Food Blogger Mania » Daily Post

Blogging U. for Photography: Developing Your Eye

BucciaDiArancia — Mon, 11 Jul 2016 17:22:55 +0000

Lots of us like to share photography on our sites, so we’re excited to add two photography courses to the Blogging U. library!

These free 10-day courses help you sharpen your visual eye so you can create a beautiful photoblog, enhance your website with images, or just get more comfortable with your camera (or all three!). Use a big fancy DSLR, a cameraphone, or anything in between — everyone is welcome.

Developing Your Eye I

Developing Your Eye I introduces you to the fundamentals of photography. You’ll get an email each day pairing a theme to inspire your image with a related shooting tip. We may ask you to consider composition or image orientation one day, or experiment with color on another.

Developing Your Eye II

Want to keep shooting? Developing Your Eye II offers ten more days of themes and tips. Experiment with light and motion, learn to lightly edit your images, and more. We’ll build on the tips and practices from the first course, but it’s not a prerequisite — you can take this first, or as a stand-alone course.

Both courses are based on our previous Photo 101: A Photo a Day four-week course. For more info about Blogging U. and how it works, check out these FAQs.

Looking for other photography resources? Check out a roundup of four of our favorite photo-focused themes, or explore the “Craft of Photography” category over on The Daily Post.

Get started

Start and stop these courses whenever works for you. To get started, visit the Blogging U. homepage and click the “Sign up” button next to the course you’re interested in, or visit the course pages (Developing Your Eye I | Developing Your Eye II) and click the “Sign up for this course” button. You’ll get a welcome email immediately, then your first assignment ten minutes later.

Not interested in photography? There are a range of other Blogging U. courses for you to choose from:

Enjoy!

Filed under: Better Blogging, Photos

Blogging U. for Photography: Developing Your Eye

Mariapia — Mon, 11 Jul 2016 17:22:55 +0000

Lots of us like to share photography on our sites, so we’re excited to add two photography courses to the Blogging U. library!

Developing Your Eye I

Developing Your Eye II

Both courses are based on our previous Photo 101: A Photo a Day four-week course. For more info about Blogging U. and how it works, check out these FAQs.

Looking for other photography resources? Check out a roundup of four of our favorite photo-focused themes, or explore the “Craft of Photography” category over on The Daily Post.

Get started

Not interested in photography? There are a range of other Blogging U. courses for you to choose from:

Enjoy!

Filed under: Better Blogging, Photos

Make the Most of Our New SEO Settings Panel

BucciaDiArancia — Thu, 02 Jun 2016 17:55:40 +0000

WordPress.com has always taken care of your site’s search engine optimization (SEO) behind the scenes. Whether you have a free site or paid plan, we index your posts and pages so that the Googles and Bings of the world can easily find them. Many of you, however, have requested more hands-on control over your site’s SEO — so we’re thrilled to introduce a new SEO settings panel to your dashboard.

When it comes to attracting viewers via search engines, nothing beats publishing high-quality posts on a regular basis. But there are also a number of technical settings that can have an impact, and our new panel gives you easy access to and control over these settings.

When you’re working on your site in the WordPress.com dashboard (access it by going to My Sites in the top-left corner of the screen), head to the Settings page and you’ll see a new SEO section.

This section contains three items: Front Page Meta Description, Site Verification Services, and XML Sitemap. Read on to learn how they can help with your site’s visibility.

Front Page Meta Description

For the first time on WordPress.com, you now have the ability to edit the meta description that search engines detect for the front page of your site. Previously, we used the site’s tagline as the front page meta description.

Meta descriptions are a general overview of the contents of your site. Search engines sometimes use this information to display a description of the site for specific searches, so adding one allows you to craft a message that emphasizes your site’s content and purpose.

Still not quite sure what a meta description does? Here’s an example of how it works on our blogging-resources site, The Daily Post:

Text entered into the Front Page Meta Description box.

A Google search result showing the meta description.

As for the rest of your pages and posts, meta descriptions are pulled from the excerpt field.

Site Verification Tools

WordPress.com comes with built-in stats that give you ample information about your traffic. If you’d like even more stats, some search engines and social networks offer additional “webmaster tools” that may complement the data you see here.

We’ve made it easier for you to verify your site with several services (for detailed instructions on site verification, read our step-by-step instructions). All you need to do is copy the HTML verification tag from any of the platforms listed below, and paste it into the corresponding field:

Site Verification Tools

We currently support the following services:

XML Sitemap

Your site has always had an XML sitemap, but now you’re never more than a couple of seconds away from finding it!

Sitemaps are special-format pages that let search engines know what pages exist on your site and where to locate them. After you’ve verified your site using Google, Bing, or Yandex’s webmaster tools, you can submit your sitemap to those services so that search engines can easily find all the pages on your site.

Going through this step may help search engines index your site more quickly, as well as establish your authorship of original content in case your posts get syndicated or shared elsewhere on the web later on. Once you’ve added your sitemap, some of these services (including Google and Bing) will also be able to provide you with more information on your site’s performance.

Take Charge

With access to more SEO settings than ever, you have the ability to take charge of your site’s search engine success. If you’re interested in learning more about SEO on WordPress.com, visit our previous articles on the topic at The Daily Post, or check out some of the most frequently asked SEO questions.

Filed under: Dashboard, Features, New Features, Stats, WordPress.com

Make the Most of Our New SEO Settings Panel

Mariapia — Thu, 02 Jun 2016 17:55:40 +0000

This section contains three items: Front Page Meta Description, Site Verification Services, and XML Sitemap. Read on to learn how they can help with your site’s visibility.

Front Page Meta Description

Still not quite sure what a meta description does? Here’s an example of how it works on our blogging-resources site, The Daily Post:

Text entered into the Front Page Meta Description box.

A Google search result showing the meta description.

As for the rest of your pages and posts, meta descriptions are pulled from the excerpt field.

Site Verification Tools

We currently support the following services:

XML Sitemap

Your site has always had an XML sitemap, but now you’re never more than a couple of seconds away from finding it!

Take Charge

Filed under: Dashboard, Features, New Features, Stats, WordPress.com

Four Tips From Seasoned Bloggers

BucciaDiArancia — Wed, 04 May 2016 19:00:05 +0000

Some of the best blogging advice we hear is from you. On Discover, we publish interviews and profiles of bloggers around the world, who also impart their own tips on how they’ve gotten the most out of WordPress.com. If you’ve missed these interviews, not to worry — we’ve compiled some of the best bits of blogging wisdom here.

Join communities that sustain your interests.

When you start to click around, follow blogs, and fill your Reader with posts to read, you’ll discover that WordPress.com is full of many smaller communities. For example, some participate in black and white photo challenges led by blogger Cee, while others join our multimedia Discover Challenges, hosted every Tuesday.

Novelist Claire Fuller credits two communities on WordPress.com for supporting and influencing her: Friday Fictioneers, a group of bloggers that writes a weekly 100-word story inspired by a photograph (hosted on the blog of Rochelle Wisoff-Fields), and The Prime Writers, a community of writers who published their first book after age 40.

But it’s the community that I love the most — so inspiring and supportive. They’ll give constructive criticism when I need it and encouragement when something hasn’t gone right. And these are people from all around the world, most of whom I have never met.

— Claire Fuller on Friday Fictioneers

Get started: Looking for a community like these, but not sure where to start? Learn about supportive blogging groups, or browse the events and challenges on The Daily Post, which are hosted by fellow bloggers and listed by topics — like books, gardening, and music. Or tap into communities through tags, like #weekendcoffeeshare, in your Reader. (You can search for any tag in the Reader — results will appear if someone, somewhere, has added that exact tag to one of their posts.)

Automatically share your posts with the world.

Many of you share your posts far and wide, like Depression Comix artist Clay Jonathan, who casts a wide social net. With Publicize, let us do the sharing for you and push your new posts to Facebook, Twitter, and other services.

“If you build it, they won’t necessarily come,” says parenting blogger Emily Austin, who writes about motherhood and life at The Waiting. In her Discover interview, she gives solid tips on growing your blog and making meaningful connections, from guest posting to cross-posting to getting the word out on social media.

While WordPress.com has a thriving community of bloggers who are engaged and encouraging, I wanted to write the one blog that people who don’t read blogs would read. And to do that, I had to put myself out there via social media. It took me a ridiculously long time to get my act together and set up a Facebook page for The Waiting, but once I did, I realized I was doing myself a disservice not to connect with my community outside the walls of the blog. I now focus on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. When it came time to interview for my job, I was able to show my organization that I know how to drive engagement and connect with both established and potential readers and customers.

Get started: To set up Publicize, go to My Site → Sharing. You’ll see a list of services we currently support: Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Path, and Eventbrite. (If you like videos, follow along on this tutorial for connecting specifically to Facebook.) Click Connect next to a service and follow the steps to enable Publicize.

Organize your feeds with Reader lists.

In your Reader, you can keep up with the blogs you’ve followed in Followed Sites, our editors’ picks and features in Discover, and any tags you’ve followed under Tags.

You can also create Lists to organize your feed by topic or group, or create a blogroll of multiple lists, which is handy for people who read a lot, have varied interests, and love to share their recommendations. Ra, the writer and reader at Rarasaur, has built a following of loyal, engaged readers, as well as forged dear friendships offline, compiled in her Reader list, Blokin (short for “blog kin”).

In a recent interview, Ra describes what moves her when browsing and reading new posts.

I am a reader of many things — fictional novels, nonfiction documentations, graphic novels, magazines, poetry, everything — but blogs have the ability to offer perspectives not found anywhere else. I seek that sparkle. . . .

I’ll read something I don’t understand, or something I don’t agree with, or something I would never want in my own life — but I will move on, quickly, if it’s something I can’t feel.

As Ra suggests, there’s so much to read out there, so take control of your Reader to ensure you see the stuff that matters to you. For example, you can follow popular tags like photography (or follow tags on specialized photography topics), but why not curate your own list of favorite photographers? Or, if you’re really into photography, build a blogroll of photography lists across topics and groups, from film and analog enthusiasts to portrait and landscape photographers around the world.

Get started: In your Reader, scroll down to the Lists section. Click on the down-arrow next to Lists and then click on Add, which will prompt you to name your list and take you to the edit page where you can can build your list.

Find a theme that allows your work to shine.

Your site is your online home: a place where you welcome visitors, old and new. Visually, your site should represent you and present your work in the best possible way.

For photographers, this is especially important. At food blog Infinite Belly, husband-and-wife team André and Adélaïde Zollinger use the free and minimal Libre theme, which keeps the focus on their images of culinary creations and picturesque French landscapes.

Strong visual storytellers, André and Adélaïde offer photoblogging advice:

See what formats work best for your blog depending on your design and theme. We used to take a lot of pictures in landscape format but discovered that single portrait formats work really well for us to display large photographs and show details.

Get started: Explore hundreds of themes to find a design that’s right for you. Go to My Site → Themes to browse the Theme Showcase, and filter by “free” or “premium” or click More to narrow your search with filters (type of site, feature, layout, etc.). As André and Adélaïde advise, experimentation is key: consider everything from the orientation of your featured images to the number of columns (one, two, multiple) in a theme.

At Discover, we profile writers, artists, and photographers doing great things on WordPress.com. Read the latest interviews and stories in our Features section.

Filed under: Better Blogging, Community, Discover

Exploring Your Dashboard: Four of Our Favorite Tools

BucciaDiArancia — Wed, 30 Mar 2016 16:00:22 +0000

A few months ago, we launched a spandy-new post editor, updates to the WordPress.com Reader, and a WordPress.com desktop app. They’re all designed to make publishing and managing your sites easier, from more effective auto-saving to quicker creation of image galleries.

Have you discovered everything the new and improved WordPress.com can do? Here are four of our favorite tricks.

Preview your site on any device, right from your editor

As more people access our blogs from phones and tablets, it’s increasingly important to make sure yours looks good no matter how large (or small!) the screen. You can buy a dozen devices to test how your site looks, bug your friends to check your blog on their phones — or preview your site on different screen sizes from right in the post or page editor.

When you click “Preview” in the editor, you’ll see a few icons across the top of the preview pane:

Click the three highlighted icons, and you’ll be able to see the post (or page) on three different screen sizes: computer screen, tablet, and smartphone. Be confident that your words and images appear just as you intend, no matter the device.

Copy and paste for quick hyperlinks

Links are the lifeblood of the internet; they help us navigate within websites and discover new ones. There was already an easy way to create hyperlinked words (like this) with the “create link” button, but now you don’t need a button at all: just copy and paste.

Copy the URL you want to link to to your computer’s clipboard, then head into your post or page editor. Highlight the text you want to make clickable, and paste the URL directly over the highlighted text, as if you want to replace it. That’s it!

The highlighted text will be underlined and blue to let you know it’s a hyperlink. To change a link, move your cursor over the link and click the pencil icon; you’ll be able to edit the URL, and set the link to open in a new window. To remove the link, click the X. (And don’t worry: you can still use the link button if you’re more comfortable with that.)

Everyone loves a list

If you’re like me, you read a lot of blogs — and keeping them organized can sometimes be a challenge. Enter Reader lists, a way to group the blogs you follow. Only want to check out new posts from your favorite food blogs, or political analysts? Want to share all your favorite DIY sites with friends? Make lists!

Head to your Reader. In the left-hand column, click the down-arrow next to Lists and then click Add to open the list tools. Add a title and description; lists are public, so a description helps others understand what they’ll find. To add blogs to the list, paste in the URL of a blog you want to include and click Add (and this can be any site, not just WordPress.com blogs). Here’s a list we made with some of our favorite sketchers and illustrators:

(Love art or sketching? Follow the list!)

To share a list, copy its URL from your browser’s address bar. Paste it into a post, page ,or comment so your readers can follow along.

All your posts and pages, from any site

If you’ve got more than one blog on WordPress.com (or self-hosted sites that use the Jetpack plugin), you can manage posts and pages from across all of them from your WordPress.com dashboard.

Log in to WordPress.com and head up to My Sites in the upper left. Click on “Switch sites,” and then “All My Sites.” Once you do, you’ll be able to select Blog Posts or Pages to see every post and page you’ve created across all your sites:

Use the toggles at the top of the page to filter all your posts and pages — only look at drafts, see everything in your trash cans, or search for particular terms.

We use all four of these nifty features every day while working on Discover, The Daily Post, Longreads, and more.

Do you have a favorite dashboard trick?

Filed under: Better Blogging, Dashboard, New Features, WordPress.com