Reruns

Without reruns, I would never have known the joys of Gilligan’s Island and Happy Days, of The Brady Bunch and M*A*S*H. Without reruns of the culinary variety, I’d have to cook every night instead of doing half-labor by cooking a meal planned for two nights. Some things — I’m looking at you, chili — are even better warmed over. So in celebration of reruns, I offer a retrospective of a few posts I’ve written from the past couple of years that I liked, that garnered a fair number of comments, or whose ideas (if not necessarily my particular expression of them) are important.

Quick Tip: Get Widgety

WordPress.com widgets are a great way to add new content such as your Twitter stream, or to display del.icio.us links, a tag cloud and/or a calendar to your blog, either in the sidebar, header, or footer of your site.

To see the widgets you have available to you, log in to your WordPress.com dashboard and click on Appearance > Widgets. To add a widget, simply click on it and drag it up and over to the right of the widget screen, into the Default Sidebar, Header Area, or Footer Area section of your site. If you choose to use several widgets in your sidebar, for example, you can click and drag them to order them as you see fit.

Here’s a bunch of my favorite widgets:

About Page 201: The Meat Grinder

Your About page is the perfect opportunity to introduce what you’re doing with your blog — and why it matters — to your audience. In About Page 101: Making Them Care, we looked at getting the basics right in terms of knowing what you’re trying to do, telling a compelling story, keeping things brief, and writing in a style that doesn’t come off as more stilted than your Uncle Joe’s wedding party dance moves. Now we’re going to take all of the hard work you did there, all of the blood, sweat, and tears you poured into making your About page rock, and put them through the meat grinder. Because good enough isn’t good enough for us. Ready? Ready.

About Page 101: Making Them Care

Without an About page, you’re nobody. It’s not only one of the first places new visitors will head if they like what you’re serving up on your blog, it’s also your calling card. The problem is, most About pages are about as enticing as putting your hand into an alligator’s mouth. In fact, to be fair, at least that would have an element of excitement, which is more than can be said for your garden variety About page.

So how do you make your About page worth visiting? Luckily, there’s a ten step program for that (twelve is so 1995). In this 101 post we’ll focus on getting the basics right with five things to keep in mind when carving out an introduction to yourself and your blog that doesn’t scream “nothing to see here, move along.”

Choosing the Perfect Blog Name: Two WordPressers Share Their Secrets

We discover different types of blogs in our community, from travel to food to parenting, with memorable and clever names. You may notice that a number of blogs on WordPress.com have unique web addresses, or custom domains: instead of mysite.wordpress.com, their address is mysite.com. Bloggers get custom domains for different reasons, but ultimately, it’s a great way to build and solidify your presence across the Internet. You can register a new domain through WordPress.com; you can also use a domain you already own with your WordPress.com site, which is called domain mapping.

A crucial step before purchasing a custom domain is deciding on the right name for your blog. Since selecting a name that best reflects your content is so important, we wanted to share insights from two writers on WordPress.com — Sarah and “C.J.’s Mom” — on how they ended up with names they were happy with.

What Makes a Post Freshly Press-able: Before _______ , We Had ______.

Every day, a handful of WordPress.com bloggers are featured in Freshly Pressed. And every day, many more wonder, “What do I have to do to get Freshly Pressed?”

Well, it’s time to reveal what the folks who push the launch button are thinking. Each week, we’ll take a close look at one post and why we thought it was Press-worthy. We hope we can provide insight into the process and give you tips and tools to make your blog the best it can be.
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When most people hear “blog post,” they think “writing.” But your blog is a blank canvas for your self-expression. For some bloggers, that takes the form of photos, drawing, or painting.