Now that you have spent some time looking at blogs and planning your blog, it is time to create one!
In the comment section, please tell us the URL of your new blog. I will add it to the blogroll so other students can check it out. Don’t worry if you starting a “practice” blog. I will update the blogroll when you are ready to update your blog.
WordPress is a great blogging platform, but with WordPress 3.0 you can create a complete and fully functional web site that is easy to update and customize, even without knowing HTML! Its true the more you know about HTML and PHP, the more sophisticated and exacting you can make your customization, but WordPress 3.0 makes your customizations easier to upgrade with future versions of WordPress.
TwentyTen Theme
New default theme called Twenty-Ten. For years the Kubrick theme has been the default theme for WordPress and it worked well in the day. Kubrick has been showing it’s age and it doesn’t show off the new features available in WordPress 3.0. Twenty-Ten boasts:
- clean and bold design
- wider format to match the wider screens available today
- sidebar AND footer widget areas
- custom header
- custom background
Set your featured image
Easily set your featured image for your post at the media gallery.
Classes start on May 15, 2010. Registration deadline was May 12, midnight. Late registration is available with for a $5 late fee. Request late registration for any LVS Online course via the late registration link.
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Your mom has taught you so much over the years. Acknowledge the lessons that she has taught you with fun lessons that let her explore her creativity or learn technology skills in an enjoyable and entertaining way. The motto at LVS Online is “Where Learning is Fun!” and the instructors take that very seriously. Consider a Mother’s Day gift certificate to the class of mom’s choosing. Registration is open now through May 12th with classes starting on the 15th.
LVS Online has dozens of classes to choose from!
LVS Online has a class for almost every interest and level of learning. All classes are conducted online with easy to print out lessons. The courses are instructor led, an instructor is available to answer students’ specific questions on the class message boards where students share their assignments and their questions. Lessons are posted weekly but students work at their own pace. A fun opportunity to learn new skills with other students from around the world!
Give the gift of learning and FUN!
You might have heard of my friend and blogging consultant, Chris Garrett. He wrote the ProBlogger
Chris has a new ebook out that tells you everything you need to know to get quality authority links and a boost in traffic, all through a quick and easy approach to guest blogging. I have been encouraging my Blogging for Fun, Fame and Fortune students to pursue guest blogging. It can be a very effective means of increasing blog traffic and blog authority. Yet, it seems to be a hurdle that few students are willing to take a chance on and leap boldly over. I am hoping that if you take the time to read Chris’ ebook on guest posting that you will gain the confidence and strategy to try guest posting for yourself.
Right now he is offering it for the crazy low introductory price of only $10. The price has already increased once, and is sure to go up again as the reviews and testimonials start to pour in, so make sure you grab your copy and check out all the bonuses fast.
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Students registering for the January session of the blogging studio course, Blogging for Fun, Fame and Fortune will have the opportunity to win a free premium theme from StudioPress. Over the holidays, StudioPress had a contest for a free premium theme and I won! Lucky me 
I already have a Pro Plus All Theme membership for my freelance work so I already own all of the themes. So, I asked permission to transfer the theme to a lucky student and StudioPress graciously agreed. On January 16, I will randomly select a student from the Blogging for Fun, Fame and Fortune class to receive a free premium theme. The lucky student will be able to select any theme from StudioPress that best meets their needs.
In the Blogging Basics course, we focus on the widely available free themes but there are some situations where a premium theme can be advantageous. This is particularly true for photoblogs and for when you want your blog to be an integrated part of your web site. You can utilize WordPress to control your entire web site with one of these quality themes.
These themes retail for an average of $60, so don’t miss out on this opportunity. Registration closes on January 6th, so register at LVS Online today!
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Whenever I begin to help a new student or client with blogging, I ask them to answer three really important questions:
The authority question is almost always the hardest for people to answer. In other words, why would other people want to read what you have to say. I recognize that it can be an intimidating question to answer but it is a crucial one. Let’s get the intimidation part out of the way first.
Authority doesn’t necessarily mean a bunch of alphabet behind your name and titles. It does mean getting clear about your strengths and your goals. Here are some examples of authority:
As you can see from the examples above, authority can take many forms. Appropriate and effective authority will vary according to your blog intent and audience.
Once you have outlined your intent, audience and authority, how do evaluate the effectiveness of your authority? That was an interesting question posed by a young 17 year old guest blogger Lianne in her post Does your blog speak authoritatively? for Cats Who Blog. She answers with the following, for traditional blogs and for the micro-blog Twitter:
Traffic and subscriber counts are traditional means of monitoring blog progress and impact but with the increasing importance of social media, those two factors are no longer sufficient to measure your authority. Translate the word authority into trust.
How much do your readers trust you enough:
Cats Who Blog is a relatively new web site, an offshoot of Cats Who Code, one of my favored web development tip and tutorial web sites. I am verifying their authority because I subscribe to their feed, follow on Twitter and used one of their blog posts to anchor my own (called pingback). All of those things validate Jean-Baptiste Jung’s authority in creating those two blogs.
UPDATE:
Didn’t get registered before classes started? No worries! You can register late through 1/16. There is a $5 late registration fee and you must use this link to register.
What are your New Years’ resolutions? Is this the year that you are going to start that blog, build that web site or figure what in the heck Twitter is all about? If so, I have a class for you!
Classrooms open this week and the first lessons will be posted on Saturday, January 9. Lessons are posted each week during the six-week course and you work at your own pace, at a time that is convenient for you. Instructor guidance and support is available via the class message boards. Classes are only $30 for students new to LVS Online and they are only $24 for returning students.
Registration deadline is January 6, 2010
Hope to see you in class!
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WordPress 2.9 has been eagerly anticipated by bloggers seeking image management improvements. WP 2.9 does boast some cool new image tools but as Matt Mullenweg points out:
This is the first wave of our many planned media-handling improvements.
In other words, like a kid the day after Christmas, I can choose to delight in what I did get or I can lament about what didn’t end up in my stocking. Don’t worry, there is plenty to appreciate in WordPress 2.9.
The new image features in WordPress 2.9 will please those of you that love to populate your blogs with lots of images. Now you can do some rudimentary image editing such as cropping, rotating, flipping and scaling, all inside of WordPress. They have also made the built in image gallery much easier to use by allowing you to easily add images from other blog posts to this image gallery. Dynamic image resizing and more image functions will be implemented in WordPress 3.0, which is scheduled for late spring.
But some of the coolest things about this version of WordPress 2.9 may not be readily apparent to the basic user. That is because a lot of the changes are “under the hood” and are were implemented to make it easier for WordPress developers and theme designers to do some really cool things. Expect some development delay until these new plug ins and themes are ready for distribution. I am pretty excited about the possibilities!
As with many new releases on a complex program, there have been some glitches for some people in upgrading. Most of these issues are related to running PHP 4 instead of PHP5 on your web server. PHP 4 is no longer supported but many web hosts have been reluctant to upgrade to the current version of PHP. Other people are having problems with some plugins, particularly Twitter Tools. WordPress is working hard on a patch so expect WP 2.9.1 in the next couple of days.
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A lot of us dread to upgrade our software because of messages just like this
your attempt to edit this post has failed
Most often it is due to an incompatibility with a plugin. It appears that is the problem here as well. The very popular plugin Twitter Tools is the most likely culprit. If you see this message when you first try to save or publish a post in WordPress 2.9, the first thing you want to do is to de-activate the Twitter Tools plugin. That cleared up the problem for me.
A few people have reported this error with the All in One SEO plugin as well but it has not caused a problem on any of the 12 blogs that I manage. If you continue to have problems, deactivate ALL of your plugins. Then try to save a new post. If that works, reactivate your plug-ins until you find the source of your trouble.
What happened to WordPress 2.9 checking for plug-in compatibility? Well WordPress 2.9 does and lots of people have had no problems with the Twitter Tool plug in on their WordPress 2.9 blog. Alex King, the developer of Twitter Tools is hard with the WordPress developers trying to isolate the cause. I can tell you that this is one of the most difficult times to debug, when something works for most set ups but not for a small group of others.
WordPress 2.9 is a feature upgrade. It is not a security upgrade, which should ALWAYS be installed as soon as possible. You could wait a week or so for some of the dust to settle before upgrading. Many people will make that choice if it is a feature vs security upgrade, as it is in this situation. You can wait and take one of the blogging classes that start after the new year to have my assistance and guidance when you upgrade. Check out Blogging Basics and Blogging for Fun, Fame and Fortune to see which class is the best fit for you.
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I’ve been playing with words all my life, but no matter what genre I was engaged in, from limericks to legal thesis, there were always times of writer’s block. Recently I began blogging and I found this phenomenon followed me there as well. I’m honored that Bean has asked me to share about this issue, but frankly it’s most likely that she considers me an expert at drawing a blank. I’m not sure what worked best for the college papers I wrote as that was long ago and the memory’s fading. I just know that days would go by looking at the screen wondering “what now”. Somehow I met all my deadlines, but that was then. I also started a biography about a friend of mine, Midge who’d passed away many years ago only to encounter the same issue. Then, at a conference near Durango this fall, Rhonda relayed information that gave me an “aha” moment and broke that 10-year block. She was talking about Historical Fiction and my brain went “aha”! So although most of it will center around the antecdotes of her life, it will be historically accurate, but not exactly her life story. I may actually get that book done now.
In the Blogging Basics course there was instruction on this problem and several great links for ideas on combating the dilemma. After reading the bulk of the articles on writers’ block for bloggers, I began perusing the internet and was instantly attracted to this article on Overcoming Writers’ Block because of the humor of the author. Then, I began searching the whole website’s offerings and found a lot of informative and constructive help from clustering ideas to final completion and everything in between. If you’re serious about honing your skills, it’s a super place to check out.
Who knew that physical exercise could be the first step to overcoming writer’s block?
Susie was a student in last session’s Blogging Basics course, she is now blogging about approaching life and art with a playful attitude at LafnPlayground.
