10 WordPress 2.7 Hacks That Make My Blog Totally Rock Out Blogging & Technology by Joel Wagner - April 20, 2009June 30, 20101 This post has absolutely nothing to do with teaching or education. It's totally about blogging. More specifically, WordPress. If you have not yet discovered the wonders of WordPress, I recommend checking it out sometime. With that disclaimer out of the way, I'll start out by listing the hacks that I have done, explaining why I did them, and then explaining how I went about adding them. Here goes: Added a featured article Put Featured & Latest images on home page only Thumbnails of all images in main and archive pages Moved most ads to search visitors only Added social media links to individual posts and searches Retweet button Reader submitted links page Added links to the footer and
Life Lesson 5: Blessed Are The Poor In Spirit General by Joel Wagner - October 15, 2008July 1, 20100 Today is Blog Action Day. The topic of choice for this year is poverty. I want to approach it from a completely different viewpoint than most of the bloggers are. I want to look at the spiritual aspect of poverty. And seeing the multitudes, [Jesus] went up on a mountain, and when He was seated His disciples came to Him. Then He opened His mouth and taught them, saying: "Blessed are the poor in spirit, For theirs is the kingdom of heaven." Matthew 5:1-3 (NKJV) Something that has become very evident to me over the past few years is just how self-centered I am. A lot of the time, I say selfish things as a joke, but I also realize
The End of Summer Blogging & Technology by Joel Wagner - August 1, 2008July 1, 20106 Well, my summer has come and gone. I want to first of all extend my appreciation to all of the bloggers who posted while I was out. I am interested in hearing some impressions of the little experiment from the community here. If you posted something (and even if you didn't), let me know if you enjoyed reading the other perspectives and the whole experience. I had an incredible trip. It was nice to get away for almost 10 days. But alas, high school summer band has started up now. With that goes my summer vacation. I am simply wrapping everything up now and getting things under control as the new school year rolls in. I will do a sort
The Blog Revolution On Hold General by Joel Wagner - May 12, 2008July 1, 20103 For reasons beyond my control, my blogging time will be extraordinarily limited this week (lots of concerts and exhaustion has begun to catch up on me). For these reasons, I will be putting the Blog Revolution Project on hold for this week. It will presumably resume again on Monday the 19th. Thanks for bearing with me. While you are waiting, I invite you to check out these outstanding blogs that have linked to my articles recently: Betty's Blog : Friends Resource for Bloggers Carnival - 12th Edition | My lucky number 13 Tag: I’m It! Guitar Building, The Daily Grind and a Lottery Wish at www.matthewktabor.com : Education and School Issues, News and Analysis A Little Personal « The
The Blog Revolution: Day 4 – Develop Your Writing Voice Blogging & Technology by Joel Wagner - May 8, 2008July 2, 20101 As we continue the Blog Revolution Project, we come to day four of our focus on writing. Today's article will focus on crafting your own personal style, develop your writing voice. Newer bloggers may have a struggle with figuring out exactly what approach they want to take with their blog. Think of your writing voice as your brand name. Lea Schizas has written some on this topic at Writing with Passion and Developing Your Voice and Brand Some common questions may include: How do I want to attack each post? What kind of a tone should I assume? What kind of audience should I expect? These are all normal. Let's look at these three questions a little bit
Parents, Students, And Teachers…Whose Right Is It Anyway? General by Joel Wagner - March 22, 2008July 2, 201010 Recently, I have come across a number of people writing about rights in the education sense. Some seem to pit parents, teachers, and students all against one another. Some seem to think that parents and students gang up against the poor teachers. Still others throw the wicked old administrators into the mix. It seems most of the bloggers I've read seem to have the teacher as the poor, mistreated, valiant hero against whom all the evil forces of society are lashing out. And then there are those who have it out for the Conservative Republican upstate hacks who call themselves "consultants" (see the comments on Matthew's blog). Whatever the case, it seems the discussion of parent-teacher relationships and dynamics bring
Entering the Twittersphere Blogging & Technology by Joel Wagner - March 8, 2008July 2, 20104 If you use Twitter, add me. I have been quickly glancing over blog posts about it lately, but never paid much attention. I see that more and more bloggers seem to be doing it. As I look at it, it seems much like Facebook and MySpace's status updates, so I'll go for it and see what happens. Some questions I have for my readers: Do you use Twitter? What do you do with it? Do you use it in the classroom? How?
Reflections on December and January Personal by Joel Wagner - February 2, 2008July 2, 20103 My life has changed quite a bit since December 1st. Today, I want to look back on some of the things that have happened in the life of this blog, as well as some things that have happened in the life of Joel. Blogging changes The number of readers continues to climb (164 as of Friday). It seems that the number is doubling every three to four months. If this growth continues, I'll be looking at a readership of somewhere around 300 by the end of the school year, and 600 by the end of 2008. I hosted the 148th Carnival of Education on December 5th, and the 152nd Carnival of Education on January 2nd. I launched my redesigned
Double Your FeedBurner RSS Numbers Overnight General by Joel Wagner - January 27, 2008May 29, 201612 This article is part of a Group Writing Project about Building RSS Numbers. I recently achieved the milestone of having 150 subscribers (I'm still hanging out in that area). In reaching that, I realize that many bloggers use Blogger to host their blogs and FeedBurner for their RSS syndication. That's a good combination (I much prefer WordPress, but Blogger can be simpler to set up). This post will serve as a simple tutorial to allow people in this situation to double their subscriber count overnight. If not overnight, then quickly to say the least. I've noticed that a lot of the bloggers who have this setup seem to have low subscriber counts. I noticed that Learn Me Good is still hanging out around
Weekend Wrapup 09/03/07 Blogging & Technology by Joel Wagner - September 3, 2007July 5, 20100 Labor Day edition. It's raining. I'm catching up on housework. And falling WAY behind on blogs. I am going to trim my RSS subscriptions this week so I can get through them more quickly. I hate it when Google Reader says I have 100+ articles to read every day. Life is too short to squander it all online. I have fallen out of touch with other bloggers because of time commitments. What I'm going to do with today's wrapup is send you to some friends around the web. Leave comments on their blogs. I find that leaving good comments on other blogs really helps out my blog as well. With this being said, I have turned comments off for this
The State of the Blog: 08/01/07 Blogging & Technology by Joel Wagner - August 1, 2007July 5, 201011 I took out nearly every advertisement from the site. The exception are links to books on Amazon, and a couple of Text Link Ads. Why? They're simply not making money and they cause screen clutter. So away they go. I additionally got rid of the SnapPreview display that had been popping up every time a user hovered the mouse over an external link. It's extra CPU time and can be annoying quickly. It's great to know how to do that kind of stuff, but brilliance is shown by knowing how to do something and choosing to not do it! Blogging guru Lorelle also left me a comment advising me against it and I trust she knows a little bit about