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 […]

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: What Words Do You Abuse Redundantly?

So, it’s word check time. Well, time to check all the words we abuse. Specifically, all the words we abuse redundantly and unnecessarily. And I’d like us to focus on the little words we add to our content, words like like, and, so, because, cause, cuz, specifically, well, and so on. In the last two […]

Fight Against Trackback Death

I’ve heard the many threats of trackbacks and pingbacks dying over the years, going the way of the virtual dinosaur, but I’m terrified to hear from Andraz Tori that Typepad is killing pingback functionality and stating that WordPress might be considering it, removing the joy of getting a notification that someone online is talking about […]

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: March Random Editing Day

It’s time for another Random Editing Day in the ongoing series of Blog Exercises to flex your blogging muscles. Consider this exercise in March as a little spring cleaning exercise. Get out your broom and start sweeping your old posts. As outlined in the original exercise, your task today is to find three random previously […]

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: Experiment with Emptiness

In “Meditation on Emptiness,” the author writes of the Buddha nature: The Prasangikas say that this teaching is an example of giving to the ’cause’ the name of the effect, for the emptiness of the mind of each sentient being is what allows for change of that person’s mind, and this emptiness is being called […]

Blog Exercises: How Many Posts Can Your Audience Handle?

In “Blog Exercises: How Many Posts? the exercise asked you to consider how many posts you should publish within a specific time period on your site, such as by day, week, month, or year. The goal was to set self-deadlines and monitor how many posts you felt were appropriate to publish within that time period. […]

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: Random Edit Day February

It’s time for another Random Editing Day in the ongoing series of Blog Exercises to flex your blogging muscles. As outlined in the original exercise, your task today is to find two random previously published posts and edit them. Use the list in the original exercise as a review on what to look for when […]

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: Taking a Risk With What You Blog About

In 2006, I spent three months thrashing, not sleeping at night, agonizing over what I had written and desired to publish. I knew it would be received with resistance at the least, revenge at the worst. I had already tested the waters and found out that the subject could get me in very hot water […]

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 […]