The Hunt for Online Spell Checking

NOTE: The latest version of Firefox now comes with built-in spell check. Faced with a repaired but not fully stocked laptop, I needed some of my writing spell checked. Instead of panicking, or digging through storage boxes of my computer disks for my word processing program, I realized that I was connected to the Internet […]

I FOUND YOU – ONLINE SPELL CHECKER!

Firefox Spell Check Firefox now features spell check by default in their Internet browser. Misspelled words are highlighted with a red wavy underline, similar to word processing programs. Right click on the highlighted word and choose from the correct spelling in the right click menu. It’s not perfect, and the misspelled word isn’t recognized until […]

Screams Heard From Online Bloggers

Okay, who is the freakin’ idiot who thought using the backspace button on the keyboard as a “back to previously visited web page” in your web browser was a good idea. Curse and pox on his head! After working for over an hour on an article for this site, the cat or “someone” moved the […]

One Year Anniversary Review: Blog Writing

Writing up the one year anniversary review of articles I’ve written about searching and search engines, I ran across this interesting bit I wrote in “How Google Ranks Websites”: Spelling is still important. Not that Google’s patented page ranking process includes a spell checker – words that are not recognized get dumped. If misspelled keywords […]

One Year Anniversary Review: Internet, Web, and Computer Tips and Tricks

WordPress, WordPress.com, and blogging aren’t the only subjects I’ve covered over the past year. Yet, the other topics were all related. Under the category of Web Wise, I included information and resources to help your blogging, but more specifically, with information you should know about being online, browsers, and computers in general. I’ve written a […]

The Most Common Tiny Mistakes Made When Setting Up a WordPress Site

I’ve just finished five years of teaching non-stop college and community education workshops and programs on WordPress for beginners, novices, experts, web designers, web developers, web programmers, and those who think they know everything but still realize they have a lot to learn. I love that last group as they are willing to learn and […]

WordPress School: Bookmarklets and User Scripts

In the last tutorial in Lorelle’s WordPress School free online course covering the web browser, your gateway to the web and WordPress, we covered bookmarks and how to save a web page for later access and reading. In this tutorial, we take bookmarks a little further by exploring browser bookmarklets and user scripts, small but […]

WordPress School: Web Browsers and The Search

Search is used in WordPress for many different purposes as you prepare, develop, implement, and launch your website, and as you continue to maintain and publish on the site. This tutorial will help you understand how to search within a web page with the web browser, search within a WordPress site, and provide helpful tips […]

WordPress School: Text Editors

Coming very soon, I’m dedicating a couple weeks to learning about web browsers and HTML and CSS in preparation for moving into the site design and customization aspects of Lorelle’s WordPress School free online course. To help you prepare, today’s tutorial and assignment is to introduce you to text editors. In WordPress, there is a […]

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 […]

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 […]

Blog Exercises: Site Policies and Bloggers Code of Ethics

It’s time to start working on all of your site policies, one by one. So far, we’ve touched on some of these in Blog Exercises: The Don’ts of Blogging, Blog Exercise: Taking a Risk With What You Blog About, Blog Exercises: Comments and The Blog Bullies, and Blog Exercises: Quoting and Blockquotes. The basic policies […]

The Secret Recipe of Comment Spam Comments

Mr. Louis Vuitton just sent me a message in my blog comments I’d like to share with you. I share this touching message because it is highly educational when it comes to the art of spam comments, and serves to remind us of why we love having Akismet, the best comment spam fighter, on our […]

Blog Exercises: Random Editing Day

Welcome to the first “Random Editing Day” as part of the Blog Exercises series. The purpose of Random Editing Day is to help you edit and upkeep your site, but also to revisit and revise posts of the past. Throughout this year we are going to have monthly editing exercises to help you flex your […]

WordPress Codex Night Success and PDX Saturday Codex Party

Last night’s PDX WordPress Meetup Group: WordPress Codex Night was a resounding success. In just under two hours, 130 changes were made to the WordPress Codex, the online manual for WordPress Users. On the informal WordPress Documentation Team Task List, 49 “things to do” were added which will become deleted files and pages, redirects, new […]