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, […]

Blog Exercise: New Years Reboot, Restart, Kick Ass

“It’s that time of year when the world falls in love…” The Christmas Waltz by Jule Styne and Sammy Cahn I’d like to think that New Year’s thinking includes bringing back the love to your blog. You might not think that, but let’s go with that belief as we continue with this year’s Blog Exercises. […]

Blog Exercises: Which Stats Matter

In this ongoing series called Blog Exercises, let’s explore the stats that matter, the ones you should be paying attention to on your site and off. On your site, you should be paying attention to: Most Popular Posts: Are your most popular posts related by topic? If so, there is clearly a driving interest in […]

Blog Exercises: Blog a Conversation

In this ongoing series called Blog Exercises, today you will blog a conversation. “I don’t want to.” “Sure, you do.” “Nah. Don’t want to.” “This is a chance to improve your blogging.” “Uh-huh.” “This is a change to improve your writing skills.” “Nope.” “You will do it because I said so. Got it?” “Okay.” Writing […]

Blog Exercises: Are You Trending?

In social media, trending are topics attracting the attention of most of the people, thus popular. Unfortunately, trending topics are self-feeding, an accident along the highway where everyone wants to slow down and take a look. Then they want to tell others about it so they can look. Walking by a student glued to their […]

Blogging Tools: Jing Screen Capture and Video

One of my favorite blogging tools – okay, tool I use for teaching, writing, and research – is Jing by Techsmith. It’s a must-have tool for bloggers and blogging. Jing is free. It allows capturing still images (screenshots), basic video, and animation, and allows you to share them on the web or save them to […]

Lorelle on WordPress, Blogging, Social Media, and Web Publishing

WordPress WordPress School Blogging Blog Exercises How may I help? Blogging News, Blogging Tips, Web Browsers, Writing, Web Design, WordPress News, Classes, WordCamps, WordPress Events, WordPress Plugins, WordPress Themes, WordPress Tips, WordPress.com

Web Writing HTML Entities Cheat Sheet

Over the years I’ve copied and saved HTML Character Entities that I use on a regular basis, and I thought I’d share my cheat sheet. These are important to me as a technical web publisher specializing in writing blogging and WordPress tutorials, so I’ve explained why and how I use them in the table below. […]

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. […]

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 […]

The Web is All About The Writing

Reading “7 Things You Need to Know about SEO in 2014” from Compete Pulse, I was fascinating to read that “size matters:” Most blog posts range between 400 and 600 words, but the ideal length for highest ranking is actually around 1,500. Many still believe that a successful website is one that offers the information […]

Speed Blogging Tips and Techniques

The following are the workshop notes for my popular workshop on “Speed Blogging.” The workshop is designed to teach how to take charge of your website and keep the content flowing with enthusiasm over the long term by learning the shortcuts, tips, and techniques to speed up the process of blogging, allowing your blog to […]

Russia’s Bloggers Under Attack

If you haven’t been paying attention to one of the largest countries in the world is persecuting bloggers. I’ve written up a summary in the ClarkWP Magazine site produced by my Clark College WordPress students, “The New Blogger’s Law in Russia.” In December 2013, the Russian parliament passed a law to allow the blocking of […]

Blog Exercises: Eliminate Distracting Notifications and Alerts

I don’t know how it happened but my new smartphone decided to change my notification settings and now my day is punctuated constantly with peeps, gongs, pings, and beeps. Such noises might not be blogging related, nor appropriate for these blogging exercises – they are alerts to the business of blogging and tremendous distractions. These […]

Blog Exercises: When You Assume…

One of the class projects for my WordPress college course involved the students working together on a single broken post to find all the errors in the content. Typically, this is a quick test of their basic coding skills, but this quarter’s students are not typical. They are exceptional. The goal was to identify and […]