Weekly Digest: Guest Bloggers Galore, Theme Spam, Blog Scraping, and Personal Blogging

It’s been a week and a half of fabulous guest bloggers bringing some color and excitement to Lorelle on WordPress. Wow! And some babble about WordPress Themes with link spam and vulnerabilities that must be addressed, and blog scrapers stealing content from WordPress.com Blogs. And one of my guest bloggers begins a series on the […]

Are You Risking Your Blog With an Unofficial or Vulnerable WordPress Theme?

Recently, Automattic and WordPress decided to clean up the WordPress Themes Viewer, removing all the “sponsored Themes” from its database. There has been a lot of debate over the definition of a sponsored WordPress Theme. In theory, any WordPress Theme design which was “paid” for development and construction is a sponsored Theme. Those aren’t the […]

Choosing a WordPress Theme

You’ve successfully installed WordPress to your site and hopefully poked around the Themes that come with the basic WordPress installation. Before you choose a new WordPress Theme, make sure you take the time to look at these Themes FIRST. Begin by making at least THREE posts. Add a comment to one or two of them, […]

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: Site Master Plan

Setting goals is the first step in turning the invisible into the visible. Tony Robbins A website is an intangible, a virtual nothing in which we create something tangible to human perception. When it boils right down to it, Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little created nothing with WordPress. WordPress isn’t a physical object you can […]

Research on the WordPress, Web Development, and Web Design Job Market

In 2012 and 2013, I did extensive research for the grant program to develop and rewrite the Web Developer degree program at Clark College. This research included an analysis of current and future job opportunities for students graduating with that degree with a solid understanding of WordPress. Now that the program has completed its first […]

WordPress For Writers: WordPress Author Sites

In this part of my series on WordPress For Writers, I’ll cover the basic things to consider when using WordPress on site promoting the work of writers and authors. For more on the subject, see other articles in the WordPress for Writers and Authors series. This article assumes you have some basic familiarity with WordPress […]

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: How Does Your Blog Make You Money?

In an interview with Daniel Scocco of DailyBlogTips, he asked me how long a blogger should wait to monetize their blog. Ha! Forever! I do not think bloggers should monetize their blogs. I think that people who want to get into the business of blogging must make a business plan on how they will use […]

Blog Exercises: Does Your Site Look Spammy?

Does your site look spammy? How would you know whether or not your site looks spammy? It’s time for a spam check. Web design is hard, especially if you aren’t an expert. Yet, in many ways you are an expert if you are a fan of the web. You’ve seen enough sites to know the […]

Blog Exercises: How Much Does Your Blog Cost?

How much does your blog cost? It should be a simple question. Do you have an answer? The costs associated with a blog are the costs associated with any website. There is the cost of the domain name, if you choose to have a custom name. In general, it is about USD $15 a year, […]

WordPress Anniversary: WordPress and Evil

As I look back on the ten years of WordPress, there is a dark side to blogging. While many blamed WordPress for the evil, like guns, WordPress doesn’t cause evil, people cause evil. In fact, WordPress, Automattic, and the WordPress Community has fought longer and harder against the evil doers in the world than most […]

Blogrolls Gone in WordPress. How to Save Your Links.

For the past few months, rumors were flying that WordPress was going to remove the Links/Blogroll feature of WordPress. As of August 2012, it is now gone from many WordPress.com. MacManx, Happiness Engineer at WordPress.com, recently stated: The Links section was removed from the core WordPress.org software, which means that it will probably be removed […]

201 WordPress Books

As part of my project to bring WordPress into colleges nationally, I did a quick survey of how many books have been published about WordPress. I was asked by several major publishers to publish the first book in English on WordPress but had to decline due to my traveling schedule and work load, so it’s […]