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Blog Exercises: Does Your Site Look Spammy?

April 5, 2013 – 4:53 am

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 […]

By Lorelle VanFossen | Posted in Blog Exercises, Blogging, Blogging Tips, Web Design | Tags: ad links, ads, advertising, author information, blog exercise, blyine, bold, colors, contact, content, content design, content development, cookie-cutter designs, design elements, expectations, instinct, italic, links, professional web designs, promotion, self-promotion, site colors, spam, spam sites, spammy sites, template designs, too many ads, trust, ugly web designs, ugly websites, underlines, Web Design, websites, Writing | Comments (9)

Blog Exercises: How Many Words in a Link?

March 28, 2013 – 4:35 am

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 […]

By Lorelle VanFossen | Posted in Blog Exercises, Blogging Tips, Writing | Tags: WordPress Tips, how to use wordpress, wordpress, Blogging Tips, wordpress help, wordpress tutorials, html, web standards, web writing, links, blog exercises, writing for the web, anchor text, html tags, readability, writing guidelines, writers guidelines, link guidelines | Comments (3)

Blog Exercises: Preview Posts

March 20, 2013 – 4:54 am

Do you preview a post before publishing? If not, consider adding this extra step to the publishing process. Why? I’m human. So are you. We mess things up. No matter how careful you are, you will make mistakes. That’s life. By double checking what your post will look like before you release it to the […]

By Lorelle VanFossen | Posted in Blog Exercises, Blogging, Blogging Tips, Writing | Tags: blog exercises, blog publishing tips, blog writing, Blogging Tips, checklist, edit, editing, editing posts, how to blog, how to write, how to write blog posts, preview, preview posts, proof, proofing, publishing checklist, publishing tips, web publishing, web writing, writing for the web | Comments (5)

Blog Exercises: How to Tag Posts

March 19, 2013 – 4:16 am

Categories are your site’s table of contents. Tags are your index words. While it is simple to explain the two basic organizational and navigation elements of a WordPress site, coming up with tags for each post is a struggle many bloggers battle. Tags represent micro-categorization of your site’s content. It helps the visitor find closely […]

By Lorelle VanFossen | Posted in Blog Exercises, Blogging, Blogging Tips, WordPress Tips, Writing | Tags: blog exercises, Blogging Tips, categorizaton, content, content organization, content tags, how to tag posts, navigation, organization, post tags, posts, structure, tags, tags and categories, web writing, writing for the web, writing tips | Comments (6)

Blog Exercises: Speed Blogging with CoLT

March 15, 2013 – 4:01 am

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 […]

By Lorelle VanFossen | Posted in Blog Exercises, Blogging, Blogging Tips, WordPress Tips, Writing | Tags: blog exercises, Blogging Tips, colt, firefox, firefox add-on, firefox extension, firefox tips, html, productivity, speed blogging, web browser, web browser tips, Writing, writing for the web, writing tips | Comments (4)

Blog Exercises: Check Your Site Title Tag

March 14, 2013 – 4:40 am

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. […]

By Lorelle VanFossen | Posted in Blog Exercises, Blogging, Blogging Tips, Web Design, WordPress Themes, WordPress Tips, Writing | Tags: blog exercises, blog title, Blogging Tips, code, html, html title, html title tag, post title, seo, site title, tags, title tag, Web Design, WordPress Themes, WordPress Tips | Comments (10)

Blog Exercises: Know Your Pageviews

March 13, 2013 – 4:28 am

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 […]

By Lorelle VanFossen | Posted in Blog Exercises, Blogging, Blogging Tips, WordPress Themes, WordPress Tips | Tags: author, blog exercises, blog names, Blogging Tips, categories, database, design, front page, generated web pages, jargon, modular, multi-post pageview, multiple posts, names, pages, pageviews, php, posts, single post pageview, tags, template files, template tags, terminology, Web Design, web design names, web pages, wordpress, WordPress Themes, WordPress Tips | Comments (5)

The Future of Blogging – With a Glimpse Backwards

March 3, 2013 – 6:52 pm

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 […]

By Lorelle VanFossen | Posted in Blogging, Blogging Tips | Tags: blog, bloggging history, blogging, blogging class, blogging future, blogging past, college, escribitionist, history of blogging, sousveillance, students, the history of blogging, university, weblog, you are the camera | Comments (5)

Blog Exercises for February

February 28, 2013 – 5:31 pm

We’ve completed the second month of Blog Exercises in February. Are you still with me? Here is the list. Blog Exercises: Taking a Risk With What You Blog About Blog Exercises: Honor the Past with Anniversaries and Birthdays Blog Exercises: Your Byline Blog Exercises: Comments and The Blog Bullies Blog Exercises: Backlinks Blog Exercises: Category […]

By Lorelle VanFossen | Posted in Blog Exercises, Blogging Tips, Writing | Tags: blog exercise, blog exercises, blog maintenance, blogging, Blogging Tips, how to blog, maintenance, organization, planning, schedule, site maintenance, web writing, wordpress, writing tips | Leave a Comment

Creating Footnotes in WordPress

February 26, 2013 – 11:35 pm

Among the many techniques students and clients request in my WordPress and blogging workshops and classes1, requests for creating footnotes in WordPress are rare, but they do happen. There are very distinctive differences between traditional writing and web publishing styles.2 Footnotes have been replaced by links to cite a reference or resource to support the […]

By Lorelle VanFossen | Posted in Blogging, Blogging Tips, WordPress News, WordPress Tips, Writing | Tags: academia, academic, bibliography, citation, creative writing, credits, endnotes, foot notes, footnote links, footnote lists, footnotes, how to use wordpress, jump links, notes, page jumps, technical writing, web publishing, wordpress, wordpress help, WordPress Tips, wordpress tutorials, Writing, writing for the web | Comments (1)

Blog Exercises: How to Publish Code

February 25, 2013 – 4:04 am

I blog about the technical side of blogging, about WordPress, WordPress Plugins, WordPress Themes, HTML, CSS, web design – code. I often blog about code. And people ask me code questions. I’ve become an expert in writing code so it looks like code on web pages. The time may come, or you may have already […]

By Lorelle VanFossen | Posted in Blog Exercises, Blogging, Blogging Tips, WordPress Tips, Writing | Tags: blog exercises, Blogging Tips, code, code in comments, code in content, how to write code, publishing code, publishing code in comments, publishing code in posts, web writing, Writing, writing for the web, writing tips | Comments (4)

Blog Exercises: Category Cross-Pollination

February 12, 2013 – 4:35 am

In these Blog Exercises, I am faced with a category quandary. For the most part, these are blogging tips, so they should go into my Blogging Tips category as well as Blog Exercises category, right? Maybe right. These Blog Exercises are meant to have some form of order, though they may be done in any […]

By Lorelle VanFossen | Posted in Blog Exercises, Blogging, Blogging Tips, Writing | Tags: blog exercise, blog exercises, blogging, Blogging Tips, body or work, categories, categorization, content, content with intent, format, organization, parent categories, planning, structure, sub-categories, tags, web writing, Writing, writing for the web | Comments (3)

Blog Exercises: Category Counting

February 8, 2013 – 4:39 am

Think of categories and tags this way: Categories are your site’s table of contents. Tags are your index words. In general, most sites should have 5-12 categories max. Each category should represent a “body of work,” a collection of posts related to a focused topic. When you find a blog with dozens of categories, what […]

By Lorelle VanFossen | Posted in Blog Exercises, Blogging, Blogging Tips | Tags: assumption, blog exercise, blog exercises, blog organization, blog writing, Blogging Tips, body of work, categories, content, content with intent, organization, perception, planning, structure, tags, web writing, Writing | Comments (12)

Blog Exercises: What Are You Talking About?

January 28, 2013 – 4:34 am

“What ya talking about?” The first time a southerner from North Carolina hit me with that question, I was stopped in my tracks. I had to think. I was talking. In fact, I was saying something eloquent and intelligent. Something I needed the other person to understand. Clearly I wasn’t making my point. At the […]

By Lorelle VanFossen | Posted in Writing, Blogging Tips, Blog Exercises | Tags: categories, Writing, Blogging Tips, content, web writing, blog focus, blog purpose, blog exercises, blog exercise, writing for the web, purpose, focus, mission, identity, talking, subject, clarity | Comments (5)

Blog Exercises: Curing Uncategorized Fever

January 24, 2013 – 4:21 am

We’ve all seen it. I call it Uncategorized Fever. By default, any post not categorized in WordPress is assigned to the Uncategorized category. The Uncategorized category appears in your Categories and Tags list or clouds. In tag clouds, the larger the word, the more posts with that tag. If Uncategorized is clearly visible in these […]