Prepare for National Novel Writing Month with the Post a Day Challenge
November marks the beginning of National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), a project in which thousands of writers around the world work toward completing a 50,000-word novel by November 30th. Sound like something you want to get in on?
Whoa. That’s 1,667 words per day. I’m not ready for that!
We hear you — writing a whole novel is a pretty big undertaking. So why not gear up for the project by starting the WordPress.com Post a Day Challenge this October? It’s a great way to meet others in the WordPress.com community, including writers who have completed NaNoWriMo in the past.
At The Daily Post, home of the Post a Day Challenge, we provide creative inspiration each and every day. You can also find tons of writing prompts at Plinky.com, so you never have to worry about running out of ideas. Participating in Post a Day is also a great opportunity to prepare outlines, character sketches, and research before starting your novel in November.
How am I supposed to complete a decent novel in a single month?
According to the folks at NaNoWriMo, “It’s all about quantity, not quality. This approach forces you to lower your expectations, take risks, and write on the fly. Make no mistake: You will be writing a lot of crap. And that’s a good thing. By forcing yourself to write so intensely, you are giving yourself permission to make mistakes. To forgo the endless tweaking and editing and just create. To build without tearing down.”
Think of it this way: Would you rather write an imperfect-but-complete novel, or no novel at all? Besides, if you get in the habit of posting daily throughout October, you’ll be well-equipped to start chipping away at a novel in November.
Bring it on! How do I sign up?
To join the WordPress.com Post a Day Challenge, visit The Daily Post. (The challenge began back in January but you can start any time.)
NaNoWriMo 2011 begins on November 1. Visit NaNoWriMo.org for information on how to register (the initiative is not run by WordPress.com). If you decide to write your novel on your blog and want to make it easy for others to check out your writing, tag your posts with nanowrimo2011.
What else should I do to prepare?
To create a brand new (and optionally private) blog for the writing challenge, make sure you’re logged in to WordPress.com, then start a new blog. If you don’t have a WordPress.com account yet, get started here.
If you’d like to make your blog look more like a book, you might be interested in purchasing the Chapters theme. Remember that you also have the option to set up a static front page (in place of your posts page) on your blog’s home page, if you’d like to use it to display a table of contents, for example.
So what do you think, are you up for the challenge?
Finding Online Aid for Establishing Your Online Business
Details coming from all forms and originating from a large quantity of resources can be acquired on the internet, easily accessible to anyone using a laptop or desktop connected to the web. An individual can potentially go about doing endless researching regarding any given subject for days and don’t ever exhaust the potential cyberspace has for generating data and understanding on that area of interest. The following obviously remains true for individuals planning to launch a small business. From government polices to bank account specifics, small business resources can be found withinthe online market place. Just as in any kind of fact-obtaining quest (blank) it is wise to follow some guidelines when looking for data appropriate for you and also your company.
1. Ensure that your data is originating through a reputable supplier. Sometimes one of the most reliable information is found on government websites – especially that information working with government error and regulation of business. Look for web sites created by and for small businesses proprietors independently, the people within the trenches that have dealt with orare dealing with the same types of issues you will be handling. Look for web pages established speciallyto help out individuals who are in positions similar to yourself.
2. Be sure that the information you are gleaning is pertinent to you in your state of affairs. For example, be certain that your details regarding government regulations is that that can relate to your certain situation, in your certain location, not government polices from a entirely different state or even country! Tend not to spend your time making an attempt to comply with polices that aren’t appropriate to you personally.
3. Bookmark internet websites in which hit you as significantly practical. Many website pages (such as delicious.com etc.) are available to help you on this endeavor. There exists nothing moreaggravating than actually being unable to find a web page which you have in the past been in and found beneficial therefore take steps to avoid this.
4. Whenever you stumble upon a extremely very helpful site, seek out a pageon it with back-links. On many occasions, these particular links is going to lead you to numerous other internet websites that can prove to be really really handy too.
5. Don’t let yourself be frightened to have questions. A lot of web pages have information on their site teaching how to make contact with them. Shoot them a message articulating thanks for the information and facts they have specified on their web site and also asking them questions or for more details. Many are often more than thrilled to assist you and in turn, you may havepresented them a little awareness in to how they can certainly greatly improve their own web page. Look for message boards that relate to small businesses or to your small company area of interest and contact those involved with those discussion boards. Offer your personal experience to the conversations, and in turn the online community contributors may well be more than pleased to lend theircapabilities to you, offering up a must have small business training.
6. Take everything you read with a touch of suspicion and investigate the veracity of anything! Tend not to take jumps or spend money based on details which you have not proven the facts or necessity of through at the very least two or more reliable sources. Several small enterprise solutions are offered to you when you need it – don’t let yourself be afraid to make beneficial utilization of all of them!
Small businesseducation
New Themes: Eight, Bold Life, and Elemin
If you score three goals in one hockey game you’ve made what’s called a hat trick. I think that should totally count for themes too. If you’re reading this post you’ve just scored a chance to check out three brand new themes for your blog. Hat trick!
The first up is Eight by renowned designer, Elliot Jay Stocks. Its unique layout means your blog will be almost completely transformed just by activating it. Thanks to the custom background feature and its custom highlight color feature, transforming the look of your blog even further takes only a few clicks. Eight is a premium upgrade for your blog at $75 for a lifetime subscription.
We have another brand new free theme for you too. It’s called Bold Life by Jay Hafling and just like Eight it has its own unique grunge-elegant look.
Finally, we have another premium theme for you and there’s nothing grungy about this one. The beautiful and elegant Elemin, designed by Themify, is just packed with features so make sure you check it out on the theme showcase. You can upgrade your blog to Elemin with a lifetime subscription for $75.
Enjoy!
New Domains for You and .me
Today we are adding .me (to .com, .org and .net) as a new option for upgrading to your own, custom domain name on WordPress.com. All of our domain mapping options cost just a couple dollars per month for your domain name and hosting. You don’t have to deal with web servers or configuration, we take care of everything for you.
Get your own .me domain on WordPress.com.
As Sara mentioned a couple months ago, one of the most common questions we get is whether you can use your own domain for WordPress.com blogs. Incidentally, Add a Domain is our most popular upgrade, so we know you love customizing your digital address and we are always looking for ways to make it better and easier.
Rather than adding numbers or dropping vowels for a .com you don’t really want, check out .me and find the perfect fit for your business, your name, or just a pun you can’t stop laughing at. We’ve seen lots of creative domain-names-as-sentences using .me, like about.me and connect.me. And we love our wp.me URL shortener, available to all WordPress.com users.
How to get a .me domain
If you want to upgrade to a .me domain for a new WordPress.com site, head over to wordpress.com/signup. If you want to add a .me domain to an existing WordPress.com site, you can follow our step-by-step instructions. It’s only $2/month, so what are you waiting for?!
Leave a comment and let us know what other domain mapping features you want us to add.
Enjoy A Shiny New, Simplified Admin Bar
Remember your old admin bar (displayed at the top of your screen while you’re logged in to WordPress.com)? Up until today, it’s looked something like this while viewing an individual post:
But we wanted to make it easier for your visitors to interact with you via Likes and Follows, so we’ve cleaned it up a bit. Now it looks like this:
Better, right!? Now on the right hand side of the admin bar where your Gravatar is displayed, you have easy access to your user profile, all the blogs you can contribute to, and all the comments you’ve made across WordPress.com:
In the blog menu on the left side of the admin bar, you’ll see all the stuff related to the blog you’re currently viewing. If you’re looking at a post on your own blog, the menu will display links to your dashboard, post editor, comment moderation panel, custom menus, and widgets. Next to the blog menu are the Follow and Like buttons, along with a sparkline, which reflects the last 48 hours of page views on the blog:
When viewing posts on other blogs on WordPress.com, the blog menu on the left side of the admin bar will display the following options, as well as the shortlink and theme information:
If you hover over the WordPress.com logo in the left corner, you’ll see the following quick links:
Lastly, you may have noticed that you’re no longer able to reblog a post after clicking the Like button. Don’t worry — we’re cooking up some reblogging improvements that you’ll have access to very soon. Stay tuned!
New Themes: Magazine and Parament
Isn’t it nice to have a brand new theme, or two, on a Thursday? Maybe you’ll remember, this day in September—because today it’s double the fun with Magazine and Parament now available in your WordPress.com dashboard.
Magazine is a sleek and stylish theme from StudioPress that’s perfect for showcasing your carefully crafted content. Choose from ten color schemes and six layout options and customize it to your taste. Make it yours for a lifetime subscription of $75, and discover all its features on the Theme Showcase.
Parament is a beautiful, all-purpose theme featuring a dark color scheme with bright orange highlights and a textured background. Its clean, colorful, and curved lines will help your content stand out from the crowd. Learn all about it on the Theme Showcase.
Enjoy.
Camping Tents – 5 Major factors to Consider When Buying Outdoor Tents
Camping tents are also called outdoor tents
and are usually used outdoors although there are instances that some types are
used for indoor purposes as when parents want the kid to use it for play. They
are…
More traffic for your blog with the follow button
We’ve written before about our efforts at WordPress.com to help you get more attention for your work. And we’re here again with a new feature: follow.
After weeks of experimentation with different designs, locations and names, we’ve determined the addition of a small, cute, little button at the bottom of your blog will dramatically help pageviews and retention.
Starting today, on all blogs, whenever someone who is not logged into WordPress.com visits, they’ll see this small little button in the bottom right corner. The button is mostly out of the way, but just noticeable enough before people leave.
And when a visitor clicks on the button, it smoothly slides open, revealing a simple way to follow the blog without having the burden of checking back on their own to see if there’s anything new. They can put their email address in, and will be notified whenever your blog has a new post.
Questions we expect to be frequently asked:
1. Why is it called Follow and not Subscribe? Good question, as many designers here at WordPress.com debated this, including me. Although the functionality is similiar to the Email subscription widget, after testing various prototypes, we learned more people clicked on the button and signed up if it were called Follow rather than Subscribe. We also know subscribe suggests to some its something you pay for, whereas follow has no such connotation.
2. I don’t like it. How can I turn it off on my blog? Easy. Go to your Dashboard. Click on Settings, then Reading, then Email. Sorry you don’t like it – but we understand. If you change your mind, this is also the place to go to customize the message new followers (subscribers) will see.
3. Will other subscription features also have their name changed? We are carefully studying the impact of different names on existing features. We only change names when we have evidence it helps our bloggers and the benefits outweigh the annoyance of the change. We don’t change feature names to be fashionable or to emulate other services that might rhyme with “critter” or “shmacebook”.
4. Why don’t I see the button? The follow button only appears for users not logged in to WordPress.com. If you want to follow a WordPress.com blog, and are already logged in, simply use the follow button that already appears in your admin bar at the top of the screen. If you want to see the new hotness, log out of WordPress.com and go to any blog, including your own, to see it. To log out, go to your admin bar at top of the screen. Click on “Me”, then click on “Log Out”.
5. Why did you put something on my blog that changes how it looks? We know you want complete control over your blog’s appearance, and that’s why we’ve built so many themes, widgets and customizations for you to use. But here the data was strong enough for the positive effect of this small little button to turn it on. We’re making sure you know about it and know how to turn it off if you don’t want to use it. In the future we expect to add more ways for visitors to follow your blog, which will give visitors and bloggers more of what they want.
Coming to a WordCamp Near You
Every now and then I like to remind people about upcoming WordCamps. WordCamps are locally-organized, casual conferences held all over the world that focus on WordPress. Bloggers, developers, and every other kind of WordPress fan get together to show off cool things they’ve done with WordPress, teach and learn from each other, meet new co-conspirators, and generally have a crazy fun day or weekend with other people who share their love of WordPress. Often, members of the WordPress.com team from Automattic are in attendance, and would love to meet more of you!
There are WordCamps this weekend in Albuquerque and Portland, so if you’re anywhere near these cities, you should try to attend (we’ll be there!). In Portland, the WordPress Foundation also will be sponsoring some special activities around Software Freedom Day (I’ll be at this one, testing and giving a sneak peek to attendees of some new features in the works).
Is there a WordCamp coming up near you? Let’s find out!
Sep 15: WordCamp Cape Town Cape Town, South Africa
Sep 16-18: WordCamp Albuquerque Albuquerque, NM
Sep 17-18: WordCamp Portland Portland, OR
Sep 24: WordCamp Lisboa Lisboa, Portugal
Sep 24: WordCamp Germany Koln, Germany
Sep 25: WordCamp Sofia Sofia, Bulgaria
Oct 1: WordCamp Louisville Louisville, Kentucky
Oct 8-9: WordCamp Sevilla Seville, Spain
Oct 15-16: WordCamp Jabalpur Jabalpur, India
Nov 5-6: WordCamp Toronto Toronto, ON
Nov 5-6: WordCamp Gold Coast Gold Coast, Australia
Nov 5-6: WordCamp Philly Philadelphia, PA
Nov 12: WordCamp Caguas Caguas, Puerto Rico
Nov 12-13: WordCamp Kenya Nairobi, Kenya
Nov 12-13: WordCamp Detroit Detroit, MI
Nov 12: WordCamp Richmond Richmond, VA
Nov 12-13: WordCamp Denmark Copenhagen, Denmark
Dec 17: WordCamp Las Vegas Las Vegas, NV
Feb 3-4 WordCamp Atlanta Atlanta, GA
There are also a number of WordCamps still in the early organizing stage that do not yet have dates set. These include: Ft. Wayne, IN; London, UK; Edmonton, Canada; Baku, Azerbaijan; Oslo, Norway; Sacramento, CA; Birmingham, Alabama; Pittsburgh, PA; Omaha, NE; Orlando, FL; Tokyo, Japan; Paris, France; Zagreb, Croatia; Nashville, TN, Washington DC, Baltimore, MD; Bangkok, Thailand; Istanbul, Turkey.
Hope to see you soon at a WordCamp near you!
Looking for tips on better blogging?
Whether you’re a WordPress.com veteran or blogging newbie, the updated version of Learn WordPress.com is sure to teach you something that you don’t already know.
The tutorial contains ten short sections on popular topics such as:
- Personalizing your site’s appearance
- Meeting others in the WordPress.com community
- Blogging from your mobile device
- Getting more readers
We’ve also added a section called 10 Super Awesome Insider Tips. It contains pointers on how to use some of our coolest (but easily overlooked) features like Distraction Free Writing, which expands the text editor and hides the modules on the publishing screen, to help you stay focused while you create content.
So have a look and tell us what you learned! And if there’s anything you want to know more about, be sure to let us know.
