Fast and Secure Contact Form is a great form tool that’s free, easy to use and will have a form up and running in seconds! I found it really easy to use and it works great – even with the latest version of wordpress.

Are you on twitter?  Here’s an interesting article about 5 interesting features that you may not know about or be taking full advantage of.

CHECK IT OUT ON TWITTOWN

Letting go of the cycle of depletion is the topic of a great blog post that I read on Christine Kane’s blog yesterday. The post itself was actually written by Jennifer Loudon, and talks about,

“…the kind of depletion that you perpetuate because you’re afraid if you stop, you’ll be freed up to take action on your heart’s desire.”

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It was really wonderful to be able to share my weekend with so many great people who are interested in writing and publishing books!

The first event for The Book Project took place on Saturday, in Nanaimo, and we were extremely impressed by the 60 people who packed the lecture hall at VIU.  The range of topics and skills was diverse, and people traveled from all over to be there: Kamloops, Courtenay, Comox, Sooke, Surrey, Port MacNeil and people from many of the smaller islands.  We even had some people from Nanaimo ; ) (more…)

We had a lovely article in the Harbour City Star written about our Winter Book Project workshops by reporter Danielle Bell. It also appeared early in the week in the Nanaimo Daily News.  We now have roughly 30 people registered for the event and more are signing up every day. (more…)

We’ve announced the winners of The Book Project New Year’s Resolution contest, and for anyone who didn’t win – you can still register until Wednesday, January 27th! (more…)

We have a really great tradition in our family that you don’t work on your birthday!  So, yesterday I had an entire day off ; )  It was a whirlwind of getting spoiled, of which  I enjoyed every minute.  I got to sleep in, and Jared made me breakfast (off to a great start already!!!) (more…)

This one is a really simple plugin, but a must have.  It’s really not convenient to have to go into every page and manually change the # in the page order section.  If you install the MY PAGE ORDER, plugin, all you have to do is click on my page order in the menu bar, and then drag and drop them to where you want.  It works with sub-pages too.

A couple other great variations on this are MY LINK ORDER, which allows you to change the order of your links in a drag and drop interface, and MY CATEGORY ORDER which allows you to drag and drop into place the order you’d like your categories to appear in the sidebar of your site.

Easy as pie to install, and use.  An absolute must have for every wordpress site.

As part of a course I’m teaching on Building a Web Presence for Authors and Illustrators, I put together a unit on blogging.  One big question people have is how do they get people to come to their blog, and how do they keep them coming back time after time?  If you’re interested in learning more about this, the course is now open for public registration.  www.webpresenceworkshops.com I’ll also be adding mini-modules for people who want to learn about something specific (how to boost your amazon sales, blogging, using social networking to sell books etc.) Coming soon!

Here are 10 tips that you might find useful in helping you to get readers, and keep them. (more…)

Since I’m teaching courses now very regularly on building website with wordpress.com and wordpress.org, and I’ve got an online class that’s running all the time – I figured I’d share with everyone what my favourite wordpress plugins are so that if they see something they like on my site, they can make use of it on their own ; )

So, this series will tell you a bit about what my favourite plugins are, and I’ll feature a different plugin per article. You’ll also be able to see it in action on the site and see if it’s something you’d like to use for your own website.