Testing, Testing…Is This Thing On? Blogging & Technology by Joel Wagner - May 29, 2016June 15, 20160 It has been quite a while since I wrote anything on here. Life got busy, WordPress didn't update correctly, Emails from the site overwhelmed me, and I basically was tired of the hassles that came along with the blog. So I pushed it to the back burner. I would feel inspired every once in a while to write something, but with the state of the website being as it was, that inspiration quickly turned to frustration. Until this month. The layout of this blog has been basically the same since 2009 when I paid to have a theme professionally built for it. That theme was nice and pretty, but a whole lot has changed in the world of web design over the
10 Years of Teaching: A Reflection Inspiration by Joel Wagner - June 4, 2012July 1, 20163 I started this blog more than five years ago. I have now come to the conclusion of my 10th year of teaching. In this article and the upcoming series, I reflect on some of what I have learned in my 10 years of teaching. A reflection It strikes me that much of what I have written on this blog, especially in the older articles is simply wrong. Some of the information can be misleading or easily misunderstood. In the upcoming weeks and months, I aim to readdress some of those same issues from my new, far more patient and friendly mindset. At the same time, there are some core beliefs I held to in those early days that are ever strong in me and I
10 Design Changes I Did To My WordPress Blog This Month Blogging & Technology by Joel Wagner - June 28, 2010June 30, 20100 If you haven't stopped by the actual website for So You Want To Teach? in a few months, er weeks, er days, er hours, you may not recognize it. I have used my summertime to really put in some solid effort into adjusting the layout of the blog. I haven't done a full-on redesign since March of 2009. Since that time, I've added a few widgets here and something else over there, but never really spent a lot of concentrated time really thinking about the layout of the blog. Until recently. How it all began Quite frankly, I got bored of looking at the blog each day. I had some stuff there that just really didn't make sense. It was more cluttered
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
Information Overloaded? 10 Quick Tips To Tame The Tide Stress Reduction by Joel Wagner - March 16, 2009June 30, 20102 Think back 5 years. March 2004. It feels like an eternity ago! For me, that was when I really hit the wall. That was when my head director told me that my contract would not be renewed. I resigned in lieu of nonrenewal. I spent the remainder of the semester learning like crazy. In fact, that is the experience that eventually formed the inspiration to begin this blog (read more here). But that's really not the point of this email, the thought just struck me and I realized how quickly time passes and how much I've grown since then. 5 years ago, there was no MySpace (until August 2003), no Twitter, no Facebook. Nada. Blogs were beginning to take off
The Blog Revolution: Day 2 – Keywords Are The Key Blogging & Technology by Joel Wagner - May 6, 2008July 2, 20102 As we continue the Blog Revolution Project, we come to day two of our focus on writing. Today will not really focus on one specific writing project, but an overall vision for your blog. Most traffic that comes to blogs comes as a result of search engines. The vast majority of searches happen on Google. If we can optimize our Google search result ranking, we can greatly increase the flow of traffic through our site. The more visitors your site gets, the higher in the results you can go. So how do we optimize our Google search ranking? Keywords are the key Everyone who comes to a site through a search engine types in keywords to get to your page.
The Blog Revolution Begins Blogging & Technology by Joel Wagner - May 1, 2008July 2, 201015 So what exactly is The Blog Revolution? We'll start with some background. I am a nerd. I am a huge nerd. I was co-president of the computer club in high school, went to the Texas State programming competition. I know a thing or two about computers. I have been reading blogs for the past year and a half. I've been reading blogs about blogging for the past year and three months. I began blogging about the same time. I began blogging regularly in June of 2007. As I got into the EduBlogosphere, I noticed a few things about a lot of smaller blogs. Many don't do a lot of the things that bloggers tend to recommend for growth Many
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
Overcoming Adversity Inspiration by Joel Wagner - November 18, 2007July 5, 20102 As teachers, how often do we stop to think about how much of an impact we could potentially make in the life of one of our students. Even if that student doesn't ever thank us or even show marked improvement in their academic skills or behavior or whatever, we still may be helping him. Our job is often thankless. Our job is often life-changing. We will not know this side of heaven the number of lives we have changed. I was recently contacted by a reader who shared an amazing story with me. This deaf man, Stephen J. Hopson, was changed by three simple words from his fifth grade teacher. The story, and the accompanying video, truly made me smile.
25 WordPress Plugins Every Blog Should Have Blogging & Technology by Joel Wagner - November 6, 2007July 5, 20102 This post is outdated. Edit 06/06/2009 - I have recently written a much more current and similar article. Please check out 20 WordPress 2.7 Plugins You Can’t Live Without. Reader experience is the most important element of any site. Whether it be an entertainment site or an information portal, the ease of use for the reader is vital. I run this blog using WordPress because it gives me incredible control over the reader experience. I large part of that control comes in the way of plugins. What are plugins? Plugins are basically optional programs that run behind the scene. Some of them are never even seen by the reader. Technically, they aren't programs -- they are really scripts that run on
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
8 Steps To Building A Better Blog Blogging & Technology by Joel Wagner - July 15, 2007July 5, 20102 This really has nothing to do with education. I wanted to take a chance to stop and address some things that happened this week in my life and the life of this blog. Every day in the past week except for Tuesday, So You Want To Teach? saw more than 50 visitors. It's not like that constitutes a high-traffic blog or anything, but I see healthy, steady growth and want to look at some of the things that I have done to see this growth. Add content I started the blog in February, but only posted three articles a month until we got to the last week of May. Those articles are pretty good and help to form the