Welcome to Week Two and your new blog!

I will be creating a blogroll of all student blogs this session. Please add a comment to this post that gives us the web address/URL of your new blog. You can also use the comments here to find a classmate’s blog to visit and comment on for the last portion of your assignment.

Get blogging!

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!

Whenever I begin to help a new student or client with blogging, I ask them to answer three really important questions:

1. What is the intent of your blog?
2. Who is your audience for your blog?
3. What is your authority in your blogging topic?

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:

• Experience in developing over 20 commercial web sites for a blog on web design
• Retired attorney for blog on estate planning
• Stay at home father of two for daddy blogging
• Breast cancer survivor and nurse for blog on healthy living
• Fantastic sense of humor for a blog on finding the humor in our lives
• Mushroom forager for 5 years and amateur chef for a blog on edible mushrooms
• 15 years of indulging in your love of hand crafts, a keen eye and a creative mind for a blog on crafting
• Passion for the environment, problem solving aptitude and creativity for a blog on recycling goods into crafts

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:

• Repeat Traffic
• Feed Subscriber count
• Social Media Followers
• Twitter Mention

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:

• to keep coming back?
• to follow you around so they don’t miss what you have to say?
• trust you enough to share what you say with others?

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.

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In the spirit of full disclosure, I am writing this post to enter a contest sponsored by Cats Who Blog. I think contests can be an effective means of blog promotion and I applaud Cats Who Code for showing other bloggers the benefits of running a contest and offering Templatic premium themes as the prizes.

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!

• Blogging Basics with WordPress
• Blogging for Fun, Fame and Fortune
• PHP 101 for Web Developers
• Advanced Dreamweaver
• Twitter for Business and Pleasure

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!

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.

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.

Should I upgrade?

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.

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.

Welcome to Week Six: Tags and Categories with Lorelle VanFossen

In this week’s session, we’re going to talk about blog categories and tags.

As you go through the exercises listed below, use the following three step filter:

Your tags and categories must:

1. Group related content into “bodies of work”
2. Provide navigation to related content
3. Send a clear message about your blog’s content

As recommended in the tags and categories class notes, take each task one at a time before reading the next one.

• TASK 1: Make a list of all the words that describe your blog subject. List a minimum of 25 words or phrases.
• TASK 2: Cull down the list of descriptive words and phrases to 5-10 “groups” representing the words on the list.
• TASK 3: Edit your blog category list to represent the post content within each category.
• TASK 4: Edit your blog category list to represent keywords and search terms best representative of the post content within each category.
• TASK 6: Write FIVE blog post titles/ideas under each category.
• TASK 7: Re-examine your brainstorm list. These are now your post tags, the descriptive words that described the meta data of your post content. They are your blog keywords.
• TASK 8: List the tag words for the featured blog post content in the class document.
• TASK 9: Share the lessons learned about rethinking your blog categories here, on the boards, and/or on your blog and link us.
• Optional: Upload and share your Wordle image.

For more specifics, see the class notes.

Remember, a tag can be any link:

<a href="http://example.com/" rel="tag">Example</a>

Tags are the link text (anchor text):

<a title="Example of Example" href="http://example.com/" rel="tag">Example</a>

I’ve scattered some tag links throughout this blog post. Look at the page source code to see how many you can find.

Open for Discussion

I get a lot of questions about tags and categories. They are an often misunderstood bloggy beast. To start us off, here are two of the most common questions I am asked about tags and categories.

What’s the difference in WordPress between a tag and a category?

WordPress only supported categories for a long time, long before other blogging platforms offered them. When Technorati started their blog post taxonomy (tags) directory, tags for labeling content by micro data categorization came into popularity. By adding rel="tag" to any link, that link text became a tag.

WordPress Themes added the rel="tag" to categories soon afterwards, but resisted the notion of adding tags. Tagging post content is not as easy as it may seem. Tags are designed to not only categorize content, they must be searchable and able to be accessed in a variety of ways, such as related content (synonyms).

When tags were finally introduced to WordPress by popular demand, WordPress kept categories as tags and tags were tags, all identified by the rel="tag" as tags, since it didn’t matter to Technorati if the keyword was a tag or category – any link with that relevance attribute was a “tag.” WordPress users were very confused.

In general, WordPress creates a “search results” page listing the posts in chronological order when the user clicks upon a tag or a category. The page title changes, identifying it as a tag or category pageview, but the results are basically the same. If you are using a WordPress Plugin which displays post content using tags, such as related content, related post titles can be displayed on the post itself (usually in the post meta data area with the date and other information), or on the sidebar. Tag clouds are show on Pages or often found in the sidebar, header, or even the footer.

I use WordPress.com and do not want my tags to link to everyone’s content. How do I change that?

As a fellow blogger on WordPress.com, I totally sympathize. I’ve nagged the staff for years to permit global (off-site) and local (on-site) tagging options, but so far, the response has been to set all WordPress.com post tags to global only. The theory is that this increases the exposure of your blog content for those who search those tag pages or use those keywords.

Personally, I hate it and rarely use them. This means I have to manually create my own site search tags. I do so at the bottom of most of my blog posts using a JavaScript Browser Bookmarklet described in A Tagging Bookmarklet for WordPress and WordPress.com Users. The JavaScript creates a set of links with tag words that link to a site search of my site.

I recommend that if you are frustrated by the lack of a local tagging option, you join me in passing on your thoughts through the WordPress.com feedback.

Now, it’s your turn. How can I help you learn more about tags and categories and how to categorize and structure your blog post content?

Greetings current and potential students and alumni! It is time for me to start planning the topics to be covered for the November session of Blogging for Fun, Fame and Fortune. I have a bunch of ideas brewing from my experiences at WordCamp Portland and my experiences from organizing WordCamp Seattle but I want to hear from YOU!
Please add your suggestions, wants, wishes and desires to the comments of this post by October 16, 2009.

Its a new school year and a new set of student blogs are on the horizon.
Put the URL of your brand new blog in the comments and I will add them to the blogroll. I am always excited to see what you come up with!

A few weeks ago, I warned students about the necessity of keeping their WordPress blog updated. If your blog is hosted on wordpress.com, it is updated. This warning is for self hosted blogs. The latest version, WordPress 2.8.4, closes a hole in previous versions that allowed hackers to create a backdoor administrator account on your blog.

Unfortunately, a lot of WordPress bloggers did NOT heed the warning to update that appeared at the top of their blog administration panel. A serious attack has been launched this weekend and hundreds of blogs have already been affected. Mashable it doing their part to spread the word about this attack and the need to upgrade immediately to WordPress 2.8.4.

How serious is this threat? Lorelle VanFossen tells her readers to stop reading her post until the reader is sure that their blog is updated. Don’t worry about finding out if your blog is affected first. She instructs WordPress bloggers to do the update first, then take a look to see if the blog was compromised. Lorelle offer two clues to look for:

There are strange additions to the pretty permalinks, such as example.com/category/post-title/%&(%7B$%7Beval(base64_decode($_SERVER%5BHTTP_REFERER%5D))%7D%7D|.+)&%/. The keywords are “eval” and “base64_decode.”

The second clue is that a “back door” was created by a “hidden” Administrator. Check your site users for “Administrator (2)” or a name you do not recognize. You will probably be unable to access that account, but Journey Etc. has a possible solution.

What to do if your blog is affected?

These hacks are digging down deep into WordPress installations, even the database may be affected. The severity of the attack will determine how much work you have to do to eradicate it. Lorelle’s post details options and instructions on how to repair the damage. In addition, prevention is always the best route and Lorelle reviews some of the best measures to secure your blog. Even if you blog is not affected, it is well worth your time to review her advice on securing your blog.

Please note: I have seen a number of bogus registration attempts on blogs this past week. Even if your blog is up to date, you can help secure your blog by turning off the Anyone can register option. Go to Settings > Membership options to turn off this feature.