Did you miss the previous part of this series? Part nine is here….
So tonight was the last meeting of the WordPress class I took this quarter and have blogged about many times. It’s a bittersweet feeling, ‘cos it was such a great class and great people. We’ll never be all together in that combination again, you know? I’ll see most of them in other classes here and there since we’re all doing Web degrees, but this particular class will never be again. Continue reading
(Again, reblogged from the Clark WP site.)
Welcome to part two! Did you have a nice intermission?
Here in the second act we will cover the last few general tips I have for you to make your content sing out like the proverbial fat lady. Because, remember: you may have composed the grandest aria ever but if your presentation is scrawny and slim, nobody can hear it. So let’s continue to make your presentation gloriously obese!
It must be over!
No, no. We’re just getting started! Continue reading
I got another award!
My friend V, from The Verbal Spew Review did this to me. That is, bestowed the Versatile Blogger award upon my head. Again, I am excited and confused. Yes, this is two awards in one year. So far…*heh heh* Continue reading
(Reposted from my WordPress class site.)
So you’ve thought of the perfect post, have you? You’ve been gifted with the golden idea, the one that will go viral and lift your blog up into the Internet heavens! It’s fully formed in your mind and it’s just a matter of getting it into your trusty WordPress text editor and then published onto your page.
Hold on just a second, sparky. Your new composition may be the best thing since the last time you wrote something, but it won’t make the same impact if you don’t craft your post with care. Content is not everything, my friend. It is only the beginning. Continue reading
That’s right. The quarter at Clark College is almost over, and with it the WordPress class I’ve been blogging about in this series.
Check out my previous post here:
WordPressin’8
Lorelle has already given her last lecture, which was about Writing for the Web and Horse Sex. Specifically, the story of horse sex was about the post that drove most of the traffic to her blog and it was a hilarious tale. The moral was be careful what you post and what you want your blog to be known for. Sorry. That moral isn’t as funny as the story itself, but it’s really not my tale to tell, it’s Lorelle’s. Take her class someday and you might hear it! Continue reading
*This article is part of a series! Collect them all!
This is Lorelle VanFossen. She’s damn glad to meet you.
So this week on WordPressin’ we are going to let Lorelle take over. For those of you who don’t know, Lorelle VanFossen has been involved with WordPress since its inception as a consultant and early tester. She has been blogging since before “blogging” was a word. She has published many books and is a featured speaker at WordPress and blogger events all over the world. Here at Clark College, we are very lucky to have her guiding us through this class as her expertise and passion is unmatched. It is exhausting but rewarding to take a class with her. I can’t say enough, so I’ll stop(for now).
Entering the fourth week of the WordPress class with Lorelle, I feel I have a tangible growth of technical knowledge about what the WP site can do for a blogger. Normally, tangible growths are not a good thing. But this one seems to be expanding my mind, so we’ll see how it goes.
(This article is in a series! If you missed the first two, click here for part one, and here for part two. Click nothing to continue reading part three….)
Though I’m in my second quarter of Web Dev courses, I still feel more like a writer than a coder. All the programming minutiae are seeping through my layers of tech-idiocy, but its still not intuitive to me. I’m still stuggling to do simple screen captures and the like. So the article I’m working on for our class site is distinctly more text heavy than the other students. Theirs are loaded with snazzy graphics and even animations that I grasp how to do mentally, but wrestle with in practicality. Beginning to wonder if I’m wrong in my approach to this degree.
So in a post last week, I wrote about my WordPress class. I told you that it’s the first of its kind that counts towards a degree and that makes all of us students pioneers and such. How cool is that? Click this to read or re-read that post. What I’ve yet to talk about is what we actually are doing in the class.
It’s been two weeks. Each student has put up a website for the class and posted a bunch of stuff. Each post has a particular purpose such as making headings, lists, linking images, making a picture gallery, a poll, etc. The posts aren’t terribly entertaining is what I’m saying, but they’re practical and useful. I’ve been blogging on WP for about four months, but I’ve kind of been glossing over all the cool things you can put in a blog and just posting without knowing all that I can do. So yeah, this course is great for me. And our instructor is an amazing lady named Lorelle Van Fossen, whose passion about blogging and WordPress is pretty damned contagious.
Here’s my class site if you’re interested. You’ll notice its language is clean. Not that I’m all that bad here, but I do slip in a fuck and the like when I feel it’s appropriate. On the classy blog, I’m doing my best to refrain from dirty talk.
I won’t detail all the assignments here. That’s just not that enthralling a read. Besides, I’m sure there are better sites for WordPress tips and the like. My main purpose here is to relate my feelings and observations on this class as a whole. The journey has been very helpful to me so far. But I felt like I would just breeze through, right? Miss Lorelle had other ideas….
Turns out the class is going to produce another blog as a group. Kind of a big project! This one will be for and associated with Clark College, but I believe that eventually it will be viewable by anyone on WordPress. Essentially it will be an online resource with articles about how to do virtually anything on WordPress. I’m thinking of it as an internet magazine. We’ll be covering everything you can do on WordPress and articles have been assigned to each one of us that relate to a particular aspect of the site. The Clark WP blog will be for future students of this program as well as for us now. Lorelle’s so excited about this project. She feels it can be huge. We’re no longer feeling the breeziness, but that’s a good thing! At this point, everyone’s still working on their first articles so there’s nothing to really see yet.
Just a couple paragraphs ago, I stated there are probably better sites than mine for real WP tips and such. That is exactly what the class is going to create! We’re basically hoping to make this Clark College blog one of the best WordPress resources on the web, and we hope it will be used by everyone, not just students. Anyone who blogs on WordPress will benefit from checking out our site. So stay tuned. It will be packed with goodies very soon and I’ll let you know more.
So right now I’m at Clark College in Vancouver, WA, sitting in a WordPress class which I’m taking as a requirement for a Web Dev degree. It’s about ten minutes before class starts, so of course I’m starting a blog. I felt this course would be a breeze since I’ve been blogging on WordPress for about four months already. Surprise! (It is a breeze.) Okay, but we’ve only had two classes so far, mostly covering the history of WordPress and how to log in to WordPress. Basically, I’m still waiting for the class to get good.
The instructor is a fabulous lady named Lorelle VanFossen, who has been with WP from the beginning days and has about a gajillion blog posts to her credit. I feel like I should highlight quotes from her in red type, like the New Testament does the words of Jesus. She’s that fucking good. I’ll compromise by just putting her words in bold type. I’m sure by the end of this course I’m going to learn how to grow my fanbase. All the way from my current 48 to a mighty 55. Maybe even 60.
I think I’ll start a series about this class. Since I decided I need to post more than one blog a week (even if no one is reading, ha) that should help pad my content. And other people on WordPress may have some interest in what Lorelle has to say. So we’ll see how that goes.
Just to let you know, this class is historical. Oh yeah. It’s the first time anywhere that a course on WordPress has been offered as a required part of a degree curriculum. So there’s that. Pretty coool.
PS: The next day…
The class got good last night! Next time, I’ll tell you about the exercises we’re doing. Lorelle went into drill sergeant mode tonight. Give me a two-hundred word post with three images and a link. You’ve got twenty minutes, dirtbags! Go!
See you next time…
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