Menu

Writing Challenge

Reel Talk

No matter how long you’ve been blogging, there is always more to learn. As part of the Weekly Writing Challenges,…

No matter how long you’ve been blogging, there is always more to learn. As part of the Weekly Writing Challenges, once a month, we’ll highlight a feature in the WordPress.com Dashboard and challenge you to incorporate it into your blog. We want to help you take full advantage of all the tools available on WordPress.com to make your blog the best it can be — and to make your friends jealous of your web wizardry.

To participate, tag your posts with DPchallenge or leave a link to your post in the comments. Please be sure your post has been specifically written in response to this challenge; obvious attempts to link-bait will be deleted. We’ll highlight some of our favorites on Freshly Pressed on Friday, and in our monthly newsletter.

Last week, we at WordPress.com introduced a new video feature: Vine video embeds. If you’re not familiar with it, Vine is a mobile app that allows users to record six second snippets of looping video to share with their followers.

Ever since the original moving picture came about, we’ve been enamored with film and the way in which it captures our experiences as people. The fun with video services on blogs is that they give us ways to share small snippets of our lives with our readers, whether it’s by creating a virtual home movie, a snippet of the touching scene in that obscure film you’ve always loved, or as a question and answer session that you can use to directly interact with your followers.

For WordPress.com bloggers who use Vine, you can now add your videos to your blog posts by grabbing the Vine URL through the “Share this post” button on your mobile app, as described by the instructions in the Vine support page. We automagically convert the Vine address into a beautiful embed on your post or page for your blog readers to enjoy.

Vine isn’t the only video service that you can embed on WordPress.com. In fact, there 10+ other video services that you can seamlessly insert into your WordPress.com site.

For this week’s writing challenge, incorporate a bit of cinema into your post. Any video will work, but if you’re a Vine user, go ahead and take our new feature for a spin. Here’s a few ideas to get you started:

Film buff?

  • Become a documentarian. Find a subject — be it yourself, your family, a local event — and document it using snippets from Vine, or a longer-form video through another service, like YouTube or Vimeo.
  • Show us your pop culture critique by embedding a clip from a popular TV show or news event into a post.
  • Talk to us. Use a video service to say hello to your readers, answer a common question you get via email, or espouse your philosophy on blogging. If you do choose to use video for a welcome message, save it and use it for your About page as well.

Can’t stand videos and don’t want to incorporate one into your post?

That’s okay, too. Try taking a cue from Vine’s shortened format — each clip can only be six seconds long — and write a shortened blog post. That’s right, tell us about your day, a recent article you read, or your favorite movie in six seconds. Better yet, take a cue from these six word memoirs and limit your word usage, as well.

As always, if you have any questions, we’ll be here to help in the comments.

Show Comments

70 Comments

Close Comments

Join the conversation!

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

Gravatar
WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Google photo

You are commenting using your Google account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. ( Log Out /  Change )

Cancel

Connecting to %s

Comments

    1. You can always upload a video to another server (like Vine, Vimeo, YouTube, etc.) and then embed it in the text of your blog post.

      Like

      Reply

    2. Daily Post challenges are primarily intended for the WordPress.com community, but anyone is welcome to participate.

      To upload a video directly to your site, you do need the VideoPress upgrade. However, for this challenge, we encourage you to use any of the free services listed on this page.

      Like

      Reply

    1. I viewed your reblog and it’s something I’ve been trying to do without much luck. Do you have any tips for me? I’d greatly appreciate it……..John

      Like

      Reply

      1. I would say set this as your goal. Don’t let anything take you away from it maybe have a specific time. I mean it is weekly so that’ll help cut out time in your week to do the challenge. I hope I can stick to this and maybe if you have any tips let me know!
        Thanks
        -LEX-

        Like

    1. i’ve tried a few times with a few different prompts to do the whole pingback thing. i thought you just had to put a link to the prompt page, which i have done, but it has never worked. any wisdom to help me figure it out??

      Like

      Reply

  17. Thanks for the information, Erica. I’m a new blogger so anything that will improve my posts is welcome. I’ll give Vine a try one of these days…….John

    Like

    Reply

  20. Heya i’m for the first time here. I found this board and I to find It really useful & it helped me out a lot. I hope to give something again and aid others like you helped me.

    Like

    Reply

  24. ooh – this looks like a fun time. i’m keen! but i need to work out how to navigate this thing haha. brand new baby to word press! i dont even know how to make photos show up – i’ve tested two posts already and the photos arent showing… so if someone reads this and can help me – pls do! haha… but yeah! im KEEN to do this! the vine video thing.. only i might use another video vehicle, cos vine is so dupes short!

    Like

    Reply

    1. Welcome! We have a a guide that will walk you through adding images to your posts. If you’re having still trouble after taking a look, let me know and I’ll send you an email 🙂

      Like

      Reply

      2. Sure thing! You can center the video in your Visual Editor by highlighting the shortcode and then clicking on the Align Center button.

        Like

      3. That doesn’t work, I tried that before I asked. It seems that the Align Center button inserts into the paragraph a text-align style and the video isn’t text. (I had a look in text mode.)

        Like

43 Responses While this challenge is closed to new entries, we encourage you to visit the Reader to find other avid bloggers.