Blog Struggles: When Spelling, Grammar, and Punctuation Interferes With Your Blogging

Discussing the challenges associated with blogging, a participant in a program I presented recently told me about how she tends to obsess over punctuation. My friends tell me I need to read that book, Eat, Shoots, and Leaves about punctuation. I’m obsessed with commas and ellipses. I love using them. I like how they sound […]

Blog Exercises: How to Create a Blogger Identity

A rebroadcast of “How Much Does Your Name Matter?” from Freakonomics Radio looked at the impact of a name on society, perception, prejudice, and ability to succeed. Indeed, there is some evidence that a name can influence how a child performs in school and even her career opportunities. There’s also the fact that different groups […]

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: August Random Editing Day

Today it is 8 posts to edit on our monthly Random Editing Day. Each month in the Blog Exercises series, I challenge you to edit random published posts on your blog, adding one for every month of the year. This month is eight posts. Are you ready? It was easier in January and February if […]

Blog Exercises: Self-Control and Distractions

During a recent WordPress Meetup in Portland, Oregon, I was on the panel of three WordPress experts answering questions from the audience on how to use WordPress. In response to one of the questions dealing with a recommendation that WordPress restrict what a user can and cannot do to protect themselves from doing something “stupid,” […]

The Giant Blog Exercise Check List Part 1

July is the midway point of these Blog Exercises and time for a Giant Blog Exercise Checklist to help you keep score of the exercises you’ve done, and what’s left undone. I’ve arranged the blog exercises by similarity, tasks related to each other, rather than chronologically. If you are playing catch up, you might wish […]

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 […]

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: When Will You Not Link?

There are few people I hate in this world. I think I can count them on one hand, mostly on two fingers. We all have them, people who did us wrong and taught us to disrespect, dread, dislike, and even hate them. As tolerant as we wish we all were, that’s just the way 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: 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 […]

Happy Anniversary WordPress: The Beginnings

On August 16, 2005, Lorelle on WordPress became blog ID number 72 on the brand new WordPress.com. The first post was appropriately titled “Lorelle on WordPress” to introduce the site. Looking back, it’s amazing how true to form that I’ve kept the mission of this site all these years later as proposed in the first […]

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 […]

PDX WordPress Meetup Group: WordPress Codex Night

The WordPress Meetup Group in Portland, Oregon, has invited me to tonight’s meetup at the US Bancorps Building in downtown PDX to talk about the WordPress Codex, the online manual for WordPress Users, and how to contribute. I’ll show them some basics about the Codex and we’ll spend a couple hours working on maintenance tasks […]