Coming Soon: Photography 101

Photo by Cheri Lucas Rowlands

Here, we focus on the art and craft of blogging — sharing tips to write more and better, hosting writing challenges to push ourselves and polish our craft, and establishing a space to interact with and learn from others.

Everyone’s “blogging process” is different, from our approach and content to our reasons and goals. For most of you in this community, words take center stage. Yet blogs are very visual platforms, and telling our stories with images is a huge part of the process. Our weekly photo challenges, ever so popular, illustrate this.

Equal Opportunity Prompting

We love checking out all your interpretations of the theme in each week’s photo challenge, and know some of you prefer spending your time behind the lens rather than in front of the keyboard. Next week, we’re trying something new to (hopefully!) get everyone blogging, no matter your medium: photography themes to complement some of our daily writing prompts.

Whether you use them as the basis for a gorgeous photo gallery or to help you take the perfect shot to illustrate your post, we hope they’ll be useful for the shutterbugs among you looking for some inspiration. So if you’re all about the image, don’t gloss over the daily prompts — they just might offer the creative boost you need. (Fine artists and poets, we hope they’ll be helpful for you, too!)

As always, we welcome your prompt ideas, writing or photo. Go on, submit something!

Improved Features: Menus, Post Locking and Revisions, and Autosave

We’ve just made updates that improve your experience on WordPress.com. You can click on a link in this list to jump to a section in this post:

• Organize your content with improved Menus.
• Avoid accidental content changes on multi-author blogs with Post Locking.
• See your changes easily with the improved Post Revisions feature.
• Protect your content with a revamped Autosave feature.

You may notice some of these changes as you poke around in your dashboard, but if you want to get acquainted with them right away, read on.

Say Cheese! March is Phoneography Month

Many of us now have phones that are a lot more than just phones — we’re walking around with some pretty powerful cameras in our pockets at all times, poised to freeze moments both sublime and mundane. This month, The Daily Post celebrates the art of phoneography and the cameraphone’s ability to go where DSLRs fear to tread.

A Post for Your Thoughts

We love how active the Daily Post community is. And we know that you have wonderful stories, tips, and resources to share with our community as well.

That’s why we’ve recently added the “Submit a Topic” page to the Daily Post menu. Via the “Submit a Topic” page, you can send us suggestions for new posts or submit your story for any one of our three new series: Why I Blog, Blogger Profiles, and My Morning Coffee.

You can learn more about each of these new post topics here and can access the respective contact forms via the links included on that page. Let us know what you think!

DailyPost Gets New Duds

Click the handy dandy arrows to navigate among the recent photo posts.

You may have noticed that we’ve recently given the blog a new look. Just in case you missed it, or in case you haven’t given it much in the way of a test drive, I thought I’d point out a couple of the more useful changes.

Our weekly photo challenge is generally the most popular post in a given week, so we wanted to really highlight those posts by adding a slider at the top displaying recent photo challenges. Click the arrows out to the side of the photo to slide to the next or previous photo post.

If you participated in the daily post challenge last year, you’ve probably noticed that we haven’t been dishing up new prompts here at the blog each day this year. That doesn’t mean that daily prompts can’t be found, though. If you still need a little daily inspiration, you can keep your eye on our new footer widget listing posts from the Plinky service. You can also just follow @plinkyprompts on Twitter.

If you like the site’s new look, you might be interested in checking out Linen, which we’re using in conjunction with the Custom Design upgrade to tweak a few things here and there. Of course, we have many other themes available, both premium and free.

We hope you like the new look!