Weekly Digest: End of Year Rush, Lorraine is Bad, Awards, and Kicking Blogging But - As Usual

I had last week’s Weekly Digest of “Lorelle World” ready to go, but life stepped in with a lot of snow and too many distractions. My apologies. So this week, you get three-for-one.

I decided to have a little fun these past few weeks with the types of articles I published here and on the Blog Herald. I hope you all enjoyed the fun. It’s always risky when you take your blog off track, even for a single post. Consider some of the fun a holiday gift for bloggers. Yes, I was a bad girl this year.

Don’t forget that I’m still looking for your input on blogging events for next year for the blog conference and event calendar I’m working on. If you are a part of a blogging or WordPress group that meets regularly, let me know!

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.

The last issue of my weekly digest was Weekly Digest: Back on the Farm, Improving Your Blog Series, WordPress Podcast Reporter, and More.

What’s Happening with Lorelle on WordPress

Here’s the latest blog posts on Lorelle on WordPress.

• WordPress 2.4 Release Delayed announced that the next version will be released in March and be called WordPress 2.5, in order to give more time to the new features and improvements.
• Unworthy Again: Nominated for Performancing Awards: Okay, so they’ve nominated me and I’m feeling guilty again. SIGH.
• Is It Time For You To Consolidate Your Blogs?: The author of I’d Rather Be Writing decides to combine his two blogs, a regular blog and a podcast blog, into one and offers some excellent tips, and I ask if it’s time you did the same.
• Blog Challenge: World Records Bloggers Could Break: What world records could bloggers break if there were world records for bloggers to break?
• Considering Writing Some WordPress Tips?: A couple times I year I remind people that the world of WordPress would not be so wonderful if it weren’t for all those who contribute WordPress tips to the WordPress Codex and on their blogs. A big hug to all who donate and volunteer their time and effort to help make WordPress great!
• Adding Avatars and Gravatars to Your WordPress and WordPress.com Blog: With Automattic’s purchase and integration of Gravatars into WordPress.com, I offer a step-by-step guide for adding avatars and Gravatars to your WordPress and WordPress.com blogs.
• We Give and Give and Give – But We Still Have to Pay the Rent: Liz Strauss was the brave one to ask this question, and I’m still watching closely to see how the blogosphere responds to “When we give so much of ourselves and work for free on our blogs, how do we ask for money to pay the rent?”
• The Demographics of Who Clicks on Ads: I’m always fascinated by those who make money from ad clicks, and those who click on ads. It’s a strange phenomenon. Sometimes I think that most of the ad clickers are people who video tape television shows so they can skip the ads.
• 10 Really Rad Righteous Blogging Tips: Okay, I had a hacker – well, sorta. An “alter-evil twin” attacked my blog over the holidays and left a rather…shall we say…interesting…blog post for you to learn more about blogging. SIGH.
• The Sharing and Caring of the WordPress Community Shines: My annual love fest for all things WordPress.
• Are You Willing to Pay Taxes For Your Blog?: I was really surprised to see so much attention, welcome attention, to this issue. I wonder if anyone is really doing anything to stop it or just whining.
• Are you a Blog Curator or Caregiver?: This is a fascinating question. It’s a statement on how much you “care” for your blog.
• Preparing for the Annual “What I Want Gone from the Web” Post: I’m getting ready to publish this annual list and the results of the feedback was actually surprising. Many of you have some serious HATES on the web and want them gone.
• Weekly Digest: Back on the Farm, Improving Your Blog Series, WordPress Podcast Reporter, and More: Okay, so I’ve been doing holiday stuff and not keeping up with this. Forgive me? Actually, we spent most of Christmas with no Internet, but a lot of sudden snow. That whole week it was hit and miss with the satellite Internet.
• What’s Your Favorite Blog Conference or Event? – A request to help me create a calendar of blogging events and groups for next year. Please let me know what your favorite blogging events, groups, associations, and conferences are and why.
• New Article Series – Blog Struggles: In this new ongoing series, I share with you some of the intimate thoughts, internal debates, conflicts, and challenges I have faced over the past 14+ years of blogging. So far, the series includes:
  • Blog Struggles: The Search for Blog Content: We put so much energy into “finding” blog content that we often forget the best source for good blog content: from within us. I offer tips and techniques for pulling content from your head.
  • Blog Struggles: Ideas and Drafts: We come up with such great ideas and then what? We jot them down, make lists, start post drafts, and they sit there staring at us, as we procrastinate over what to do with all these ideas and how to keep them in check. I offer tips on how to best keep track of your ideas and drafts.
  • Blog Struggles: The Blog Focus: As part one in a sub-series of posts on Blog Struggles, I look at the issue of the blog focus, your blog’s ability to turn you from a blogger into an expert.
  • Blog Struggles: Why Should Your Blog Have a Focus: Your blog doesn’t have to have a focus, but if it does, these are the reasons, and benefits, of why it should.
  • Blog Struggles: Finding Your Blog Focus: Continues the Blog Focus theme and offers tips for finding your blog’s focus and direction.
  • Blog Struggles: Changing Your Blog’s Focus: Once you find your blog focus, how do you change your blog? Or should you start a new blog? I cover the tips you need to know to redirect your blog.
  • Blog Struggles: When Spelling, Grammar, and Punctuation Interferes With Your Blogging looks at the issues around the impact of poor writing habits and skills and whether or not they impact the success and reading of your blog.
  • In Blog Struggles: When Are Too Many Comments Too Many Comments?, I share a struggle I faced not long ago about an over-enthusiastic commenter who left a ton of comments on my blog within a few hours, making me very suspicious. We are often faced with suspicious comments, so what do we do? How should we handle them?
  • Blog Struggles: Taking The Moral High Blogging Ground addresses the issue of deciding which ethical and moral road to take on your blog.
  • Blog Struggles: Blogger’s Depression looks at the rarely discussed by normal aspect of blogging: depression. When the enthusiasm for the effort is lost and apathy sets in, and how to overcome it.
  • Blog Struggles: It’s The Rituals That Help Us Focus: I share some of the rituals I use to get me “in the blogging mood” and ask you to share yours.

Lorelle’s News

Peformancing Award Nominations: On the list of things I’m not worthy of are two award nominations from Peformancing: Most Influential Blogger Award and Best Writing and Blogging Award. I’m in the best of company among the nominees. Go vote for them.

Lorraine: Okay, my “alter-evil twin” had some fun and gave you all the gift of 10 Really Rad Righteous Blogging Tips for Christmas. I hope you all enjoyed it.

On the Blogroll Honor Drummed Roll: In 2007 Blogroll Awards by Jake’s Life, I was one of many wonderful recipients of his Blogroll Awards, a delightful satirical look at his favorite blogs of the year. Here is what he had to say about my blog. It just bears repeating – putting in cement actually!

WordPress Jedi: Lorelle On WordPress

If you are just starting with WordPress, or you’ve been using it since the beginning, you can learn from Master Lorelle. This blog provides so much information on the WordPress blogging platform it’s sickening. From the small tweaks to fix something only you are bothered by to the good ol’ overhaul you’ve been planning, and everything in between. Bookmark, subscribe, however you do it, but read it. Cheesy as it may sound, the Force is strong in this one, hrmm, yes.

Jake, I’m going to put my award on my About page with a link to the post. It’s an award I will treasure always.

Among the 10 Most Influential Blog Posts: Cape Code SEO published a list of the most influential blog posts for the year and my popular article on the Problogger, Blogging Is About Writing, made the list along with some other great company.

On the Top Posts List for Blogging Bytes: Blogging Bytes offered their top list of blog posts about blogging for 2007 and several of my articles were listed including Hundreds of Resources for Finding Content for Your Blog, Selling Your Blog: What Are Blog Buyers Looking For?, and Selling Your Blog: What Goes Into The Selling Price?.

Interviews: I was recently interviewed by the new Blogger Interviews in Interview with Lorelle VanFossen, Lorelle on WordPress. I talk a little about how I started on the Internet in the “early days” and where I see the web going.

WordPress Book Reviews: In WordPress Books (Plus Reviews), WPThemesPlugin did a summary/review of the various books available on WordPress. My book, Blogging Tips, started off the list, which is wonderful, but my book is not about WordPress. It’s about blogging with whatever blogging platform or program you use. Still, thanks, Moses, for the kind words and the endorsement.

Improving Your Blog Tips on the Blog Herald: The series I started this past week on the Blog Herald, Improving Your Blog Tips, is getting a lot of attention and getting people thinking about what they need to do to improve their blogs.

Lorelle on ProBlogger: I recently published Readers Versus Visitors: Whose Needs Are You Meeting, an article that looks at how to not let your interpretation of your blog stats, or assumptions about your blog readers and visitors, get in the way of serving and meeting the needs of your visitors and readers.

Blogger and Podcaster Magazine: It looks like I will be continuing my work with Blogger and Podcaster Magazine into next year. The last three issues included articles on tips you need to know on blogging mistakes, editorial calendars for bloggers, and improving your writing skills. I’m working on a series on turning your blog into a business for the next couple months.

Among the Must-Read Blogs: Damien Riley published a “Must-Read Blogs This Season” which included me, but also a lot of other interesting blogs worth checking into.

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

It appears my book, “Blogging Tips: What Bloggers Won’t Tell You About Blogging” sold very well before the holidays, so I hope my book is making some new and old bloggers happy to finally get a real bloggy gift.

You can order a copy from SplashPress or the new Blog Herald Bookstore. If you would like to order multiple copies, please email me first as that requires special handling.

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 announcement of the delay of WordPress 2.4 brought a lot of eager WordPress fans here to find out what was going on. I predicted this release would be delayed a while ago, and while I’m sad to see it pushed back, I feel much better about the new features they are going to be adding in the new WordPress 2.5 coming in March.

Adding Avatars and Gravatars to Your WordPress and WordPress.com Blog helped many people who love adding their picture to their blogs and incorporating images that represent other bloggers within their blog comments. The issue of avatar image size is a touch one when choosing the right image that can take the shrinkage and still remain visible, so it was interesting to create different images and see how they would handle the size reductions.

I read dozens, sometimes many dozen, of articles about WordPress every week, and it was time for another set of tips for writing WordPress tips. It was also time to encourage people to contribute their tips to the WordPress Codex, the online manual for WordPress Users, so they will be there for everyone to use.

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

• WordPress 2.4 Release Delayed
• Adding Avatars and Gravatars to Your WordPress and WordPress.com Blog
• Considering Writing Some WordPress Tips?
• Unworthy Again: Nominated for Performancing Awards
• Learning About Blogging and How to Blog
• Designing a WordPress Theme From Scratch
• HTML, CSS, PHP, and More Cheat Sheets
• Do-It-Yourself Search Engine Optimization
• Hundreds of Resources for Finding Content for Your Blog
• Free Photos for Your Blog
• WordPress Plugins for Images, Photographs and Graphics
• Contact Form WordPress Plugins

Blasts From the Past

Here are some blasts from the past I’ve written that still are interesting today:

• Matt Mullenweg Gets New Clothes
• McDonalds Starts Internal Corporate Blog
• October Sifry State of the Blogosphere Report Released
• One Year Anniversary Blog Self-Review
• Proud to Showcase YOUR Work: Sploggers Turn Dopplebloggers

Blog Herald Columns

Maybe I was tired. Maybe I was just tired of people spending too much time looking at the year in review and plans for next year. Me, I got a little cynical and abrasive during my end-of-the-year posts on the Blog Herald, basically telling bloggers to get their act together and start blogging with their heads and hearts and not their lazy back ends. I hope someone appreciated it.

Recent articles on the Blog Herald included:

• Should Journalists Be Required to Comment? Should Bloggers? is a post I started writing a year ago, but just couldn’t finish. So I decided to open up the question to my readers.
• Don’t Blog About That Which You Understand Not is a rant to all of the bloggers who blog without the expertise to back up their blog content. Come on, folks, tell us what you know, not ramble about what you don’t know. We’ve had enough of that.
• Help Translate WordPress For Your Readers and Everyone is an invitation to anyone speaking more than one language plus English fluently to help translate WordPress and how you can translate your WordPress blog for your multilingual readers.
• Bring Something New to the Blog Table, Please is a request to all bloggers to stop blogging about WordPress, blogging, and SEO subjects. We’ve had enough. Bring something new to your blog table.
• I Blog shares an odd experience I had while at the dentist office, telling the hygienist that I blogged brought no discussion, but describing my husband’s much more boring work as a aircraft engineer brought an hour’s worth of discussion. Is blogging boring? How do you explain blogging to those who don’t understand, or don’t want to understand?
• Prolific Versus Long Winded Versus Gregarious Bloggers is one of the shortest blog posts I’ve ever written. It asks you to consider which one you are.
• Want. Want. Want. Blogging is About Giving. I wanted to really hit the holiday season hard with a reminder that blogging is about giving.
• The Art of Backlinking looks at how to get links to your blog the right way.
• Are You Stopping Comments Before They Ever Get Started? I will be talking more this year about the blog conversation and this is just one of the first in the series.
• What Do You Want Gone From the Web in 2008? I asked this on my blog and on the Blog Herald to get a wide spread answer to what people really hate on the web. I’m getting some interesting answers. Make sure you respond so your hated item on the web will get a voice in my annual report.
• Blog Writing: Are You Writing With Grit? I’m going to be writing more about the art of blog writing and this was a visual step in that direction asking you if your writing is like a grit of sand that grinds a pattern in to the rocks on the beach, sticking in our heads for long periods of time and making us think.
• Name Calling Bloggers is a exploration with tips on what to call the characters in your blog story – using acronyms, fake names, or other descriptive methods to name the people you write about while protecting their privacy and helping your readers understand more about who you are writing about.
• Blogger Sucks. Wanna Move to WordPress? I’ve been reading about many wanting out of Blogger and deciding to move to WordPress. It’s very easy to move and I offer a step-by-step guide to help you manage your move.

Some recent weekly WordPress Wednesday News reports included:

• WordPress Wednesday News: Mandatory WordPress Security Release, Sneak Previews of WordPress 2.4, Hoodies, Vote for WordPress, Moving to WordPress, Custom Fields, and More
• WordPress Wednesday News: WordPress 2007, Nominated for TechCrunch Crunchies, More WordPress Blogs Hacked, WordPress Events in 2008, WordPress.com Blogger Wins, and Snow
• WordPress Wednesday News: Akismet Day, Two Million Bloggers, Plugin Security Warnings, And WordPress is the Best CMS
• WordPress Wednesday News: WordPress Theme Viewer Waits, New Social Network, Security Issues, Austin Grows, Gravatars Enabled, WordPress Books, Matt Cutts, and More
• WordPress Wednesday News: WordPress Themes Hacked, WordPress Schwag for Sale, Life Without Akismet, Flickr Edits, and New WordPress Baby
• WordPress Wednesday News: Will You Turn Off Akismet? WordPress 2.4 Delayed, and More WordPress News

Lorelle’s Linkworthy Links

As I crawled through the web recently, I ran across some interesting posts and articles you should check out:

• 50 Blogging and Online Money Making Tips of 2007: I’m constantly asked to write more about making money with your blog. Why should I when there are such great bloggers doing it so much better like JohnTP?
• 24 ways: Typesetting Tables: While tables should not be used to design your blog, don’t forget that tables have a use in your blog content for displaying content. This looks at some typsetting issues for HTML tables.
• Economist Ready To Try ‘Social Networking’ Again: Okay, so I’m still laughing about this announcement. I like “trying” and “retrying” social networking. At least they are trying.
• Words for Telling the Future: I’m always working to learn more about the words I use to write what I say, and this was a great insight into the words we use to define the future.
• To Blog or Not: Which Businesses Are Ideal, Which Are Not: A good look at which businesses should blog.
• 456 Berea Street highlights of 2007: One of my favorite sites for web design tips and information, this is their annual article highlight list.

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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.