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Blog Exercises: How Many Words in a Link?

How many words should you put into a link? Is there a rule? There isn’t a rule but there are good standards and practices. These state that two words should be the minimum, and only enough words to compel someone to click through to the linked source. The words must also imply the link’s destination […]

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: How Much Does Your Blog Cost?

How much does your blog cost? It should be a simple question. Do you have an answer? The costs associated with a blog are the costs associated with any website. There is the cost of the domain name, if you choose to have a custom name. In general, it is about USD $15 a year, […]

Blog Exercises: Speed Blogging with CoLT

I’d like to introduce you to the work horse I use for speed blogging. It’s a web browser add-on for Firefox called CoLT. It stands for Copy Link Text. I will be offering a variety of web browser tips and tools to make blogging faster and easier throughout these Blog Exercises, and of all of […]

Blog Exercises: Check Your Site Title Tag

Do you know what the title of your site is? Not the name of your site or the title of your post, but the HTML <title> tag for your site buried in the source code. In HTML, every website is required to have the <title> tag in the <head> of the source code HTML structure. […]

Blog Exercises: Know Your Pageviews

In this Blog Exercise, it is time to learn some website jargon, specifically, what are all the web pages of your site called. I teach web publishing with WordPress and web design courses at two colleges, and I’m stunned that students don’t know at the lack of proper names for all the parts of a […]

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: Polls and Surveys Follow-up

In Blog Exercises: Polls and Surveys I asked you to create a poll on your site asking for input from your readers. Today’s exercise is on creating a follow-up poll. In that exercise, I invited readers to respond to the question, “What publishing platform are you currently using?” The answers to that are typical, skewed […]

Writing for the Web Course Starts June 3, 1013

I will be teaching “Writing for the Web” at Clark College Corporate and Continuing Education in Vancouver, Washington, Tuesdays and Thursdays, June 3 – July 8, 2013. The class will be at the West Coast Bank Building in downtown Vancouver, Washington, just a few minutes from downtown Portland, Oregon. Writing on the web is now […]

WordPress Course at PCC-Rock Creek in Beaverton

I will be teaching a WordPress Introduction college course at Portland Community College in Beaverton, just west of Portland, Oregon, starting April 3 – June 12, 2013. The course is a hybrid online course meetings Wednesdays from 6-9PM with a minimum of two hours online per week. Called “CMS Website Creation: WordPress,” this 3 credit […]

The Future of Blogging – With a Glimpse Backwards

In “What’s next for blogging: I try to predict the future” by Yesterday’s news, the author, a Creative and Professional Writing Major at Bemidji State University in Minnestoa, used fantastic visuals to take us on a journey through the development of blogging and the blogging industry for a class on blogs and wikis. She makes […]

Blog Exercises: Feed Readers

Without the feed reader, my blogging life would be seriously hard work. Feed, commonly misidentified as RSS, is the proper name for the contextual version of your site as distributed through various feed types such as RSS, Atom, XML, etc. They are basically your posts stripped of your website design, read like articles in a […]

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: Backlinks

Known as incoming links or referrer links, backlinks are links pointing from an external site to your site, directing their readers to you as a resource. Timethief of “one cool site blogging tips” describes backlinks as: Backlinks to your content are like votes for your blog. The more backlinks your blog receives the higher it […]

Blog Exercises: Make Post Titles Matter

Post titles are the titles of the articles you publish on your site. They represent the subject matter of the article. Newspapers and magazines are famous for their sensationalism when it comes to titles, lurking in readers with “Sexy Siren Stabs Six.” Or they include number counts to impress. “101 Best Ways to Cook a […]

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