Web Writing HTML Entities Cheat Sheet

Over the years I’ve copied and saved HTML Character Entities that I use on a regular basis, and I thought I’d share my cheat sheet. These are important to me as a technical web publisher specializing in writing blogging and WordPress tutorials, so I’ve explained why and how I use them in the table below. […]

WordPress School: Two Tab Preview Method

You will be doing too much tab switching and opening during this year-long Lorelle’s WordPress School free online course, so let’s talk about what that is. Tabs are mini-windows inside of your WordPress browser for holding web pages. Browser tabs were one of the greatest addition to the web browser, allowing the user to open […]

WordPress School: Categories and Tags

We’ve covered WordPress posts and Pages, the core content elements associated with a basic WordPress site. Today we are going to focus on posts, specifically how they are organized and structured within a WordPress site. Categories are your site’s Table of Contents. Tags are your site’s index words. Honestly, it is that simple. Think of […]

Site Review

DISCOUNT: Lorelle is offering her popular site reviews for 50% off during 2015 as part of her WordPress School year-long project teaching the basics of WordPress. The discount code is found in the introduction materials. Lorelle VanFossen offers three levels of site reviews, specifically for WordPress sites. The prices are the starting prices for the […]

Clark College Students Want to Interview You

Students in my Clark College WordPress class are required to interview a WordPress professional and member of the WordPress Community as part of their assignments for our student managed site, ClarkWP Magazine. Would you like to be an interview subject? Here are the qualifications. You must use WordPress actively as part of your business. The […]

Blog Exercises: Current Events for October and November – Interview

Due to the computer crash and trauma lately, October and November Blog Exercises for Current events is combined. In my college courses, one of the student assignments is to interview someone within the WordPress Community. The WordPress Community is a broad field of participants and activists, from users to professionals building their career on the […]

Blog Exercises: Ingredients of a Professional Site

Two questions on the same day triggered this blog exercise. I was asked by a student in my WordPress class recently what defined a “professional blog.” I told him it was one that met all the criteria for a well-designed, well-formed site that met web standards. This is a good definition, but lacked specifics. A […]

Blog Exercises: Blogging Loss and Grief

Loss is a part of life. This year, I’ve lost friends, family, and pets, and some days the sadness permeates everything. Other days, we laugh and smile. As with all things, in time, the balance between sunshine and dark shifts the scale towards sunshine. Grief is often best when shared, at least during the earliest […]

Blog Exercises: Priorities

A friend’s son was working on a school project when I asked him a question. “Not now, Lorelle. I don’t have the bandwidth.” Unfortunately, I’ve had to use it over the past month too many times. Consider this an apology for letting this site lapse recently for these Blog Exercises. Research published in “Scarcity: Why […]

Blog Exercises: 5,127 Tries

In his native UK, Sir James Dyson is known as much for his quirky looking, superior-functioning vacuum cleaners as for his long embattled path to commercial success. He gave Brits their first bagless vacuum in 1993 after 13 tough years tinkering in the tool shed. He slogged through 5,127 prototypes, a couple of lawsuits and […]

Blog Exercises: What’s the View Through Your Binoculars

One of my favorite things is a framed picture by Matt Mullenweg of an old set of mounted binoculars. The eye pieces are worn and the blue paint on the metal binoculars looks like it’s not the first coat of paint it has seen. It’s wonderful, and I find new meaning in it every time […]

Blog Exercises: Where is Your Audience?

In this ongoing series, Blog Exercises, you’ve been exploring your site stats to determine where your audience is coming from and why. Now is the time to explore the where. Using whichever as stats or web analytics program you wish as discussed in the post introducing you to blog stats and analytics, check out the […]

Blog Exercises: Connecting All the Pieces of Your Site Together

The concept of the World Wide Web is based upon linking, the web of connections that link web pages together like a spider web. There are external links, connecting one site to another, and intrasite links, connecting web pages together within a single site. Today’s blog exercise is focused on the latter, intrasite links. Intrasite […]

Blog Exercises: Spell Checkup on Categories and Tags

Oh no! I was writing out a tag in WordPress and the auto-suggest feature popped up with a misspelled tag name! Yikes! Today’s blog exercise is to clean up your tag and category names to ensure you’ve not made the same mistakes. To review your category names in WordPress, go to Posts > Categories and […]

Blog Exercises: Dissecting Post Categories

In a recent article, Noah Weiss shared his struggle to figure out categories and tags on his personal site. I know many of you following these Blog Exercises have also struggled to figure out your categories, so I thought Noah’s site would be a perfect example, He has gratefully given me permission to rip his […]