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When I was asked to speak on how WordPress changes lives at WordCamp Portland in September of 2008, I was faced with a dilemma. While WordPress does change lives, blogging changes more lives. How do I connect the dots between WordPress and the life changing experience of blogging?

I didn’t realize that the WordPress Community would give me the answers I needed to that question. Their inspirational answers led to the following video on how WordPress changes lives, and the creation of the WordPress Fairy Blogmother.

WordPress changes lives because of the community. Over and over again, people told me that WordPress changes their lives because of the people it brings into their lives. While it doesn’t really matter what blogging platform you may use, it’s the community that supports and encourages fellow WordPress users that makes the difference. Without the WordPress Support Forums, the incredible free WordPress Themes created by imaginative and altruistic fans, the powerful WordPress Plugins created and shared by those who saw a challenge and found a solution, and the support and willingness of WordPress users to educate others on how to use the program and make it work better - there would be no community.

WordPress has inspired many to learn about coding, design, web development, marketing, but also how to be a part of a community. WordPress fans are the definition of the social web. With the passion that comes with learning and sharing WordPress tips, tricks, and techniques, they’ve founded a grassroots community, which led to WordPress meetups and social gatherings, and now to WordCamps around the world.

When I attend the many business and professional conferences to speak and present programs, it’s fairly serious. I’m there for business. They are there for business. It’s serious stuff.

When I walk through the door of a WordCamp event, I’ve found family. We’re instantly friends. We all know each other, and if we don’t, we will within a few moments. We’re risk takers and yet communal spirits, sharing the risk together. When one person pushes WordPress, we all benefit from the results.

As I interviewed people and asked the WordPress Community for help in discovering how WordPress changes lives, I knew I had to put faces on the many people who’ve had their lives transformed by their involvement in WordPress. In the first half of the video, I honor those whom I’ve known for several years since early in the development of WordPress, as well as a few new friends. Many of these people have gone from interested enthusiasts to friends of WordPress to employees of Automattic, the parent company of WordPress. By using WordPress and being involved in the community, they’ve built their businesses and reputation as WordPress experts, and in turn, powerful forces on the web.

Sure, any blogging platform can do that, but there is something about Matt Mullenweg and his vision for WordPress and blogging in general that brings people together to achieve more than they could alone. This is what changes people’s lives. Together, we’re stronger with WordPress than without.

Enjoy all the inspirational reasons WordPress fans offered for how and why WordPress changed their lives. And don’t forget to check out Glenda Watson Hyatt: How WordPress Changes Her Life Daily, the video made especially for the finale of my presentation.

Video of How WordPress Changes Lives

There are two versions of the video. The YouTube version is low resolution and a smaller file size. The Viddler version is higher resolution and 138.5 meg file size. The video is ten minutes long. The transcription of the video is below.

YouTube Version of How WordPress Changes Lives by Lorelle VanFossen

Viddler Version of How WordPress Changes Lives by Lorelle VanFossen

Transcription of How WordPress Changes Lives

I haven’t found an easy way to add subtitles or captions to this Sony Vegas Movie Studio Platinum v9 program. Any help would be appreciated. Until then, this is the transcript of the video.

Fairy Blogmother: Hey, is this thing on. Hey. Is this on?
Is it working? It’s not working.
Bang! Bang! Hello, are you working.
Ah, there we go.

* Instrumental Music “When you wish upon a star” from Pinocchio *

“When you wish upon a star, makes no difference who you are.
Anything your heart desires will come to you.”

“If your heart is in your dream, no request is too extreme.
“When you wish upon a star, as dreamers do.”

“Fate is kind. She brings to those who love
The sweet fulfillment of their secret longing.”

“Like a bolt out of the blue, fate steps in and sees you through.
“When you wish upon a star, your dreams come true.”

Featured WordPress Community Members:

• Matt Mullenweg
• WordCamp Portland Attendees
• Barry Abrahamson
• Liz Danzico
• Andy Skelton
• John Dvorak
• Darren Rowse
• Donncha O’Caoimh
• Ben Huh
• Liz Strauss
• Daniel Brusilovsky
• Mark Ghosh
• Michael D. Adams
• Chuck Lewis
• Tantek Çelik
• Patrick Havens
• Trisha Miller
• Mark Jaquith
• Jonathan and Crystal Bailey
• Jeff Chandler
• Wendy Piersall
• Nathan Rice
• Aaron Brazell
• Alex Frison
• Jane Wells

*Music*

*Static*

Fairy Blogmother: Hello! Is this working?
It’s stop working again, dang it.
What’s going on here? Okay, wait, wait.
Bang! Bang! Ah, there.

Barbara Rozgonyi: Hello, my name is Barbara Rozgonyi with wiredPRworks.com, and Lorelle, thank you for interviewing me in the bathroom. How has WordPress changed my life? I can’t tell you everything in 15 seconds but I can tell you that it’s really made me into the person I’ve always wanted to be. Now, I can be an author, I can be a person who really influences lives. And boy, it’s so interesting to see what readers have to say. To see them take just a little piece of information and take it and make it huge that will help so many people. And I get to hang out with cool people like Lorelle in the ladies’ room.

John Hawkins: Hi, this is John Hawkins from johnhawkinsunrated.com. WordPress. WordPress changed my life how. Let’s see. I’d say I’ve met some amazing people through WordPress. I Twitter and I answer people’s questions, and you would be amazed at the amount of people who are just dying to connect with you through WordPress. Go WordPress!
Hey, come to WordCamp Las Vegas on the January 10-11, 2009. See you there!

Stace Baris:
My name is Stace Baris with aceinternetmarketing.com. And WordPress has changed my life because it is open source, lots of great Plugins for doing SEO getting my content out there, lots of widgets I can use and also made affiliate marketing really easy with great Amazon Plugins and all sorts of things. If you are serious about blogging, WordPress is the way to go and Lorelle is the person to get your info from. She’s great.

Susan Patton: Hi, I’m Susan Patton the Marketing Eggspert from Sparkplugging.com/marketing. How WordPress has changed my life? Besides getting me interviewed in the bathroom at Blog World Expo, the height of experiences, it makes it really easy. I have some tech experience but I love the creative side. So I don’t want to deal with the hard stuff. WordPress makes it easy to do what I want to do. There are Widgets for everything. There are template for everything. It’s easy. And I can worry about everything else and not my blog.

Kim Woodbridge: WordPress has changed my life by giving me confidence in my abilities and helping me earn money. I’ve found that I love
working on it. Plus, I’ve met so many interesting and talented people online.

This sounded so much better in my head but it didn’t come out quite right Well, I hope it gives you the idea. Thanks! Kim Woodbridge kimwoodbridge.com [Via email]

Naked Bones: I would say WordPress has changed my life, and it has made it easier. It gave me the room to empty my mind of the everyday stuff we all go through. [Via blog comment]

Wendy Piersall: Hi, I’m Wendy Piersall. I’m CEO of the SparkPlugging.com. Looking back I was remembering when I first started my brand. I kicked it off with WordPress. WordPress made it absolutely easy for me with little-to-know tech experience whatsoever to create a powerful brand that is now rocking the blogosphere. I tell everybody now to just start with WordPress. It’s brain dead easy and it’s extremely just brilliant and I don’t know how we could function with out it. We owe a lot to you WordPress. We love you.

Owen Cutajar: [from Twitter] WP means I can build a great new website, secure and loaded with functionality, all b4 breakfast. Good Luck at #wordcampdx.

Heather Rasley: Hi, my name is Heather Rasley, the deputy at Automattic. I made the switch to WordPress after discovering that all my favorite awesome bloggers use it. I’m very happy to be working for Automattic and making other people happy, too.

Jane Wells: Hi, I’m Jane Wells and I’m the user experience person with Automattic. WordPress has changed my life by exposing me to a kick ass community of open source developers and allowing me to work with the best guys in the world.

Karen Jackie and Dana Rockel: I’m Karen Jackie partner of Content Robot and Dana Rockel from Content Robot. WordPress has changed our lives because it has actually given us an entrepreneurial spirit and we produce WordPress blogs for clients all over the world. WordPress is a great platform. We started out as a blogging company and moved to WordPress and we don’t do any other platforms right now. WordPress is it.

Nathan Moller: My name is Nate Moeller from MollerMarketing.com. Without WordPress I don’t know where I would be in the blogging community. What else is there. Blogging is WordPress.

Fairy Blogmother: Oh, no. Not again.
They must be redesigning the interface. Sigh.
Can’t they leave anything alone. They keep messing with things.
It was just fine the way it was. Why do they have to keep changing things?
ARGH!

At WordCamp Portland, I surprised the audience from behind, wearing my WordPress Fairy Blogmother outfit. I spoke about the points mentioned at the beginning of this article, and asked the audience to come forward with their “testimonies” on how WordPress changed their lives. I was stunned at the number of people wanting to share their stories, nearly bringing the audience, and myself, to tears.

You can see the video of part of the presentation by Dale Chumbley streamed live from Cubespace in Portland, Oregon.

The end of the program featured Glenda Watson Hyatt: How WordPress Changes Her Life Daily, a video on how this woman uses WordPress to blog only with her left thumb. Because WordPress continues to be the most accessible and disabled-user friendly blogging platform around, she has opened up her sphere of influence and network of relationships around the world as her blog allows her to “speak out” when her body won’t.

As we design and develop WordPress Themes, Plugins, and code, the WordPress Community needs to remember that Glenda is an important representative of our users.

Thank you again to everyone who helped me put this together, everyone whose lives have been touched my WordPress, and everyone who has helped changed my life with WordPress.

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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, the author of Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won’t Tell You About Blogging.

Posted in WordPress News      

Matt Mullenweg has just announced that you can go “ad-free” on your WordPress.com blog.

While you may have never noticed, those who are not logged into WordPress.com will see ads on blogs across the WordPress.com network. two years ago, WordPress.com started experimenting with Google ads to help support the cost of the experimental and state-of-the-art multiple user free blog service. The intent was not to cover your blogs with ads, like many free blogging services do, but to show an occasional ad discretely within your WordPress Theme.

Since few complained or noticed, the experiment continued, helping to keep WordPress.com free and add a lot of free features that might have been paid upgrades.

These ads were so rare, I never saw them. So I forgot about them. I’ve written a lot about the WordPress.com Terms of Service policy that prohibits adding ads to your WordPress.com blogs, so I was dismayed a few months ago when I got a few emails accusing me of special favors from WordPress.com because I had ads on my blog. They were seeing the WordPress.com experimental ads. Unfortunately, one of the ads was - shall we say - inappropriate, a problem many have with Google’s ad program.

Still, this bothered me. I talked to the WordPress team about this and they agreed that users should have the right to determine whether or not to have WordPress.com ads on their blogs. As Matt explains:

At the same time it’s easy to imagine blogs that would never want ads on them: businesses, startups, non-profits, political activist sites, the list goes on. Google Adsense analyzes the content to show contextually relevant ads, but that might mean a link to a competitor. Because of this we’ve introduced a premium option that gives you control: the No-ads upgrade.

They’ve been working on this new feature for a while, trying to come up with a secure and affordable way for users to continue to support WordPress.com by permitting ads on their blogs, while allowing those with sensitive or special interests to not host ads. They’ve finally done it, and I applaud their foresight and integrity.

Removing Ads from Your WordPress.com Blog

Before you start jumping to remove ads from your WordPress.com blog, remember that those ads, most of which you will rarely ever see, help bring in income to keep WordPress.com going. If they don’t bother you or your readers, leave them alone. Why not?

You are using one of the most powerful, state-of-the-art blogging platforms, a service that will survive the Digg-effect and high traffic surges without charging you; a service that keeps bringing you options and features without charge; a service that gives you a platform upon which to express yourself proudly - and is incredibly SEO friendly. Why not help them continue to keep this service free for everyone?

If you do feel a compelling need to remove ads from your WordPress.com blog, go to Upgrades.

Scroll down to No-ads and select the option.

The cost to remove ads from your WordPress.com blog is 30 credits annually (USD $30 if you haven’t earned any credits) which comes to eight cents a day.

Whether you keep or remove ads from your WordPress.com blog, why not take a little time to give back to WordPress.com and other WordPress.com users by browsing the WordPress blog network and get to know your fellow WordPress.com members. You can use the Random Post feature in the gray dashboard bar at the top of your WordPress.com blog when you are logged in, or visit the WordPress.com Blogs of the Day which lists the most popular blogs by language, or the WordPress.com Tags list.

If you are familiar with how WordPress.com works, then why not help out in the WordPress.com forums and get to know the volunteers and staff there as well as your other fellow WordPress.com members. It’s a simple way to say thank you for this powerful free blog service.

I Want to Put Ads on My WordPress.com Blog

A lot of WordPress.com bloggers want to put ads on their blogs to make money for themselves. While some free blog hosts permit that, don’t forget that WordPress.com is also a testing site for many of the latest features of WordPress development.

While the world has to wait for the release of WordPress 2.7, WordPress.com users are already using the new sticky post feature and will soon be playing with other new features as part of the new WordPress Administration interface redesign, a continuation of user interface improvements from the previous version of WordPress - long before anyone else.

This means that WordPress.com has to stay clean of code that will screw up not just one blog but all the blogs on the WordPress.com network powered by WordPressMU. While most ad code is harmless, opening up WordPress.com to Javascript and other code languages opens the door up to malicious code, too. It’s a security risk WordPress.com isn’t willing to take, and I support that policy.

If you want to monetize your blog, get the free version of WordPress and pay for cheap hosting. Some hosts are offering web hosting for under USD $10 a month. With the full version of WordPress, you can not only add ads, but customize the whole look, add all kinds of cool WordPress Plugins, and really tweak your whole site to maximize its revenue potential.

WordPress.com has always been about blogging, about freedom of expression and creativity. It’s not about the code. It’s about the words. WordPress.com is working overtime to make sure we have a place to share our words with others around the world - no holds barred.

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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, the author of Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won’t Tell You About Blogging.

Posted in WordPress News, Wordpressdotcom      

Liz Strauss is holding the “Bring Back That ‘Brand New’ Blogging Feeling Event” contest and giving you a chance to win a premium WordPress Theme from Blog Design Studio and a copy of her ebook. Whether you win or not, it’s a chance to really push your blogging creativity.

The challenge is to take a picture of something that shows that “brand new feeling” such as you feel when you published that very first blog post. That’s right, your first. Can you remember back that far? (I can’t ) Compose a one sentence caption and head over to the contact form to upload the photo and your contact information.

There are so many emotions tangled up with that very first blog post, how would you display that in a photograph? I’m fascinated by the concept and eager to see what people come up with. Bloggers are such creative folks, and the almost USD $4,000 value of the prizes is definitely an incentive.

I gave it some thought and here is my version of that “brand new blogging feeling event” dredged from the depths of my memory.

When I began “blogging” the name soon became “online journaling” as we ventured forth with the first web pages and websites in the world. We didn’t call them web pages back then. They were “homepages” and these were our “homesites” as the web wasn’t the Web but the beginnings of the Internet in those rough and tumble days. It was a new world, a new universe, and technology that was part of the rush into space. Since we couldn’t seem to push our government to support travel through outer space, we plunged into cyberspace along what would come to be known as the Information Highway. It wasn’t a smooth ride but this was the future and we were on board our virtual space ships, navigating by keyboard, mouse, and browser, ready for our grand adventure to seek out new life and new adventures. To boldly go where no Internet Connection would ever be lost!

I didn’t realize how far this galactic journey would take me, deep into the wilderness of HTML, web design, CSS, SEO, JavaScript, PHP, the rugged beginnings of WordPress, the stumbling steps of social networking and social media, tags, categories, comment spam, blog trolls…in a way, much like the journey in Zork, the original of the popular IF Games (Interactive Fiction) text-based adventure games. A rough journey of exploration and discovery, with a few trolls and grues to fight off.

There will be 50 winners choose to receive a premium WordPress Theme from Blog Design Studio and a copy of the ebook Insider’s Guide to the Conversation eBook by Liz Strauss.

There is also a bonus round. Be the first fifty to follow the directions exactly and submit “clever pictures” and you will be featured on her blog, Successful and Outstanding Bloggers with a link back to your blog.

Don’t forget that Liz Strauss is also the honoree of one of the most popular new WordPress Plugins, the Liz Strauss Comment Counter by Ozh WordPress Plugin, a nice addition to your blog’s sidebar. I wrote about it recently on my blog and on the Blog Herald.

Remember to submit your entry to the competition in order to participate and win.

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Copyright Lorelle VanFossen, the author of Blogging Tips, What Bloggers Won’t Tell You About Blogging.