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: Trackback Check-Up

It’s time to check your trackbacks. In Blog Exercises: Trackbacks and Blog Exercises: Backlinks you learned about trackbacks, the automatic process of a site linking to yours and generating a comment-like notification to alert you of the link to your article, and helping your readers discover what others are saying about your article. In this […]

Creating Footnotes in WordPress

Among the many techniques students and clients request in my WordPress and blogging workshops and classes1, requests for creating footnotes in WordPress are rare, but they do happen. There are very distinctive differences between traditional writing and web publishing styles.2 Footnotes have been replaced by links to cite a reference or resource to support the […]

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: Weekly Link Roundups

Many bloggers publish weekly or monthly link roundups, highlights of some of the interesting sites they’ve found on the web. Most use a variety of automation techniques to generate this link list, bookmarking the web pages to a bookmarking program that helps them generate this list and release it once a week. It’s a lazy […]

Blog Exercises: Curing Uncategorized Fever

We’ve all seen it. I call it Uncategorized Fever. By default, any post not categorized in WordPress is assigned to the Uncategorized category. The Uncategorized category appears in your Categories and Tags list or clouds. In tag clouds, the larger the word, the more posts with that tag. If Uncategorized is clearly visible in these […]

Classes and Workshops

The following are classes and workshops offered by Lorelle VanFossen. Writing for the Web June 3 – July 8, 2013 Clark College Corporate and Continuing Education Tuesdays and Thursdays from 9am – noon in the West Coast Bank Building in downtown Vancouver, Washington, just across the river from Portland, Oregon. USD $179 This writing class […]

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 […]

Happy Birthday and Anniversary, Matt Mullenweg

Happy Birthday and Happy Anniversary, Matt Mullenweg. Well, happy early birthday. Matt’s birthday is January 11. Matt Mullenweg is the co-founder of WordPress, the brains behind WordPress.com and Automattic, and I’m honored to call him friend. He also changed my life completely, in more ways than I can count.

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 […]

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 […]

WordPress Featured in Wall Street Journal

Matt Mullenweg of Automattic, WordPress.com, the self-hosted version of WordPress, was featured today on the Wall Street Journal Business talking about the fact that WordPress now supports 14% of all websites in the world, approximately 1 in 6 globally. Matt talked about the future of WordPress and made these three points. WordPress as a CMS: […]

How Many is Too Many WordPress Plugins?

In “How Many WordPress Plugins Should You Install on Your Site?” WPBeginner asks a question I bring up in my workshops, training programs, and college courses: How many WordPress Plugins are too many. The article brings up some valid points worth considering when choosing WordPress Plugins. Are WordPress Plugins a security risk? How would you […]

DuckDuckGo: The Search Engine You Need to Meet

Recently, DuckDuckGo has been turning up in my referrers list. Curious about the name, and thinking it was a spam site, DuckDuckGo needed investigation. Seems I’ve been missing out on what could be the major competition to Google as a search engine. Here is a quick summary of what I learned about DuckDuckGo. It is […]

Blogrolls Gone in WordPress. How to Save Your Links.

For the past few months, rumors were flying that WordPress was going to remove the Links/Blogroll feature of WordPress. As of August 2012, it is now gone from many WordPress.com. MacManx, Happiness Engineer at WordPress.com, recently stated: The Links section was removed from the core WordPress.org software, which means that it will probably be removed […]