Blog Resources for English Language and Blog Writing

I blog in English and it behooves me to get it write – okay, at least once in a while. The challenges I face as a writer are not just generating ideas but finding the write way to convey those ideas. I frequently need to check the spelling or definition of words I come up […]

Blogging Challenge: Favorite or Worst Writing Boo Boos

I have a horrible habit. It’s not really a habit as much as a constant boo boo. I type exceptionally fast and frequently hit the space bar before the letters slip off my fingers, creating memorable combinations of letters to spell “the” like hte, t he, theo, and eth? I’m also quite renown for quiet […]

Posts and Articles I’m Proud of Writing

I know it’s blatant bragging, but I have never gotten blase about reading an article I wrote and finding it not only good but awesome. How can I explain this better? See, I really don’t think that what I write is very important or even very interesting, though people tell me that it is all […]

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 […]

The Top 10 Clues That You Are an Amateur Blogger

This post could be also called “The Top 10 Most Common Writing Errors” or “The Top 10 Mistakes Writers Make”, but I thought “The Top 10 Clues That You Are an Amateur Blogger” was more appropriate. Because, if you want to have your blogging taken seriously, then you need to sit up and pay attention […]

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: HTML and CSS References and Resources

In “9 Truths That Computer Programmers Know That Most People Don’t” by Macleod Sawyer, he quotes Ben Cherry and adds the following after: “Under the hood, most critical software you use every day (like Mac OS X, or Facebook) contains a terrifying number of hacks and shortcuts that happen to barely fit together into a […]

WordPress Publishing Checklist

The following is a brief summary of the workflow to publishing content in WordPress. Print this out to remind yourself of each step in the process. Consider this your checklist to review before publishing every post until you become accustomed to the process. This is your guide to the WordPress publishing process. This guideline is […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

The Future of Blogging – With a Glimpse Backwards

In “What’s next for blogging: I try to predict the future” by Yesterday’s news, the author, a Creative and Professional Writing Major at Bemidji State University in Minnestoa, used fantastic visuals to take us on a journey through the development of blogging and the blogging industry for a class on blogs and wikis. She makes […]

What You Most Need to Know About WordPress

At the recent WordCamp Portland 2012, I was asked by several attendees to cover the basics of WordPress and we came up with What You Most Need to Know About WordPress. Here are the “notes” from that unconference presentation. The Difference Between Categories and Tags I hear this question at WordCamps, from readers, students, and […]