mentoring digital wordsmiths
I’ve given up on new year’s resolutions. Instead, I spend all year searching for the perfect apps to keep me more organized in the next year. Here are four perennial favorites that have literally saved my sanity this past year. These are the apps I put on my friends’ phones. These are the services I make my mom sign up for….
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In my search for the perfect solution to common RSS feed challenges, it was the beauty of Mad Mimi’s RSS emails formatted for “clean display” that finally gave me the inspiration. I’d spent hours trying to customize my MailChimp RSS campaigns to include a featured image along with the excerpt, but to no avail. (Then there is the constant frustration of extra-wide post images making the MailChimp email body drastically wider than the email header.) And even if I could get my emails to look how I wanted them to (just like Mad Mimi’s!), that still left the question of my RSS feed. That’s when I realized the solution was to start at the source and customize my WordPress RSS feed.
But customizing my WordPress RSS feed was a lot harder than it sounded. Until WordPress developer Robin Cornett took her plugin Send Images to RSS and made version 3.0 rich with all the features I’d hoped for an in RSS plugin–and more!
Here’s how to know Send Images to RSS is for you, and the details on how I set it up to create a beautiful custom RSS feed summary.
I’ve been in a quandary about partial feeds versus full feeds ever since I knew what an RSS feed was. As a reader, I liked the ability to consume an entire post from within my feed reader or email inbox, especially when I didn’t have an internet connection at home. But as a blogger, I wanted to get readers to my site, where they could comment on posts, and of course, click on affiliate links and generate ad impressions.
But wait, what is the difference, you ask? WordPress offers two default options for displaying your RSS feed: summary or full text.
The truth is, I don’t like either option. But there’s an alternative.
I love to read. But these days, I find myself with less time to bury my nose in a book. My days are filled with tasks that keep my hands and my eyes busy, leaving my ears and often my mind in need of employment. And in those moments, I turn to podcasts or audiobooks. I’m not the only member of the…
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There’s a myth about mompreneurs (mom entrepreneurs). We hear it in various forms, but it’s usually the well-meaning comment of a friend or a client: “I’m amazed by how you do all you do.” “I don’t know how you do it all.” Sometimes we try to explain the truth. Other times we just laugh it off. It is laughable, really….
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Having trouble growing your email list? Header bars not catching your visitors’ attention? Feature Box from Plugmatter might be just the ticket to obtaining those opt ins that keep your readers coming back for more. I’m no coding guru like our friend Gretchen, so I needed something that would be user friendly. There’s nothing worse than taking my precious writing time…
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Converting readers to subscribers isn’t always easy. If content is king, then having a fabulous freebie to offer your email subscribers is surely the queen. But what you really need is a court jester or two dancing around on your blog, inviting your visitors to subscribe. Preferably, you’d name them Jester A and Jester B and do some A/B split testing…
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It’s all fine and good to declare blog commenting alive and well. But how can we give the comment section on our own blog a shot in the arm? We’ve heard the usual suggestions time and time again: write good content, ask questions, be real, be controversial, be sure to reply to their comments, as well as comment around the web. But no…
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There’s a tidal wave sweeping the blogosphere: bloggers everywhere are removing the comment feature from their blogs. They say that replying to the comments is no longer scale-able, it takes too much time to moderate spam, and the conversation is taking place elsewhere. Whatever the reasons stated, the fact is: comments are down, and many bloggers are willing to help them die….
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by Gretchen Louise with Kelly Kathleen Many WordPress bloggers ran their plugin updates in early December to see a notice announcing the discontinuation of their favorite suite of related posts plugins: nRelate Related Content, nRelate Most Popular, and nRelate Flyout. We had until 5pm EST on December 31, 2014 before the nRelate plugins and service stopped working, according to the nRelate…
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