One Year Anniversary Blog Self-Review

One year. Wow! When Donncha asked me to lend my WordPress assault skills to the then named WordPressMU, the backbone upon which WordPress.com is built, I have to be honest. I didn’t have the time, energy, or enthusiasm to tackle another WordPress project. Like that ever stopped me. 😉 I only took a few minutes […]

Blog Exercise: New Years Reboot, Restart, Kick Ass

“It’s that time of year when the world falls in love…” The Christmas Waltz by Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn I’d like to think that New Year’s thinking includes bringing back the love to your blog. You might not think that, but let’s go with that belief as we continue with this year’s Blog Exercises. […]

Presentation: Blog Your Passion

The following are the presentations notes for my workshop called “Blogging Your Passion” at Making it in Changing Times in 2015. In 2010 I was in Chicago for SOBCon, the Successful Online Business Conference, and I had an amazing encounter with a woman on the crowded downtown streets: …I was storming away from the last […]

Speed Blogging Tips and Techniques

The following are the workshop notes for my popular workshop on “Speed Blogging.” The workshop is designed to teach how to take charge of your website and keep the content flowing with enthusiasm over the long term by learning the shortcuts, tips, and techniques to speed up the process of blogging, allowing your blog to […]

Russia’s Bloggers Under Attack

If you haven’t been paying attention to one of the largest countries in the world is persecuting bloggers. I’ve written up a summary in the ClarkWP Magazine site produced by my Clark College WordPress students, “The New Blogger’s Law in Russia.” In December 2013, the Russian parliament passed a law to allow the blocking of […]

Blog Exercises: Making Notifications and Alerts Work for You

In the blog exercise on eliminating noisy distractions from your computer, mobile phone, and other areas around your working environment, I wanted you to remove the things that interfere with your blogging time and space, with your creative energies. I wanted you to identify what is getting in your way that you might not be […]

Blog Exercises: When You Assume…

One of the class projects for my WordPress college course involved the students working together on a single broken post to find all the errors in the content. Typically, this is a quick test of their basic coding skills, but this quarter’s students are not typical. They are exceptional. The goal was to identify and […]

Blog Exercises: Intentional Blogging

One of the things I work with in teaching writing for the web and blogging is to blog intentionally. I call it “content with intent.” Content with Intent From the very first of these Blog Exercises I’ve preached content with intent, blogging with every intention filled with purpose, goals, and incentive. Specifically self-incentive, a self-motivated […]

Blog Exercises: Taking Inventory on What Keeps You Blogging

The recent major desktop computer crash has left me reeling. I thought I had all my data backed up. For the most part, I did. What I didn’t have backed up was my programs. Getting back up to speed fast, I’ve had to prioritize the programs I had download and install. Yes, download. Who gets […]

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: Mashups

One of my favorite odd-ball mashups is the movie Moulin Rouge! Released in 2001, the movie features Nicole Kidman, Ewan McGregor, and an outstanding cast of top notch actors singing their way through a Bollywood-style production set in a 1899 France cabaret. There are few original songs in the film. Instead they used pop songs […]

Blog Exercises: Debate Ethics

A premie baby is causing debates and controversy about medical research projects. A debate on plant ethics questions over the humane treatment of plants opposes yet is related to the debate on ethical treatment of animals as food sources. Advanced research on stem cells and human cloning is debatable on all sides, especially when news […]

Blog Exercises: The Daily Social Meme

Did you know that there are specific memes for each day of the week in the blogosphere and social web? Today is your chance to play around with some of these themed days of the week in this blog exercise. A themed day, or meme, is a tradition of sorts. It involves publishing and sharing […]

Blog Exercises: When Your Site Design Owns You

Yesterday a long-time client called me up in tears saying, “I can’t do this any more. My site design owns me, I don’t own it. It’s too confusing. It’s too much work!” Several years ago, she’d chosen a Magazine-style WordPress Theme. The structure was based upon the standard magazine-style, sticky posts for the slider/carousel at […]

Blog Exercises: The Art of List Making

Today’s blog exercise is part two on how to make a list. In “Weekly Link Roundups” and “Making Lists” blog exercises I covered some basics of how to make a list. This blog exercise will take these exercises further to help you create interesting lists in your blog posts that pull the reader through your […]