revise posts of the past. Throughout this year we are going to have monthly editing exercises to help you flex your […]