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 […]

WordPress School: Links

I’ve dreamed of teaching a class or workshop on nothing but links. Web links fascinate me. They are the connective tissue of the web, the glue that binds us all together in the virtual space, an economy in and of themselves, and links can save lives, they are that powerful. In Lorelle’s WordPress School free […]

Blog Exercises: A Link List Post to Dazzle Readers

In blog exercises on making lists and making your lists pretty, we worked on the links, understanding how they work and formatting your styles. In this blog exercise, I want to focus on the content within those links, the real reason people love those link lists. I’d like to cite my friends at Daily Blog […]

Blog Exercises: The Domino Effect

I recently created a domino effect on one of my sites. The Domino Effect is based upon the traditional game of domino pieces stacked standing upright in rows, typically in a straight or curved path carefully spaced close together. Knock over the first one and it falls against the second, and third, knocking down each […]

Blog Exercises: Creating Influential Connections

In “Why a Link Post Should Be Like Mingling at a Party,” my friend Jan of Circular Communication described it this way. Imagine you are at a party. You mingle and meet someone you know. You do not know her well, but well enough to appreciate her. You also have an idea what interests her, […]

Blog Exercises: Organize Your Content – The Sequel

In the previous blog exercise, “Blog Exercises: Organize Your Content,” you were to create a giant lists of all the posts you have published in a link list organized by topic. If you have been blogging for a while, that exercise may have taken some time and work. If you’ve been blogging a short time, […]

Blog Exercises: How to Respond to a Copyright Violation

While I know that you would never violate anyone’s copyright and publish other people’s content without proper citation or permission, there are hundreds of thousands who think that if it is on the web, it’s free to use and abuse. Accusations of copyright violations are big deals. Some top journalists, writers, photographers, musicians, software developers, […]

Blog Exercises: Connecting All the Pieces of Your Site Together

The concept of the World Wide Web is based upon linking, the web of connections that link web pages together like a spider web. There are external links, connecting one site to another, and intrasite links, connecting web pages together within a single site. Today’s blog exercise is focused on the latter, intrasite links. Intrasite […]

Blog Exercises: Sharing Without Context

I got a trackback to one of my posts yeseterday. I was so excited that someone thought what I wrote was worth sharing. Eager to read what they wrote about my article, I paused in my busy schedule to race to their site to find out if I’d changed a life, influenced them in some […]

Blog Exercises: Awesome by Association

In “Two WordPress.com Experts and One Series of Blog Work,” Kinna Reads featured myself and my friend, timethief of one cool site (lowercase intentional). I’m honored and grateful, but more importantly, I’m awesome by association. My friend, timethief, started blogging in 2005. When she switched to WordPress.com, her life changed as did mine and hundreds […]

Blog Exercises: How to Write about Something Someone Else Wrote

In the early development of the web, blogs were classified as echo chambers, vessels of redundant content as every original idea was shared, reshared, quoted, and spread across the web at rapid speed. Some estimates state that less than 2% of all the content on the web is original. It’s mostly regurgitation of the same […]

Blog Exercises: List Your Resources

In “Blog Exercises: What Are Your Reference Articles” your blog exercise was to identify your reference articles from within your site and list them on a Page or in a post as a reference list. Today’s blog exercise is to identify and publish your resources beyond your site, the reference material and sources you count […]

Blog Exercises: Trackbacks

Trackbacks are like an invitation to a party. It is also like legitimate gossip. Trackbacks are notes telling you that someone is talking about you. Trackbacks are part of the important connections that form the true sense of the “web” on the Internet. WordPress and most modern publishing platforms generate trackbacks automatically. As common as […]

Blog Exercises: Backlinks

Known as incoming links or referrer links, backlinks are links pointing from an external site to your site, directing their readers to you as a resource. Timethief of “one cool site blogging tips” describes backlinks as: Backlinks to your content are like votes for your blog. The more backlinks your blog receives the higher it […]