WordPress College Course: Register Now for PCC Rock Creek

I’m expanding my WordPress college courses to now include Portland Community College at Rock Creek. Give yourself a holiday gift to learn WordPress next year! Beginning January 9, 2013 and running through March 20, I will be teaching CMS Website Creation: WordPress. This is a part of their new series on Content Management System instruction. […]

Introduction to WordPress Course at Clark College Continuing Education

Starting October 16, 2012, I’m teaching the Introduction to WordPress at Clark College Corporate and Continuing Education in Vancouver, Washington. This is the course many of you have been waiting for – affordable and covering the basics you need to know about WordPress. The CTEC 280 Clark College WordPress Introduction course continues as a four […]

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 […]

What You Most Need to Know About WordPress

At the recent WordCamp Portland 2012, I was asked by several attendees to cover the basics of WordPress and we came up with What You Most Need to Know About WordPress. Here are the “notes” from that unconference presentation. The Difference Between Categories and Tags I hear this question at WordCamps, from readers, students, and […]

PDX WordPress Meetup Group: WordPress Codex Night

The WordPress Meetup Group in Portland, Oregon, has invited me to tonight’s meetup at the US Bancorps Building in downtown PDX to talk about the WordPress Codex, the online manual for WordPress Users, and how to contribute. I’ll show them some basics about the Codex and we’ll spend a couple hours working on maintenance tasks […]

201 WordPress Books

As part of my project to bring WordPress into colleges nationally, I did a quick survey of how many books have been published about WordPress. I was asked by several major publishers to publish the first book in English on WordPress but had to decline due to my traveling schedule and work load, so it’s […]

What are the Essential WordPress Plugins You Can’t Live Without?

In my WordPress session at Barcamp Portland this past weekend, one of my favorite questions started the discussion: What are the most essential, must-have WordPress Plugins? My answer? None. Okay, not really. My honest answer is one: Akismet. Spam is the bane of our web experience. It comes in our emails and site comments. While […]

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 […]

Spring Quarter Introduction to WordPress College Course Begins April 10

It’s hard to believe that the first ever full college course on WordPress is coming to an end, with a new one beginning April 10, 2012, but here we are, and time is running out to get your seat in this Introduction to WordPress course. If you live in the Portland, Oregon, or Southwest Washington […]

WordPress Credit Course at Clark College in Vancouver, Washington

Beginning in January 2012, I will be teaching “Introduction to WordPress,” a four credit class at Clark College in Vancouver, Washington, just across the Columbia River from Portland, Oregon. While many schools are beginning to offer WordPress courses, few are offering credit classes and Clark College approached me to make that happen here in the […]

Word11 AudioCast – UX: Developing Content to Enhance the User Experience

Live Now at WORD11 LIVESTREAM At noon PST/3PM EST Wednesday, July 27, 2011 (tomorrow), I will be presenting UX: Developing Content to Enhance the User Experience in a livestream audiocast for the Word11 Pre-Event: Prefix. It’s free and open to all, especially those interested in web publishing, blogging, and social media. I will be discussing […]

Firefox 5 Crashes: What is Causing Them and How to Fix It

If you are one of the thousands suffering constant crashes from the June update of Mozilla Firefox 5, realize you are not alone. Literally thousands have reported on Firefox 5 crashing across all platforms, including Windows and Mac. UPDATE: The crashes were clearly not a result of problems with Firefox but with Adobe Flash. Crashes […]

Managing Multiple Authors: Customizing the Author Bio Box

In this series on managing multiple bloggers in WordPress, I’ve covered how to showcase the authors within the WordPress Theme design, talked about how to manage author content within WordPress to help you see all the ways you can promote your authors within the design and content management system, and started showing you code and […]

Social Media for Crafters Ebook Sale Ending

I am so thrilled and honored that hundreds of people have taken advantage of the 99 cent sale for my new book, Social Media for Crafters: Covering the Basics of the Social Web. The sale was only supposed to be for a couple of weeks, but we extended it as the demand was so high. […]

Social Media for Crafters

Social Media for Crafters: Covering the Basics of the Social Web by Lorelle VanFossen (yep, that’s me!), has been a true labor of love, meeting the two joys in my life, blogging and social media with crafting. It is available as a PDF ebook. The book includes the basics of social media designed specifically with […]