WordPress School: What’s the Difference Between the Display Posts and Archive Shortcodes

In Lorelle’s WordPress School free online course, we’ve been exploring shortcodes. In this tutorial, let’s take a look at two shortcodes that appear to be the same on the surface. WordPress has long had the ability to generate a list of posts in a Page or post with a bit of code in the archives() […]

WordPress School: Posts and Pages

Let’s be Lorelle’s WordPress School with the two core content elements of WordPress: posts and Pages. By default, WordPress displays content in posts and Pages. Each behaves differently and distinctively in WordPress, and can confuse people easily. Let’s make this simple. Pages hold timeless content. Posts hold timely content. Please be patient with the videos. […]

Blog Exercises: How to Tag Posts – The Quiz

In “Blog Exercises: How to Tag Posts,” I covered the basics of how to tag your posts. The following blog exercise is a quiz to see how you would tag the following post. Read through the article on tagging posts for a review. Read the following fictional short story I wrote called “The Story of […]

Blog Exercises: Preview Posts

Do you preview a post before publishing? If not, consider adding this extra step to the publishing process. Why? I’m human. So are you. We mess things up. No matter how careful you are, you will make mistakes. That’s life. By double checking what your post will look like before you release it to the […]

Blog Exercises: How to Tag Posts

Categories are your site’s table of contents. Tags are your index words. While it is simple to explain the two basic organizational and navigation elements of a WordPress site, coming up with tags for each post is a struggle many bloggers battle. Tags represent micro-categorization of your site’s content. It helps the visitor find closely […]

Blog Exercises: How Many Posts Can Your Audience Handle?

In “Blog Exercises: How Many Posts? the exercise asked you to consider how many posts you should publish within a specific time period on your site, such as by day, week, month, or year. The goal was to set self-deadlines and monitor how many posts you felt were appropriate to publish within that time period. […]

Blog Exercises: How Many Posts?

How many posts do you need to publish a year on your site? Have you counted? Do you schedule them in a way to count each post over a day, week, month, or year? At my peak, I pushed 1,975 posts a year. Yes, someone counted. The number frightened me. I had to break it […]

Blog Exercises: Clean Up Your Most Popular Posts

“It’s dated 2008. It must be useless.” This was the response to an article I tweeted out recently. Yes, the article was dated 2008. Did that mean it wasn’t a valid, timely, and invaluable resource? It was, but that’s not the point. Some people equate old with useless. With the aging population gaining the majority […]

Blog Struggles: I Need an Eraser for My Old Posts

Online Diary: May 20, 2010 I’d like to go back and erase my old posts. Don’t you feel that way sometimes? Maybe all the time? As I think about talking to the telephone poles out there and reassessing where I am, the urge to purge is overwhelming me. I want to go through all my […]

Alert: Possibly Related Posts Feature on WordPress.com Blogs

WordPress.com has activated a feature without warning that has many up in arms of protest, making it one of the least welcoming additions to WordPress.com. Since the beginning of WordPress.com, one of the most requested features has been the ability to showcase related posts from our own blogs. WordPress.com has activated this ability, but the […]

Apologies: Future Posts Released Again

As I have/will/did write in the future post, Blog Struggles: Surviving Offline Downtime, which released a week ahead of schedule due to a repeat of a glitch on WordPress.com that hasn’t been seen for well over a year, I depend upon the future posts feature of WordPress for my blog to keep going while I’m […]

Rotating Old Posts and Tires

I love it when a blogger makes a point in clever ways, which meant I adored Ian Fernando’s How Rotating My Car Tires Taught Me About Blogging: It is getting chilly here in New Jersey, and before the winter winds and snow fall comes I went ahead and rotated my tires. Spent 14 dollars just […]

Using WordPress Categories To Style Posts

By Abhijit Nadgouda UPDATED 2010: See below One of the reasons WordPress fits so many bills is its flexibility. It lets you do things at a much lesser cost, not necessarily money, but time and effort too, as compared to others. This article is about styling WordPress posts differently using the categories they are classified […]

How Do You Find Relevant Blog Posts To Link Too?

By Dawud Miracle @ dmiracle.com As I wrote about previously, I tend to link out from my blog a ton. Yet, just linking isn’t enough – at least for me. I want to link to posts that are highly relevant and complementary to the topic I’m writing about. And specifically, I want the text I’m […]

Writing with Single Lines Not Double in Your Blog Posts

If you are a poet, quoting poetry, write out an address, recipe, or need to create a block of text featuring single lines not double lines between each line, here’s how. By default, WordPress and most blogging programs turn every line into a paragraph. When you hit the ENTER or RETURN button on your keyboard, […]