We’re famous! Jacques did an amazing article for us in The Columbian on Saturday in “Blogging pioneer blazes trail for WordPress at Clark College.”
Get your copies online and off. It’s snowing here so I’m not sure I can get off my mountain and across the river, so if someone can get me a couple extra copies, I’d really appreciate it. Get a bunch to send friends and family and put in your scrapbook! Congrats to all!!
I’ve put together a combination feed of all the Clark CTEC 280 Introduction to WordPress students blogs. If you would like to add it to your feed reader, copy this link and add it. To view the list (so far) of the student blogs, check out Clark College Student Sites.
For those worried about the issues of content ownership in regards to WordPress.com (as opposed to Facebook and others), here are the relevant sections from the WordPress.com Terms of Service which covers both your copyright protections as well as respect for the copyrights of others:
Section 8: Copyright Infringement and DMCA Policy. As Automattic asks others to respect its intellectual property rights, it respects the intellectual property rights of others. If you believe that material located on or linked to by WordPress.com violates your copyright, you are encouraged to notify Automattic in accordance with Automattic’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) Policy. Automattic will respond to all such notices, including as required or appropriate by removing the infringing material or disabling all links to the infringing material. Automattic will terminate a visitor’s access to and use of the Website if, under appropriate circumstances, the visitor is determined to be a repeat infringer of the copyrights or other intellectual property rights of Automattic or others. In the case of such termination, Automattic will have no obligation to provide a refund of any amounts previously paid to Automattic.
…By submitting Content to Automattic for inclusion on your Website, you grant Automattic a world-wide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, modify, adapt and publish the Content solely for the purpose of displaying, distributing and promoting your blog. If you delete Content, Automattic will use reasonable efforts to remove it from the Website, but you acknowledge that caching or references to the Content may not be made immediately unavailable.
The first Introduction to WordPress Class starts tomorrow at Clark College. If you are registered, read Preparations for the Clark College Introduction to WordPress and Introduction to WordPress Class 1: Getting Started to get ready! See you then.
Talk to the serious blogging and web publishing pros, the ones turning out brilliant content fast, and you will find that they all have one thing in common. They write with HTML.
Writing with HTML in WordPress isn’t complicated nor does it require a degree in foreign languages or web development. We’re not talking about building a web page from scratch every time you publish. We’re only talking about the HTML that goes into the post content.
How much HTML do you have to learn? Only 10 HTML tags. That’s it. Less words than you probably know in Spanish or another foreign language.
The most commonly used HTML tags in the post content area are:
<a href="…">link</a><img src="…" /><h2>, <h3>, <h4>, <h5><p>Text here</p><strong> not <b> and Italic <em> not <i><ol> and <ul><blockquote> and <cite><br /><hr /><pre> and <code>How many of these do you use commonly in your blog posts? All of the ten? When was the last time you needed to put code in your blog post? Rarely, if ever. At most, you use 5 of these in most posts you publish. I think you can handle that.
The five are links, headings, bold and italic, lists, and blockquotes – unless you are a poet. Then add the line break to your collection for six easy to remember HTML tags.
Sure, there are more HTML tags you can use in the post content area, but these are the most common. Tables, font colors, etc., are rarely used and if you need to use them, you probably already know how.
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There are many ways to give back and support WordPress and WordPress.com, as an experienced user or a coder and developer. The WordPress Forums are the first place to begin.
There are two support forums for WordPress.
The WordPress.com Forums are dedicated to providing help to WordPress.com users. It is staffed by Automattic employees who monitor and moderate forum posts but a majority of the support comes from volunteers, fellow users who want to give back and help others but also learn more about how WordPress works.
The WordPress Support Forums are for those using the self-hosted version of WordPress or WordPress MS (Multisite). This is mostly a volunteer support forum where experienced users help others get their questions answered.
WordPress.com questions will not be answered on the WordPress.org forum, and the reverse is true. Questions must be posted (and answered) in the appropriate forum section as well.
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The following is the list of the articles in the series I’ve written on how to manage multiple authors and contributors with WordPress.
There are many ways to track the competition, from reading newspapers and magazines to checking them out on Alexa or other web stats and analytics sites.
Here are some articles referencing how to track the competition in a variety of ways including traditional media, social media, analytics, and legal spying.
Comparing your website to others means tracking their activity compared to yours. This might involve using an online tool that compares your site to theirs, or by checking each site individually and comparing notes. Some of the following will compare one site to another testing for a variety of data such as PageRank, keywords, traffic, and incoming links. Others will focus on a single aspect such as keywords or unique visitors. Use a variety of them to get an overall perspective on how your site compares to others.
Note: Google removed their PageRank data from the public a couple years ago. Online tools based upon Google’s PageRank data may no longer work or be supported. Please let me know if any of these are no longer active.
The following are SEO and analytics testing tools that cover specific types of testing. For example, BuiltWith tests the site and reports back with information on how the site was build, the publishing platform, supporting technologies, and other information about how the site was built.
The following are articles and sites specializing in analytics, SEO, and optimization.
This is going around the web and it’s a powerful statement:
I am responsible for what I say.
I am not responsible for what you understand.
It’s a simplified version of:
I know that you believe you understand what you think I said, but I’m not sure you realize that what you heard is not what I meant.
Robert McCloskey
Yet, it goes much further.
How does this relate to social media and web publishing?
The following resources are for those who develop WordPress Plugins and WordPress Themes and wish to release them to the public and include them in the WordPress official directories, WordPress Plugin Directory and WordPress Theme Directory.
It is highly recommended that you read “A Love Letter to WordPress Plugin Authors” with tips for WordPress Plugin and Theme authors on how to ensure your audience finds your WordPress goodness.
There are many ways WordPress can integrate into social media services and networks, and many ways you can integrate those same services and networks into your WordPress site.
You can also integrate Google Maps, Google Docs, Flickr, Tumblr, and a lot of other goodies into WordPress.
There are many WordPress Plugins that make the job easier, but this article is focused on how to do it manually both for the self-hosted version of WordPress as well as WordPress.com.
The following are links to resources with more information on WordPress 3.3, the next release of WordPress due the second week of November 2011.
There will be times when you will want to create a feed to add to your feed reader from a site that doesn’t have a feed so you can monitor the site for changes, updated, or new content. Here are some free, online feed creation services to try. Not all create feeds from sites without feeds equally, so experiment with these to find the right one.
In general, you will want to provide the “front” page or the page with the most active content you wish to follow. For example, if you wish to only follow the WordPress information from a specific site and not the rest of their content, then you would create a custom feed for their WordPress category, subdomain, or search results.
These are not meant to replace the feeds provided by websites but to use them on sites without feeds.
Rule Number One: Ask first, they might say yes.
If it is on the web, it isn’t free.
If it is on the web, it could be free.
Everything on the web was created by someone. It took hard work. It took time, sometimes a lot of time. Hours, days, weeks, months, possibly years.
Everything on the web is copyrighted and someone owns that copyright. It is up to them to decide what those rights are.
They might want to share what they’ve created with the world but only on their space.
They might want to share it for free for use by others and allow it to be used by others as long as credit in the form of links stays with it.
They might want to share only a small bit with a link as credit for use by others. They should tell you how much they will allow to be shared before it is considered plagiarism and copyright infringement. This is called Fair Use. If in doubt, use no more than 10% or 400 words.
They might want to give it away and not care if it is linked, credited, or changed.
It is up to the copyright holder to set the terms of the sharing, copying, and usage, but understand they don’t have to. Always look for their copyright policy, usage license, or Creative Commons license and permissions to verify the rights of the copyright holder. Anything published and shared on the web is owned and controlled with all rights and usages to the copyright holder. Treat it fairly within the rules of Copyright Fair Use.
This applies to written content, pictures, graphics, images, designs, web art, web templates, web designs, video, animation, photographs, audio, podcasts, music, illustrations, artwork, downloadable files, and any other content on the web. It’s all copyright protected. Continue reading
A while ago I ran across the Yahoo Pipes Social Media Fire Hose, a script written with Yahoo Pipes by Joseph Kingsley. If you want to track yourself, your blog, your brand, or any keyword or phrase across the web, especially by social media sites, this is the tool for you.
The Yahoo Pipes Social Media Fire Hose searches across Twitter, Flickr, Friendfeed, Digg, various search engines, and even includes blog comments. It creates a custom feed you can then add to your feed reader.
Originally created for public relations, advertising, and marketing tracking across the online social networks and media, this is a great way to find out what others are saying about you and your blog, your brand, or anything. I’ve been using it to track information on WordPress such as WordPress Tips, WordPress Plugins, and WordPress Themes, as well as my name, blog name, and URL and feedback from various blogs I work for and with.
Learning from Lorelle 