Prove It: What Makes You Trust a Website?

What makes you trust this site? What makes you trust me? What makes you trust any website you visit? What is it about the site that earns your trust? I’ve asked this question at most of the conferences and keynotes I’ve given over the past seven years: What makes you not trust a website? The […]

How Much Do You Charge for Web Dev/Design Services?

As part of an ongoing annual survey for the social media industry, Mark Collier offers this year’s “How Much Does Social Media Cost Companies in 2012?” report on our industry. This is a significant survey and mostly matches the ones coming out of the WordPress 2011 State of the Word survey from self-employed respondents, WooTheme’s […]

WordPress Tips: Exploring the WordPress Text Widget

One of the most unappreciated widgets among the WordPress Widget collection is the Text Widget. There are many Widgets that come with WordPress, and many more you can add with Widget WordPress Plugins. The Text Widget is not a WordPress Plugin, it comes with the basic installation of WordPress and WordPress.com. The Text Widget helps […]

Lorelle’s Family History Blog Featured in the Everett Herald Newspaper

I was recently honored with an article about my Family History Blog in the Everett Herald newspaper serving Everett, Snohomish County, Washington. The article, “Blogger digs into her roots: Snohomish County native works to uncover her family’s history,” quickly describes some of my family’s history related to the Snohomish County area on the Knapp and […]

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 […]

WordPress 3.1 Beta Unleashed on WordPress.com

WordPress.com has just released WordPress 3.1 Beta on more than 15 million blogs across the network. WordPress has used WordPress.com as their proving ground since the beginning, relying upon the feedback of the many bloggers from around the world, all using different types of computer hardware, browser types, operating systems, and blog setups to test […]

Blog Struggles: I Need an Eraser for My Old Posts

Online Diary: May 20, 2010 I’d like to go back and erase my old posts. Don’t you feel that way sometimes? Maybe all the time? As I think about talking to the telephone poles out there and reassessing where I am, the urge to purge is overwhelming me. I want to go through all my […]

Blog Struggles: SOBCon, Idea Whelmed, and Tell It To the Telephone Pole

A few people were concerned when I started my first Blog Struggles Diary recommending that I not blog every day thus changing the whole tone of my site. This confused me as I thought this was what my site was about. I had to take some time to think about that…then life and work interfered, […]

WordPress.com Maintenance Downtime on Sunday, February 15, 2009

WordPress.com warns that the free blog hosting service will be down for maintenance starting Sunday, February 15, 2009, at 20:00 GMT (noon PST, 3PM EST) for maintenance and upgrade improvements. This should only be a few seconds to a couple minutes. This does not impact full version and self-hosted versions of WordPress. The maintenance probably […]

WordPress News: Lots of WordPress Releases, Love Blogging and WordPress Contest, Scott Wallick, Akismet News, Permalinks, and More

This week’s Blog Herald WordPress News is WordPress News: Release Week News, WordPress 2.7.1, BuddyPress, WordPress MU, and More Releases, and I’ve covered a lot of WordPress news you can use: It’s Release Week. WordPress 2.7.1 Beta 1 released for testing. WordPressMU updated. BuddyPress Beta 2 released. WP Scanner beta released. WordPress.com releases January stats. […]

WordPress Las Vegas: Weekend of Non-stop WordPress, Social Media, and Blog Talk

WordCamp Las Vegas was an incredible gathering of some of the best of the best in blogging and WordPress, including: Matt Mullenweg Liz Strauss Joseph Scott Aaron Hockley Jim Kukral Geoff Kleinman Michael Dorausch Micah Baldwin Dave Taylor Micah Baldwin Shayne Sanderson Niran Amir from Picapp Jim Turner of OneByOne Media Ethan Gahng from Psolenoid […]

WordCamp Las Vegas Began With Blogger and Social Parties

Last weekend, my world was rocked in so many ways at 2009 International CES (Consumer Electronics Show) and WordCamp Las Vegas. I have so much to tell you about my experience, but you’ll have to settle for pictures right now. The first set of photographs started with a blogging event at CES with Robert Scoble […]

The Art of the Fan-Based Blog: Copyrights for You and Your Content Sources

By DB Ferguson of the No Fact Zone I know I just recommended aggregating news stories from sources outside of your blog in my series on The Art of the Fan-Based Blog, and that search engines were your friend. They are. However, I cannot stress this enough, be extremely mindful of every single word or […]

Exclusive First Interview with Woopra Co-Founders

I was honored to be the first to interview Elie Khoury and Jad Younan, co-founders of Woopra, the exciting new web analytics program currently in beta. We were at the LT Pact Conference in Las Vegas. The interview is featured in this week’s WordPress Podcast with Charles Stricklin. We talked about Woopra and the Woopra […]

Lessons from LTPact 2008: Cloud Servers and Gambling

I spent the past few days in Las Vegas for the Layered Tech LTPact 2008 Conference, an event sponsored by Layered Tech, the second largest web hosting and reseller in the world, among WordPress luminaries and experts and a lot of server geeks and serious online business folks. I got a chance to spend time […]