WordPress School: Visual and Text Editors

In this assignment in Lorelle’s WordPress School free online course we are going to explore the Text and Visual Editors in WordPress. WordPress features the two editors on all posts and Pages. The Visual Editor is the WYSIWYMG editor for writing content. This means it is the What You See Is What You Might Get […]

Visualizing the Spread of News Across the Internet

Stephen VanDyke’s Hammer of Truth article, “How News Travels on the Internet” is a great visual look at how news may travel around the Internet. While this was published early in 2004, and there are plenty of new sources for news today, the point of how news travels on the Internet still holds. His visual […]

Can You Visualize the Web?

If you could see the web, what would it look like? I was recently asked, “What does the web look like?” This inspired me to find out what it might look like if we could see the web and Internet, all the interconnected parts and pieces that create the spider web for which the “web” […]

Visual Impact of Hurricane Katrina

Some of you may know that we are also among the millions of refugees/evacuees from Hurricane Katrina. We’ve been in Atlanta for over a week now, waiting for the electricity and water to be turned on and the roads to be cleaned up back in Mobile, Alabama. Where we are staying, we have had no […]

WordPress School: Shortcodes

WordPress shortcodes are abbreviated code placed into the WordPress Visual or Text Editors that expands into a larger code structure. As we continue with Lorelle’s WordPress School free online course, it’s time to explore the basics of WordPress shortcodes. The following is the embed code for a Google Map, pointing to one of my favorite […]

Blog Exercises: Ingredients of a Well-Designed Site

I was asked by a student in my WordPress class recently what defined a “professional blog,” one that met all the criteria for a well-designed, well-formed site that met web standards. What a marvelous question! We brainstormed all the elements that make up a web standard site, and mixed in personal preferences of the students […]

WordPress School: The Links in WordPress

In Lorelle’s WordPress School free online course today we will explore the most important thing on the web: links. Specifically how WordPress automatically generates links on your site and how you can add these same links within the content and elsewhere on your WordPress site. So far in this course we’ve covered the topic of […]

Blog Exercises: Define Your Community

In this Blog Exercise, it is time to start building a community around your blog. If you have one, it’s time to re-evaluate it to ensure you keep it. We will start with defining your community. Your blog topic should give you a clear indication about demographics of your online community, but it might not […]

WordPress School: Excerpts

If you are following along with Lorelle’s WordPress School free online course you’ve been writing posts as part of the article series assignments and other assignments. Go to the front page of your site in the Twenty-Eleven WordPress Theme and take a look. Do you see long posts, one after another, and have to scroll, […]

WordPress.com Not Displaying Images

UPDATE: WordPress.com reports that they have fixed the issue but it will take time for the images to process as there have been millions of images uploaded during the past 12 hours. They recommend waiting patiently. Some sites may update immediately, some may take 24 hours, though it is likely to be less. Just keep […]

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 Basics Half Day Workshop at Newspace Photography Center, Portland

Saturday, September 12, 2015, I will be teaching “Building a Website with WordPress” at the Newspace Center for Photography in Portland, Oregon, from noon to 5PM. I know most of you in the Portland area will be heading to OMSI for the Maker’s Fair, but do that in the morning and spend the afternoon with […]

WordPress School: HTML and CSS Embedded Styles

In the next part of this mini-series for Lorelle’s WordPress School, we’re moving deeper into understanding how CSS works with HTML. These easy tutorials will give you the basic tools you need to learn to customize your WordPress site and work on WordPress Themes. We will be working more on the test HTML file and […]

WordPress School: HTML Inline Styles

In this mini-series for Lorelle’s WordPress School , we’re learning about HTML basics. I shared a little history and information to help you get started and gave you an HTML file that you will use in this tutorial. In the next tutorial, I covered some very basic HTML elements found in the test HTML file. […]

WordPress School: HTML Tags

The last lesson was the HTML and CSS Tutorial, another mini-series on Lorelle’s WordPress School. This is a very basic tutorial on HTML and CSS to prepare you for WordPress site customization and WordPress Themes. This tutorial in the series will help you understand the basics of an HTML tag, the architectural code wrapped around […]