Join Us for After Christmas Blues Party in Oregon

The holidays for many are often stuffed with tons of cheer, family, friends, and parties. For my husband and I, most of our life was spent away from family and friends, so we made it a part of our holiday cheer to invite total strangers, orphans, forgotten ones, and the lucky ones to a holiday […]

Responding to Insult Against WordPress Plugin Authors

After all these years on the web, you would think I wouldn’t get fired up over pure stupidity and selfish meanness. You’d think I’d have thicker callouses. When it comes to trashing the WordPress Community – ooooh, my shackles rise. Darnell Clayton wrote “Why WordPress Bloggers Need To Choose Premium Plugins Over Free” on BloggingPro […]

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, […]

Dreams Can Come True: Meeting Alan Dean Foster

I’m in Arizona after a very exciting and busy series of conferences, including the very successful WordCamp Netherlands, WordCamp Phoenix, and PodCamp Arizona, visiting family living near one of my favorite authors in the world, Alan Dean Foster. During WordCamp Phoenix and PodCampAZ, I shared with my audience that I was too excited to just […]

Example of a Perfect Personal Blog

I’m working on a series of articles about personal blogging, but I wanted to share with you a perfect example of a personal blog. It’s by my cousin, Duke DesRochers. You may remember Duke from the story I did on him called, “Future Social Media Renaissance Man,” on Lorelle on WordPress or the one on […]

Time to Break WordPress This Summer

In Want to Break and Remake WordPress? on the Blog Herald, I summarized this year’s WordPress/Google Summer of Code, an exciting annual project that brings together the top WordPress Community experts with college students from around the world dedicated to making and breaking WordPress so we all benefit. When I read the cute announcement by […]

Experimenting with LoudTwitter Twitter Tweets on My Blog

Last week I experimented with LoudTwitter, a tool used to post your Twitter tweets to your blog. I wasn’t sure it would work with a WordPress.com blog, but it does. However, with the number of complaints from readers, it was not welcome on this blog. LoudTwitter publishes your Twitter tweets in a blog post once […]

Weekly Digest: Lorelle in Oklahoma with Family, Heading to WordCamp Dallas, WordPress 2.5, SOBCON, and More News

For the first time in almost two years, the VanFossen clan came together in one place – well, at least our arm of the VanFossen family. The convenience of coming to WordCamp Dallas enabled my husband and I to make a stop first in Tulsa, Oklahoma, to spend time with family first. In a few […]

Weekly Digest: Lorelle in San Francisco, Heading to WordCamp Dallas, Pasadena, Chicago, and Writting About Blogging In Between Talks

It’s been a very busy week for me, traveling to San Francisco, meeting friends and clients, and having a great time. I went to an interesting seminar on US politics, which took an interesting turn recently. Also attended a book signing and talk by Bill Hayes, author of “The Anatomist: A True Story of Gray’s […]

Blog Resources: Researching the Research, Finding the Facts, and Seeking Supporting Evidence

As part of my ongoing series on blog resources, covering the many online resources I use to help me blog, you can tell that I don’t deal with rumors or guesses. I like facts. I don’t mind a few estimates, but I like being right when I make a claim or statement, so I work […]

Blogging Resources and Sources to Help You Blog

As a blogger and professional editorial and technical writer, I have collected a variety of online resources and references to help me write, blog, and work. The following are a list of Internet resources, sources, references, guides, and tools that help me with my basic blog writing research and publishing. I use these resources to […]

Where Do You Go For Your Blog Research and References?

I needed to know the dimensions of a US quarter compared to the Euro coins. Where should I go? Hmm, maybe I’ll hop in the car and drive to the library to dig through the shelves for coin collecting books. Nah. Maybe I’ll drive over to that coin and stamp collecting shop I saw over […]

Blog Challenge: Whatcha Reading?

I recently finished rereading all the books, one after another, by two of my favorite authors, Alan Dean Foster and Terry Pratchett. I read the whole Discworld series in order, then the Humanx Commonwealth by Foster in “chronological” order. It was wonderful to submerse myself in other worlds for extended periods of time, putting off […]

Blog Challenge: Write a Travel Post

I travel pretty much full-time, living on the road, sleeping in motor homes, trailers, tents, hotels, and other odd places. I started traveling extensively when I was a teenager, turning it into a full-time life in 1996. I have lots of travel stories I share on Taking Your Camera on the Road, and this week, […]

Weekly Digest: Blogging on Blogging, Speaking at SOBCon and WordCamp Dallas, and More on Blogging

This week has been a busy one as I prepare for two intensive blogging article series coming up in the next couple of months. I doing a lot of research and I’ll give you a hint. One is about personal blogging and the other is about blog writing. Stay tuned for more hints. I’m sent […]