My mother emailed me and asked if WordPress was under attack. With all the news of last week’s attack of the Boston Marathon, the attacks on WordPress and other PHP-based web publishing sites was low on the priority list for myself and others, but this is something to take seriously. As we get back to […]
By Lorelle VanFossen
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Posted in Blogging Tips, WordPress News, WordPress Tips, WordPressDotCom
| Tags: admin, bad behavior, brute force, brute force attack, evil, how to use wordpress, login, passwords, protect your site, registration, security, servers, site security, spam, web hosting services, web hosts, wordpress, wordpress brute force attack, wordpress help, WordPress News, wordpress passwords, wordpress security, WordPress Tips, wordpress tutorials |
April 16, 2013 – 10:36 am
I will be teaching the WordPress I Introduction course at Clark College Corporate and Continuing Education starting Saturdays, April 27 – July 13, 2013, 9am – noon, in Vancouver, Washington, just across the river from the Airport at the Columbia Tech Center. What a great way to get to learn about how WordPress works without […]
By Lorelle VanFossen
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Posted in Announcements, WordPress Events, WordPress News
| Tags: clark college, clark college continuing ed, college, continuing ed, courses, education, how to use wordpress, learn wordpress, learning, wordpress, wordpress class, wordpress classes, wordpress college, wordpress course |
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
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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 |
In the first blog exercise on trackbacks I explained how trackbacks work and how to respond to trackbacks. It’s time to revisit the concept of how to respond to a trackback. In the exercise, I described the unique quality of trackbacks for tracking conversations across the web. You publish something, someone likes it and publishes […]
By Lorelle VanFossen
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Posted in Blog Exercises, Blogging Tips, WordPress Tips, Writing
| Tags: backlinks, blockquotes, blog exercises, blog interactivity, comments, conversation, etiquette, good practices, how to comment, interaction, interactivity, online conversations, readers, responding to comments, response, social web, trackbacks, tracking the conversation |
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
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Posted in Blog Exercises, Blogging Tips, Writing
| Tags: anchor text, blog exercises, Blogging Tips, how to use wordpress, html, html tags, link guidelines, links, readability, web standards, web writing, wordpress, wordpress help, WordPress Tips, wordpress tutorials, writers guidelines, writing for the web, writing guidelines |
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
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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 |
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
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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 |
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 […]
By Lorelle VanFossen
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Posted in WordPress News, WordPress Plugins, WordPress Themes, WordPress Tips, WordPressDotCom
| Tags: akismet, anniversary, autoblog, autobloggers, bitacle, comment spam, content theft, copyright, copyright violation, copyright violations, evil, hackers, history of wordpress, how to use wordpress, jonathan bailey, malware, plagiarism today, plugins, prevent comment spam, scrapers, spam, splogs, wordpress, wordpress anniversary, wordpress help, wordpress history, WordPress News, WordPress Themes, WordPress Tips, wordpress tutorials |
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 […]
By Lorelle VanFossen
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Posted in Announcements, WordPress Events, WordPress News, WordPress Tips
| Tags: blogging, blogging lessons, Blogging Tips, classes, college, education, learn wordpress, pcc, portland community college, training, Web Design, wordpress, wordpress classes, wordpress development, wordpress help, WordPress News, WordPress Plugins, WordPress Themes, WordPress Tips, wordpress training |
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
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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 |
February 22, 2013 – 4:30 am
Who are you? What do you do? How do you let the world know who you are on your blog? We’ll dig into your About Page later. For now, this blog exercise is dedicated to updating your profile on your site. In my popular series, “Managing Multiple Bloggers in WordPress,” I covered more than you […]
By Lorelle VanFossen
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Posted in Blog Exercises, Blogging, Blogging Tips, WordPress Tips, Writing
| Tags: author bio, author byline, author description, author information, authors, bio, blog exercises, blog setup, byline, contributors, identity, maintenance, my profile, post meta data, post meta data section, profile, setup, site setup, users, what do you do, who are you |
February 5, 2013 – 4:23 am
What does your byline say about you? Is it your name? Your identity? Or is it admin? The byline is the author name, the name of the person who presumably wrote and published the article, who the article is “by.” In traditional media, this is a coveted credit. In traditional newspapers, a byline was a […]
By Lorelle VanFossen
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Posted in Blog Exercises, Blogging, Blogging Tips, Writing
| Tags: anonymous, author, blog exercise, blog exercises, blogger identity, Blogging Tips, byline, credit, display name, identification, identity, name, who are you, Writing |
January 29, 2013 – 4:52 am
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 […]
By Lorelle VanFossen
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Posted in Blog Exercises, Blogging Tips, Writing
| Tags: article titles, blog exercise, blog exercises, blog writing, blogging, Blogging Tips, edit, editing, post titles, search engines, seo, titles, Writing, writing for the web |
January 23, 2013 – 10:02 pm
The following are classes and workshops offered by Lorelle VanFossen. Writing for the Web June 3 – July 8, 2013 Clark College Corporate and Continuing Education Tuesdays and Thursdays from 9am – noon in the West Coast Bank Building in downtown Vancouver, Washington, just across the river from Portland, Oregon. USD $179 This writing class […]
January 23, 2013 – 8:55 pm
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 […]
By Lorelle VanFossen
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Posted in Blog Babble, WordPress Events, WordPress News, WordPressDotCom
| Tags: about wordpress, anniversary, birthday, camera on the road, cameraontheroad, community, css, happy birthday wordpress, history, how to use wordpress, israel, Lorelle-on-WordPress, site history, stories, wordcamp, wordpress, wordpress anniversary, wordpress community, wordpress development, wordpress event, wordpress help, wordpress history, wordpress irc, WordPress News, WordPress Tips, wordpress tutorials |
Blog Exercises: How to Respond to a Trackback
In the first blog exercise on trackbacks I explained how trackbacks work and how to respond to trackbacks. It’s time to revisit the concept of how to respond to a trackback. In the exercise, I described the unique quality of trackbacks for tracking conversations across the web. You publish something, someone likes it and publishes […]