The following article was written by blogging about blogging extraordinaire, Lorelle VanFossen. She has one of the oldest personal blogs in existence, Taking Your Camera on the Road, which began in 1994. She is also the author of the awesome book “Blogging Tips: What Bloggers Won’t Tell You About Blogging”. She and I talked quite a bit about personal blogging back in September on PreviewCast #044, and so I asked her to contribute some more thoughts on the importance of personal blogging. Enjoy! –Douglas

The Art of Personal Blogging

When I started my first website - an online journal back then - it was a combination of technical articles and stories about our life as we prepared to quit our jobs and take off six months to a year to travel full-time around North American. Fourteen years later, and still living on the road, such a site is called a blog - a personal blog.

A personal blog is the story of your journey. No matter where it takes you.

There are a lot of names and purposes a personal blog can have. It can be about your day-to-day life, a sort of online diary. It can be a place where you can rant and rage without censors. It can be a place to tell your stories. It can be an online classroom where you share your knowledge and expertise.

Which makes it hard to define a personal blog as it can be anything and everything.

However, there is an art to personal blogging that makes it work for you and be the success that you want it to be. It begins by defining what personal success is for you and your personal blog.
Continue reading »

Tags: Blogging, content, goals, guest blog, Lorelle VanFossen, Personal, personal blogging, style, tips

I may not be a big fan of the iPhone, but like it or not, it’s built-in web browser interface is revolutionary. As soon as a few patents expire, we are going to start seeing the iPhone’s web interface in more and more places. In my latest Lorelle on WordPress guest post, I cover some of the basics on making sure that your site is easily usable and readable for iPhone users, along with a link to Apple’s more detailed documentation on how you can build full-fledged web applications for this iPhone.

Check out the article.

Tags: Apple, article, guest blogging, iPhone, Lorelle VanFossen, web browsing, web design, website

Lorelle VanFossen, blogger extraordinaire, celebrated the 2nd anniversary of WordPress.com and her blog by inviting many guest bloggers to post various articles about blogging during the month of August. (The upcoming month of September will feature many non-stop WordPress/blogging tips.) She invited me to write a few articles, and I must say I really enjoyed writing them. The first one was Ways to Build and Retain Your Podcast Audience, posted almost two weeks ago, and the second one was Blogging and Social Networking as a Teenager, which was just posted this morning. I highly recommend that you check out these articles, which I am very proud of!

Tags: article, Blogging, guest blogging, Lorelle VanFossen, podcasting, social networking, teenagers

Lorelle VanFossen presented an amazingly excellent session at WordCamp about connecting with your readers when you blog. This was an excellent conference which I’m so sorry that I missed, due to my stupidity of scheduling something at the same time as her session. Nevertheless, if you’re a blogger and you’re at all interested in really having your blog mean something to your readers, you HAVE to check out this session. I’m now rating it the best session of the whole weekend at WordCamp.
Continue reading »

Tags: Blogging, Connections, Lorelle VanFossen, Revver, San Francisco, Video, WordCamp, WordPress

WordPress superstar Lorelle VanFossen is spending the months of August and September featuring guest bloggers on her blog to celebrate the 2 year anniversary of her blog and of WordPress.com. (By the way, you might see me do an entry on there later on this month…) Today’s guest-blogged article is a very interesting article by Edrei Zahari all about personal blogging, including how personal blogging has been under-appreciated, along with tips for what really makes a personal blog one that readers would be interested in. He really emphasizes how it’s a blog about yourself and your personal life, but it’s written with an audience in mind–not so that you cater your posts to what the audience wants, but that you write in a style that the audience can relate to. This article really strikes a chord with many of the philosophies that I’ve had behind the production of this blog, and it’s really good to see my ideas written down in this article. I highly recommend that you go check it out.

Tags: article, Blogging, Connections, Lorelle VanFossen, Personal, tips, WordPress