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 […]

WordPress School: Week 9

Welcome to week 9 of Lorelle’s WordPress School free online course. Last week, we covered: WordPress School: Pageviews WordPress School: Polls and Surveys WordPress School: How to View a Web Page Source Code WordPress School: Image Lessons WordPress School: Image Lessons – Introduction WordPress School: Header Art Images WordPress School: Text on Images WordPress School: […]

WordPress School: Call-to-Action Graphic Images

In this mini-series of lessons on creating images for your WordPress site, we’ve covered the basics, experimented with two ways of creating header art from scratch and with text overlaying a photograph, and learned how to put text on images for quotes and other purposes. Today’s image lesson in this series is about creating a […]

WordPress School: Text on Images

In this mini-series of lessons on creating images for your WordPress site, we’ve covered the basics and experimented with two ways of creating header art from scratch and with text overlaying a photograph. This tutorial covers creating a quote graphic, words over an image used to showcase a quote or to display an image with […]

WordPress School: Header Art Images

In the first article in this mini-series on learning how to create images for WordPress header art, call-to-action images, and add text to images for your site’s design elements, I covered the basic tools and materials you will need for these tutorials. In this tutorial, you will learn simple basics for header art, specifically how […]

WordPress School: Image Lessons

I’m often asked by students in the college degree programs of web development and web design how much familiarity and expertise do they need with images. “Do I need to learn PhotoShop and Illustrator?” The truth? You need to know more about images and graphic design than you would ever imagine. Web design and development […]

WordPress School: Header Art

It is time to begin to customize the design elements of your test site in Lorelle’s WordPress School free online course. We begin with the header art in the Twenty-Eleven WordPress Theme. When you set up your WordPress test site for this course, you were instructed to set the WordPress Theme to Twenty-Eleven as it […]

WordPress School: Image Preparation

In the assignment for Lorelle’s WordPress School free online course today and over the weekend, you are to work on preparing images for uploading to WordPress. You will be adding a variety of images to your WordPress test site such as images to accompany your posts and Pages, portraits, images for galleries, design elements, sidebar […]

Blog Exercises: Taking Inventory on What Keeps You Blogging

The recent major desktop computer crash has left me reeling. I thought I had all my data backed up. For the most part, I did. What I didn’t have backed up was my programs. Getting back up to speed fast, I’ve had to prioritize the programs I had download and install. Yes, download. Who gets […]

Blog Exercises: Make a List of Everything on Your Site

Today’s blog exercise will require a little time, magnifier, and a score card. Well, maybe not one of those items. I want you to grab a piece of paper and load up the front page of your site in a browser. Zoom in so you can really see it up close and personal. Start counting. […]

Blog Exercises: Mashups

One of my favorite odd-ball mashups is the movie Moulin Rouge! Released in 2001, the movie features Nicole Kidman, Ewan McGregor, and an outstanding cast of top notch actors singing their way through a Bollywood-style production set in a 1899 France cabaret. There are few original songs in the film. Instead they used pop songs […]

Blog Exercises: I Thought You Would Appreciate This Gratuitous Picture

For many years it was thought that every post published on a blog had to feature a gratuitous image, some photograph that would lure people to click through and read the article. The myth perpetuated itself, which myths tend to do, and many still publish content with gratuitous imagery. A gratuitous image is one that […]

Blog Exercises: Fix Images in Your Content

One of the most popular help requests on the WordPress forums is how to make the post text wrap around images. I wrote “Wrapping Text Around Images” in the WordPress Codex as a starting point many years ago. I explain it further in “How to Add Images in Your Post Content” on Lorelle Teaches, going […]

Buttons, Bows and Badges for Your Blog

I used to have a sidebar overloaded with a ton of buttons, badges, icons, and bows, linking to feeds, feed readers, site submission services, links, social networking services, translations, and other goodies. Want some buttons and bows, and a few icons and badges associated with blogging and online social social networking? I’ve uncovered a wide […]