Weekly Digest: WordPress Tips Month, Grateful to Guest Bloggers, WordPress 2.3

We are down to the last week of the two months of guest blogging fun celebrating the two year anniversary of WordPress.com and this blog. This month is dedicated to WordPress tips and has been stuffed with a ton of tips, techniques, resources, and news about WordPress by myself and my fabulous guest bloggers.

I’d like to thank everyone for their kind support over the past week as things got tough with a death in the family. I’d especially like to thank my guest bloggers who have helped cover my lack of attention to this blog this week, and next. You are so appreciated and loved – thank you all!

With all the traveling I’ve been doing lately, keeping up this weekly digest has been a bit tough, so forgive it’s intermittent absence occasionally. There is nothing wrong with FeedBlitz. It’s me. 😀

This is the Weekly Digest from Lorelle on WordPress. To subscribe to the Weekly Digest category of Lorelle on WordPress, you can subscribe by the Weekly Digest feed or by email with the Weekly Digest Email Subscription to stay up to date on what is happening in Lorelle’s world of WordPress and blogging.

What’s Happening with Lorelle on WordPress

WordPress.com 2 year anniversary party Celebrating Blogging and WordPress: The first month of the two month-long party celebrating the two year anniversary of WordPress.com and this blog covered a variety of topics with fantastic guest bloggers blogging on blogging.

Our two month party continues with September jammed-packed with almost nothing but WordPress Tips. Here are some of the great WordPress tips we’ve offered:

5 Most Useful Administrative Plugins For WordPress by John Pozadizes introduces many to five powerful WordPress Plugins that will help speed up your administrative tasks and movement around the Admin Panels.
WordPress Tips: Previewing Your Post in WordPress takes a look at some options, pros and cons, of how to preview your draft post in WordPress.
The 3 Easiest Ways to Speed Up WordPress by John Pozadizes gives some simple and easy-to-do tips to help speed up your WordPress blog.
Tags Arrive on WordPress.com Blogs offers tips and information for WordPress.com and full version WordPress blogs on the new tagging feature.
Heads Up News on WordPress 2.3 lists news and resources to help you prepare your WordPress blog, WordPress Theme, and WordPress Plugin for the upcoming release of WordPress 2.3.
Banning a WordPress Spammer With .htaccess: John Pozadzides takes another stab at stopping a nasty commenter and comment spammer with a nice tutorial on blocking users with the .htaccess file.
Are You Abusing Your WordPress Pages – and Your Blog? Pages are for “static” information about your blog like who you are, how to contact you, and other information. Posts are for content. This post looks at how people are confusing posts and Pages, turning their Pages into posts.
Fighting Comment Spam: WordPress Comments Mass Edit Mode: More tips for fighting comment spam, I explore the power of the Comments Mass Edit Mode, helping you tackle dozens of comment spam quick and painlessly – at least for you.
Checking WordPress for Comment Spam That Slips By You: Dealing with comment spam on your blog is tough, but some do manage to slip through. I offer some quick tips on how to search regularly for comment spam keywords to make sure no comment spam reaches your reading audience.
WordPress Tip: Writing Customized Post Headlines, Title Tags, And Permalinks: Mohsin at Blogging Bits covers a top of tips dealing with writing customized post titles and more on using the Post Slug.
Is Your Site Ready for the New Mobile Internet?: Douglas Bell tackles the issue that confronts all of us: Is your blog ready for the mobile web? He helps us understand how our blogs are viewed on cell phones and iPhones and how you can improve your blog’s mobile viewing quality.
Attack of the Mean Commenter: Blocking Commenters and Comments on Your WordPress Blog: Do you have a mean commenter, one who just enjoys saying vicious and nasty things? There are some easy tips for preventing your vicious reader from commenting, or even viewing your blog, or worse.
Protecting Your WordPress Blog: I take a look at the various ways you can boost your blog’s security and improve your chances of avoiding being hacked or invaded.
WordPress Tip: How to Display a Specific Post Anywhere You Want: Want to feature a post on your blog anywhere in your WordPress Theme? This tip by Mohsin at Blogging Bits will show you how to do it easily.
Kubrick and K2 WordPress Themes: Collection of Theme Tips: There are a lot of tips around the web for working with Kubrick (aka, Default Theme, K2, etc) WordPress Theme, but I dug up some of the best of the best to help you tweak and customize a Theme based upon the Default WordPress Theme.
Using WordPress Categories To Style Posts: Abhijit Nadgouda of ifacethoughts helps us customize any post by category, allowing you to change how a post is viewed on multi-post page views so it stands out visually by category “style”.
How to Turn Off Snap Preview on WordPress Blogs: Many find Snap Preview, now called “Snap Shots”, annoying, so I offer a basic guide to help WordPress and WordPress.com users turn it off.
Write Today, Post Tomorrow: Using Post Timestamp: Dawud Miracle of dmiracle.com reminds of us of the powerful “future posts” feature of WordPress, which gives you a ton of freedom with your blog to post blog posts ahead of time so they will automatically publish when you want them to, so you can work, play, and not babysit your blog constantly.
Displaying the Date in Your WordPress Theme: The time and date plays an important role in your WordPress Theme. In the byline or post meta section, it tells readers when the post was published. It can also be used elsewhere to provide chronological or date information about your blog and blog post with these tips.
Understanding The WordPress Post Title and Post Slug: I dig into the post title and post slug issues with tips on how and when to change the post title and post slug of your blog posts.
Microformats and WordPress Themes: Ever wonder about what microformats are? Otto of Nothing to See Here introduces us to them and how to use and incorporate them into our blogs so browsers and other online services can take advantage of these “address forms” and other embedded information. If you don’t know what these are now, you will have to get to know them soon. Start early.
WordPress.com Tip: Get Your Own WordPress.com Email: If you have a WordPress.com blog and you want an email address that connects with that blog, I’ve written some tips on creating a “WordPress.com-like” email address and account.

The guest bloggers have been putting on their best party outfits and bringing forward the best of their best for you and me, and we’re having a great time. Besides you, the party goers so far include:

Greg Balanko-Dickson, The Remote control CEO

Edrei Zahari of Footsteps in the Mirror

Engtech of Internet Duct Tape

Jan of Circular Communication

Daniel Brusilovsky of Apple Universe

John Pozadzides of One Man’s Blog

Michael Hampton of Homeland Stupidity and Bad Behavior

Battling Referrer Spam

Abhijit Nadgouda of ifacethoughts

J.T Dabbagian of JTDabbagian.com

Pelf Nyok of pelf-ism is contagious

Dawud Miracle of dmiracle.com

Douglas Bell of Webmacster87.info, PreviewCast, and phpBB Weekly

Mohsin at Blogging Bits

There have been a few little bits of news and information not related to the two month celebration:

Tags Arrive on WordPress.com Blogs covers the new arrival of tags on WordPress.com blogs in time for a little testing before the Monday release of WordPress 2.3.
Heads Up News on WordPress 2.3 covers a wide range of news and resources on WordPress 2.3.
WordPress: It Takes a Village thanks Ozh of Planet Ozh for the WordPress Bug Fixers Heat Map, a tag cloud of the volunteers and staff of Automattic who dedicate so much of their time and energy to making WordPress work and evolve.

Lorelle’s News

Lorelle at WordCamp Israel: It’s official. I’m heading to Israel after the Reno conference to participate in WordCamp Israel on October 25, 2007 in Tel Avia (English). It’s so exciting. If you live in the Middle East, specifically in Israel, or nearby, get signed up fast. The conference will be in English and Hebrew and will be a powerful WordPress and blogging experience for all.

Lorelle in Reno in October: The Conservative Leadership Conference is hosting “RIGHTOBERFEST” in Reno, Nevada, October 11-13 and I’m one of the workshop leaders. I’m still awaiting some detail, but currently, I’m on tap to present two programs, one on WordPress and another on blogging tips.

WordPress Podcast: I was invited to participate in two episodes of the WordPress Podcast with Charles Stricklin and Aaron Brazell and the first podcast is out, Episode 29: Lorelle and WordPress 2.3. We talked about the upcoming release of WordPress 2.3, news from WordPress.com, my book, and a lot of WordPress news and tips. It was great fun and if you are missing out on the WordPress Podcast, you are missing some great WordPress news, tips, and tricks!

Douglas Bell and Lorelle on PreviewCast: Last week, I was interviewed by Douglas Bell of Webmacster87.info and PreviewCast for a future podcast release. We sat and chatted about all kinds of blogging and WordPress subjects, having a great time. Douglas and I love blogging and sharing our passions and experiences with the world through our blogs, so we had a great time. Thanks for the fun and hopefully it will be released soon!

Virtual Assistants Tackle Blogging Issues and Copyright Violations: I just finished a live tele-conference with members of the Virtual Assistant Revolution Forums (VA Revolution) as part of their Thirsty Thursday Training. We covered the issues of protecting your content from copyright violations, how to find copyright violations, and how to deal with them, as well as any other issues around publishing your content on the web and blogging for virtual assistants. The conference was recorded, but I believe only available to members. If you are a virtual assistant, check out the their forum for the conference recording.

American Business Women’s Association Regional Conference in Seattle: November 3, 2007, will see me in Seattle as the keynote speaker for the regional meeting of the American Business Women’s Associations regional chapters. I’ll be talking about blogging, specifically about working on the web with a blog to support your business through social interaction, networking, search engines, and reputation-building. If you are interested in attending, let me know. There are a few tickets left for this dinner event.

Win Valuable Prizes From David Airey: David Airey is offering a “$4,000 Blog Anniversary Prize Draw” for anyone who blogs about his contest before September 26, 2007, and one of the prizes is my book, “Blogging Tips: What Bloggers Won’t Tell You About Blogging”. It’s his one year anniversary and he’s throwing a huge bash with you, his readers, as the potential winners. How fun!

WordCamp Review in Blogger and Podcaster: The September issue of Blogger and Podcaster Magazine, Elisa M. Welch described WordCamp (page 11) as a great international gathering of the whose who of blogging and WordPress and said kind things about my session, describing me as:

Another lively session ensued when blogger/evangelist Lorelle VanFossen took the stage. “Kicking Ass Content Connections” began quite informally, with VanFossen strolling the floor among the attendees, passing her microphone around, asking people why they blog. When she returned to the podium, she poured forth a slew of insightful suggestions, including “leaving holes” for the reader to fill in (commenting is blogging, as she observed more than once), being authentic rather than faking it, and writing for the future. Several observations drew guffaws, including her request for “a toliet-flushing sound” to accompany Akismet’s spam-tagging feature.

Too funny! Thanks, Elisa!

Blogger and Postcaster Magazine: The next issue of Blogger and Poscaster Magazine will feature an article I’ve written on the mistakes and overlooked tips that I’ve found some veteran and top notch bloggers overlook, helping you to learn how to do these invaluable things on your blog to help your SEO, accessibility and web standards, and increase your readership and traffic. Next month, I’m writing an article on creating a blogging editorial calendar to help you find, build, and plan your blog’s content.

Problems with Taking Your Camera on the Road: The web host from hell and I are in major dispute over the “quick-and-easy” termination of services and transfer of my main sites. Unfortunately, these people don’t know their heads from their…fill in the blank. So yes, I know there are problems with my main site and genealogy site. Hopefully, this will be resolved soon without legal action.

Blogging Tips: What Bloggers Won’t Tell You About Blogging

I will be traveling extensively for the next couple months on behalf of my popular book, “Blogging Tips: What Bloggers Won’t Tell You About Blogging”.

If you will be attending one of the events, workshops, and programs where I’m speaking, you can buy your own copy and save some postage and handling. If you want your own copy now, you can order it still at the introductory price, you can order it from SplashPress or the new Blog Herald Bookstore.

For more information on the book, see the original announcement and a recent update with reviews and other information, as well as the Blogging Tips Book official page.

Most Popular Articles on Lorelle on WordPress

The most popular posts on Lorelle on WordPress these past few weeks were:

Blasts From the Past

This issue, I thought I’d reach back into the nine months of blogging on the Blog Herald to see what blasts from the past I’ve written there to tickle your fancy:

Blog Herald Columns

Here are some of the latest articles I’ve written for the Blog Herald:

I also started an article series on converting your newsletter into a blog, a great look at how to think through the process of turning a newsletter from a small business, individual, or organization into a blog, saving time and money, and involving more members.

Some recent weekly WordPress Wednesday News reports included:

Lorelle’s Linkworthy Links

This is the Weekly Digest of Lorelle on WordPress.
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Lorelle VanFossen is a member of WordPress, WordPress.com, the 9Rules Network, and author of Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won’t Tell You About Blogging.

2 Comments

Love Poem

Posted September 24, 2007 at 5:42 pm | Permalink

Well done, great blog and great posts!!!

qsxr@hotmail.com

Posted October 7, 2008 at 11:09 am | Permalink

tfgwixs lohumc

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