The Rhetoric of WordPress Blog Plugins

Plugins: The buttons and twiddly bits

Now that I have had some experience this year with building several self-hosted WordPress blogs and sites, I have become very interested in the rhetorical tools enabled by plugins that enhance WordPress for organizational blogs and websites.

Plugins make blogs more functional than the “naked” version of WordPress.  For a person who is not an expert in HTML or PHP, they are tools given for free by those who do write the code, and they enable customization for the rest of us who are just beginner to intermediate blog administrators.

Call for papers: ISHR: Rhetoric and Performance, 2013

 

The neglected prophetess Cassandra pulls her hair in frustration as the city burns

The Nineteenth Biennial Conference of the International Society for the History of Rhetoric (ISHR) will be held in Chicago, USA, from Wednesday, July 24 to Saturday, July 27, 2013. The Biennial Conference of ISHR brings together several hundred specialists in the history of rhetoric from around thirty countries.

WordPress blogs as organization or association newsletters

A functional option today for an organization’s newsletter is to set up a free public blog on http://wordpress.com/ or to host a WordPress blog on your own website (if you have one).

Blogs are quite professional nowadays (no longer merely online diaries). They are respectable forums for academic associations. The Rhetoric Society of America has a blog (The Blogora) at http://rsa.cwrl.utexas.edu/

Blogs are even used by many nonprofit organizations as the basis for free websites. See this example of a website — the Trent Centre for Community-based Education http://www.trentcentre.ca/ — you wouldn’t even know it’s based on WordPress software unless you scroll down to the very bottom and see the notice “proudly powered by WordPress.”

The rest of the post explains how it can work for your association, why WordPress is a good choice, and how it can be used to automatically distribute content to members who may prefer to browse its content or stay up to date via Facebook or other social media platforms rather than (or in addition to) an email subscription to your blog.

Using Zoho Projects as an educator

I’m a professor and for the past 10 months, I’ve used Zoho Projects for team projects in my classrooms and for collaborations amongst academics at a distance.

I’d just like to share my thoughts on how I use this tool, the things I absolutely love about this online collaboration application, and things I wish could be worked on.  I’m also sharing this with the Zoho support team on their support forum.

The Ebb and Flow of Rhetorical Output

Conversational rhetoric (From "img_5070" by bpsusf on Flickr with Creative Commons license)

If you’re a person who writes and speaks full time, like myself, have you ever wondered why there seem to be dry periods when you’re not very productive at the kinds of writing or speech that “count” the most to yourself or the people who evaluate you?

Well it bothers me.  I know I am not the only professor who notices that during Fall and Winter terms while I focus on producing the rhetoric required by my teaching roles, I don’t seem to be as productive in aiming my rhetoric at broader public audiences: conference presentations, blog-writing (!), and publication in journals.  The month of May comes around sooner than it should, and I feel like I haven’t accomplished “anything”– other than teaching, of course.