Mandatory Follow Me By Email

I love you!

I really do. You’re the reason I’m here.

I want to connect with you, chat, see your posts, and share mine with you, but I have a confession to make up front.

There are some things I am lazy about, and going through the process of digging through my subscriptions manager to locate your blog once I have followed you to pull you out of my reader, which I NEVER look at, and put you in my email is probably not going to happen. WordPress denies me the opportunity to see all the posts of the many people I subscribe to in its reader. You get lost in there.

YOU have the POWER to make my life easier and connect in such a way that your posts will never be ignored. WordPress gives you a nifty tool.

Use that “Follow Me by Email” widget.

Please give me that option.

Put it in your sidebar and I promise you will get more engagement with readers like me who check their email daily. 🙂

WordPress How To (Categories and Bulk Edit)

Another helpful wordpress “How to” from Green Embers

Blogging How To (Request Feedback Button)

Another great wordpress “How To” post from Green Embers.

Blogging How To (Menus)

Another helpful post! Why don’t you just head on over there and tell him what you need to know. Bradley will be happy to oblige!

Blogging How To (Sticky Posts)

Green Embers is full of useful information. There are so many cool things to do with WordPress that I don’t know about, and this was one of them that I would like to share with you.

A must read if you want your Gravatar to work for you!

Are you lost in the cyberspace of the blogosphere? Most everybody knows what a Gravatar is, right? It’s that little image you inserted that tells people who you are. However, if you “like” something on my page, but you have not commented, I have no way to check out your site to see who you are. (BTW, if I have a lot of likes/comments on something, the notifications box has probably scrolled you away before I had time to check you out, especially if I wasn’t sitting by the computer.Checking archives can be a pain.)

Make it easy for me! We might could become good friends and have a nifty online relationship…if I can find you.

So help me out, if you have not done this already! I would love to check out your stuff, chances are, if you “liked” mine, I would “like” yours, too.

Go to your Dashboard, then Users, then My Profile.
Scroll down to LINKS.
Copy and paste your own site’s URL into the links box, and put in the title of your blog. (It might be useful to have a second tab opened to your homepage if you don’t know your URL address by heart.)
Hit the “add links” button.

It is that easy!

Now your blog’s link will show up in your gravatar when I click on it, and I can find your blog easily! You can do the same with any pages you would like to promote; your website, your Facebook page, other blogs you have or want to encourage people to check out, or even your Amazon page to promote your book sales.

I cannot count the number of folks I have tried to connect with, but had no means. I would love to get to know you 🙂 You will get more followers if people can track you back. A link to your site is NOT automatically provided on your Gravatar.

I thank you very much and hope this was helpful!

Your Gravatar is an image that follows you from site to site appearing beside your name when you do things like comment or post on a blog. Avatars help identify your posts on blogs and web forums, so why not on any site?

Help! RSS feeds: Can anyone tell me how to set up one?

Help! I am being held captive by the techno wizards. I need an RSS or Atom feed to link my blog to my Goodreads account and I am not sure how to do that. It is asking for the external blog feed URL. i don’t even know if I have one of those. I am not at ground zero, but I would not rate myself higher than about a two right now. Any and all assistance would be greatly appreciated. Sorry to be such a bother. ~ S.K. Nicholls

Widgets and Headers and Footers, Oh My!

Yes, I know, it is rather dark. I have been commenting but not posting for the last few days because I have been lost in the world of WordPress themes. Did you know that there are over 250 themes available from WordPress, and many other themes that are WordPress supported? I have now tried out most of them. It took a while.

I felt like Dorothy looked when she stepped out of the tornado ravaged house into the land of OZ. Of course, as many of you know I can be a bit of a clux when navigating the ins and outs of the blogosphere. I lost all of my widgets going back and forth between themes and had to reestablish them. Being over 50, with my subsequently impaired memory and inexperience, I had to relearn how to do all of that. Sometimes, things don’t stay with me like they should. I also spent some time organizing old posts into more appropriate categories.

When I first started with WordPress , a few short months ago, I picked the Quintus theme only because it was the first theme listed in the examples. Being WordPress and weblog naïve, I dove in without a clue. Since that time I have become bored with my theme, so I decided to change it. I wanted one that would allow for a header image that I can change at liberty. I also wanted it to appear more contemporary, yet retain some degree of elegance. Not that there is anything wrong with traditional, it’s just not where I am right now. With my WIP, I am seriously trying to focus on the future.

I thought about using my facebook banner as a header image because it has my book, Red Clay and Roses, across it and I like the way it looks spread out at length across the page. With the book on the right hand side, where you can click on the image to go to the novel page it was really overkill, so I decided against it. There are other reasons why I wanted this particular image. This is the skyline of Orlando over Lake Eola downtown. Orlando is not a terribly big city, but it is young and fresh and beautiful. It plays a part in the work in progress that I have dedicated myself to getting accomplished. There is a clickable image added to my right sidebar that shows Cypress Cove Resort, my family’s nudist resort, here in Florida for anyone who might be interested. Orlando and a fictional location patterned after The Cove will be featured in the first book of my murder mystery series that is my primary work in progress.

I have joined a local meetup.com group for writing and critiquing that is being established in my neighborhood here by some aspiring authors who have not yet published. We will be meeting at least monthly, maybe bimonthly. I am thinking it will be fun to learn and to share with them the wonderful things you all have taught me in the past few months. I thank you for bearing with me through this learning curve we all must go through. Have a great and inspiring day. ~ S.K. Nicholls