I've come accross great instructions on how to create a Google Personal Page. She said it much better than I would have, so here it is:
I don't know how many of you guys use a google personal page or a Yahoo personal page, for that matter... but you can "site feed" the blog to your personal page.
To get a google personal page: ( if you use a google email service ( gmail)or, if you want to start using that service)
http://www.google.com/ig
sign in ( or start a new account)
click on " Add Content"
( you can add all different kinds of newspaper links, stocks, sports, weather, and have them personalized to your preferences, etc.)
go to " create a section"
paste the following into the space: http://whateverURLyouwant/atom.xml
(you'll need that URL to have the /atom.xml at the end of it in order to see new posts to blogs automatically.)
this will make it so when you go to your google personal page, the newest blog entries will be there in their own little section, you can click on them and go straight to the blog.
Easy as pie. Blueberry.
Monday, August 15, 2005
Friday, August 12, 2005
Super Easy RSS Feeds for your Favorite Blogs
What are RSS feeds? Really Simple Syndication. They let you view headlines as they are posted on newspaper websites, and you can do it for your blog as well. There are online programs out there to keep track of this for you, like Bloglines. But there also another way that has great benefit...
Do you have a personalized Yahoo or Google page yet? These let you view the latest headlines from your favorite blogs in an at-a-glance style. The added benefit to adding an RSS feed to your Google or Yahoo personal page is that you can add your own blog as a source of fresh content you'd like to track. Once you do that, it forces Yahoo and Google to link to that new post. When that happens, Yahoo and Google have spidered you sooner than they would have.
This is the theory, at least, of this Brad guy at SEO Elite. I'm trying it out, but nevertheless, if you are RSS wary, and don't 'get' how to tell a program to track headlines from a certain source for you, this is a very simple way to do it. For Yahoo and Google, you just go to the "Add Content" button on both (in Google, go one step further to "Add a Section"), and add the site feed of your blog, or anyone elses. That ends in .xml and can usually be found by clicking on an orange button with the letters "XML" or "RSS" in it. Hunt around, you'll find it. Or, if you're using a browser like the latest Safari browser, you can click on the blue RSS button in the right hand corner of the address bar and get the site feed address up in the address bar. Copy and past it into the site feed text box on Google or Yahoo.
When you're done, you can return to your Google or Yahoo personal page and see the latest headings and blog posts!
Do you have a personalized Yahoo or Google page yet? These let you view the latest headlines from your favorite blogs in an at-a-glance style. The added benefit to adding an RSS feed to your Google or Yahoo personal page is that you can add your own blog as a source of fresh content you'd like to track. Once you do that, it forces Yahoo and Google to link to that new post. When that happens, Yahoo and Google have spidered you sooner than they would have.
This is the theory, at least, of this Brad guy at SEO Elite. I'm trying it out, but nevertheless, if you are RSS wary, and don't 'get' how to tell a program to track headlines from a certain source for you, this is a very simple way to do it. For Yahoo and Google, you just go to the "Add Content" button on both (in Google, go one step further to "Add a Section"), and add the site feed of your blog, or anyone elses. That ends in .xml and can usually be found by clicking on an orange button with the letters "XML" or "RSS" in it. Hunt around, you'll find it. Or, if you're using a browser like the latest Safari browser, you can click on the blue RSS button in the right hand corner of the address bar and get the site feed address up in the address bar. Copy and past it into the site feed text box on Google or Yahoo.
When you're done, you can return to your Google or Yahoo personal page and see the latest headings and blog posts!
Thursday, August 11, 2005
Tags Make Your Blog Go Round
A fellow blogess needs to make links in her blog. She's having trouble understanding the concept of wrapping words with 'html tags' to make them do something, like format themselves. So, right now we're going to focus on the basics and learn about html tags. Once you get this concept, linking will come easy.
HTML Tags are your friends when making something online. You 'wrap' tags around words you want to be bold, or format in any way. Try it with me. Bold a word. To bold, you use the b tag. To italicize, you use the i tag. The arrows have to be around the tags. You have a opening tag, and a closing tag, with your the word in the middle you'd like to be formatted. A word that is bolded has those tags in back and front of it. Like this: < b >bolded< /b >. They have < b > on the left, and < /b > on the right (the < /b > closes the 'wrap' - anything with a / closes the tag). If you follow so far, make somthing bold in a comment or one of your posts, and we can move on. :)
To really see lots of html tags you can use, see this cheat sheet from Webmonkey. This may help.
You can do this!!
HTML Tags are your friends when making something online. You 'wrap' tags around words you want to be bold, or format in any way. Try it with me. Bold a word. To bold, you use the b tag. To italicize, you use the i tag. The arrows have to be around the tags. You have a opening tag, and a closing tag, with your the word in the middle you'd like to be formatted. A word that is bolded has those tags in back and front of it. Like this: < b >bolded< /b >. They have < b > on the left, and < /b > on the right (the < /b > closes the 'wrap' - anything with a / closes the tag). If you follow so far, make somthing bold in a comment or one of your posts, and we can move on. :)
To really see lots of html tags you can use, see this cheat sheet from Webmonkey. This may help.
You can do this!!
Saturday, August 06, 2005
Changing Your Blog Template
If you change your blog template, you will lose specific additions to your template code that you added. That means, if you have statistic code in your template that you put there, that stat code will not be in the new template. Before you change your blog template, go into the template settings and copy and paste all of the code into a Word or text only document. That way, you will be able to add your specialized code back into your new template in a quick and easy fashion.
How Will Google Find My Blog?
Google will definitely find your blog when another website links to you. Yahoo, Google, MSN and other search engines work in simular ways. A search engine like Google will find your blog and rate it according to how many links point to it, as well as relevant content within its pages. Therefore, in theory, you don't need to submit your blog to a search engine directory (and you should never pay one to have your blog included - search engines do not work that way, Google doesn't at least). But it doesn't hurt and is painless.
When you're blog is in a place you're satisfied with, I recomend you submit it to two places: straight to Google and to the human edited directory, dmoz. If you submit your blog to dmoz, make sure you select the right category (there's lots of them). Google may include your blog in future spiders (it's not 100%, but is likely), and a person at dmoz will one day come over and check your blog and add it if he/she likes to that directory. Dmoz does give blog and website information to Google, Yahoo and others, so you may as well submit. I'm no expert on dmoz, I just know it is recomended by bloggers to submit to it.
Because you've selected in your settings to have each post be a page, each post is qualified to come up in a search engine result for whatever you wrote about, be it "seychelles wedges" or "kadorables t-shirts." So when you're writing each post, think about what search terms a user might type into Google's search box (or another search engine) when looking for something specific. Yahoo has a great tool you can use called Overture. This was built for websites who want pay-per-click advertising on their sites. It measures what search terms are being plugged into Yahoo every month. So Overture is a free and easy to use tool to check if a phrase is being searched in search engines. Your blog has a good chance of showing up in these search results if you write your posts tightly around a phrase.
But, the bottom line is, you will rank higher in search results if you 1. have links poinint to your blog or specific posts on your blog and 2. 'optimized content' is written tightly into your posts - for those posts you want to rank for (or be found for), that is.
May the search engines be with you!
When you're blog is in a place you're satisfied with, I recomend you submit it to two places: straight to Google and to the human edited directory, dmoz. If you submit your blog to dmoz, make sure you select the right category (there's lots of them). Google may include your blog in future spiders (it's not 100%, but is likely), and a person at dmoz will one day come over and check your blog and add it if he/she likes to that directory. Dmoz does give blog and website information to Google, Yahoo and others, so you may as well submit. I'm no expert on dmoz, I just know it is recomended by bloggers to submit to it.
Because you've selected in your settings to have each post be a page, each post is qualified to come up in a search engine result for whatever you wrote about, be it "seychelles wedges" or "kadorables t-shirts." So when you're writing each post, think about what search terms a user might type into Google's search box (or another search engine) when looking for something specific. Yahoo has a great tool you can use called Overture. This was built for websites who want pay-per-click advertising on their sites. It measures what search terms are being plugged into Yahoo every month. So Overture is a free and easy to use tool to check if a phrase is being searched in search engines. Your blog has a good chance of showing up in these search results if you write your posts tightly around a phrase.
But, the bottom line is, you will rank higher in search results if you 1. have links poinint to your blog or specific posts on your blog and 2. 'optimized content' is written tightly into your posts - for those posts you want to rank for (or be found for), that is.
May the search engines be with you!
Friday, August 05, 2005
You Published A Blog. Now What?
Here’s where we rub our hands together. There are several basic ‘Settings’ in your blog that you want to make sure are fine tuned. We’re going to go under the hood to make sure you can get the most exposure at the most basic (aka easy, least amount of effort) level. I’m assuming you’re using Blogger (blogspot.com), so just follow along. If you’re not, your blogging program most likely has similar options for you.
The Tabs
When you log into your account, and you click on the blog you want to work on, you’re go into the behind the scenes area. You see 4 tabs: Publish, Settings, Template, View Blog (that’s an easy one). This is where you’re create and edit posts, tweak RSS feeds, publish to FTP if you so desire, change your template, and other little quarks.
Posting Tab
This is where you’re create and edit your posts. It’s pretty basic and self-explanatory. If you want to allow people, random people or your friends, to make comments on your post, you can make the decision here. It will be specific to this post. So if you clicked “No” to people commenting on your post on a past post, and you don’t want people commenting on this post, then you’ll have to click it again. Keep in mind, you are the administrator (god or goddess) of this blog. You can delete any comment, or any post for that matter, at any time.
You can change the time and date of your post here. If you don’t want people to know you were up at 4am blogging, then change the time to 2pm.
Settings Tab
Ok, here’s where we really go under the hood. I’ll just define what everything is, and why you want it. If you care about showing up in search engines for certain phrase searches like “seychelles wedges” or “new york fashion designer,” pay attention:
Under Basic:
Title: the title of your blog. It appears in search engines as the main linked copy and at the top of the browser window. Look up at mine. It says “That Girl with the IT Answers”
Description: appears somewhere below your title depending on your template. Fill this with good keywords but in a way that makes sense, as in a complete sentence.
Add your Blog to listings?: when you publish a new post to your blog, Blogger will automatically tell blog listings that you have a new post. This can generate traffic to your site. It will be random traffic, but traffic none the less. Usually, people are hitting that ‘next blog’ button at the top of a blog, and you could be the next blog because you have fresh content. You’ll want to say Yes to this. It doesn’t hurt.
Show Quick Editing on your blog?: this will let you get into your settings from your blog. So if you’re reading it over and catch a mistake, you can click on this little graphic to go to your settings. It looks like this:
Show Email Post links?: this does what it says. It’s another way of people to share your blog with other people. Doesn’t’ really hurt, so click Yes.
Show Compose Mode or all of your blogs?: this lets you use a ‘wysiwig editor’ with your blog, which means that, formatting your text will be much easier. It will be like formatting text in Word. You just click in a word you want bolded instead of wrapping code around it.
Under Publishing:
Woa there, Nelly. Don’t mess with this until you’ve done your homework. The only thing you want to change here is to click Yes to Notify Weblogs.com. Again, this notifies a blog-tracking program that you have fresh content on your site. People from far and wide looking at that list of currently updated blogs may see your blog Title and click on it.
As for the FTP and SFTP settings you see there, those are for if you want your blog to live in a website that you already maintain. Think long and hard before you do this, because reversing it could be painful. There are many little changes associated with changing where your blog is published, and you’ll want to think them all through. For a quick dip into it if you’re curious , you can see me flail for help (and get it) when I changed the settings (ouch for the brain).
Under Formatting:
The usual suspects are in here: time zone, how dates are displayed, how your archives are displayed. Keep all other settings at Yes except for the Show Link Field. No one really knows what it does or what it’s for.
Under Comments:
Comments: to show or hide. Showing comments is up to you.
Who Can Comment?: Again, up to you. Anyone gives ability for more people to comment. If it’s only members of your blog, those are more settings.
Default for Posts: do you want comments available every time you create a new post? If so, click “new posts have comments”
Show comments in a popup window?: this let’s your comments pop up separately, leaving your blog still open in the browser window. It allows for quicker loading of comments if you click Yes.
Show profile images on comments?: some people have pictures attached to their profiles, like me (see strange looking mouse above). This picture will be included with the commenter’s comments.
Under Archiving:
Choose your archive frequency (personally, I think monthly is good enough and easier for the user to go through).
Enable Post Pages?: if you click yes, all of your posts will be their own web page. This increases your chance of getting into a web search result for those keyword phrases. This of course not only increases chances for traffic, but gets you traffic who want to be on your blog.
Under Site Feed:
Another good way to get traffic. People can subscribe to services that alert them when new content is posted to their favorite blogs or websites. bloglines.com is one such service. If you click Yes here, then your site feed URL will be enabled.
Site Feed URL: it’s your blog URL plus the atom.xml exension. Unless the user has a special ‘reader’ that can turn this code into a pretty page, it will be a bunch of code. But it’s great to have.
Under Email:
I’ve never used this, so feel free to experiment.
Under Members:
This is where you’ll add members who can publish or do certain things on your blog. If you decided that members only can comment on your blog, than this is where they will live.
I think that’s all for now, don’t you? Check back for adding statistics (and which are the best free statistics) to your blog so that you can see who the heck is coming to your blog.
The Tabs
When you log into your account, and you click on the blog you want to work on, you’re go into the behind the scenes area. You see 4 tabs: Publish, Settings, Template, View Blog (that’s an easy one). This is where you’re create and edit posts, tweak RSS feeds, publish to FTP if you so desire, change your template, and other little quarks.
Posting Tab
This is where you’re create and edit your posts. It’s pretty basic and self-explanatory. If you want to allow people, random people or your friends, to make comments on your post, you can make the decision here. It will be specific to this post. So if you clicked “No” to people commenting on your post on a past post, and you don’t want people commenting on this post, then you’ll have to click it again. Keep in mind, you are the administrator (god or goddess) of this blog. You can delete any comment, or any post for that matter, at any time.
You can change the time and date of your post here. If you don’t want people to know you were up at 4am blogging, then change the time to 2pm.
Settings Tab
Ok, here’s where we really go under the hood. I’ll just define what everything is, and why you want it. If you care about showing up in search engines for certain phrase searches like “seychelles wedges” or “new york fashion designer,” pay attention:
Under Basic:
Title: the title of your blog. It appears in search engines as the main linked copy and at the top of the browser window. Look up at mine. It says “That Girl with the IT Answers”
Description: appears somewhere below your title depending on your template. Fill this with good keywords but in a way that makes sense, as in a complete sentence.
Add your Blog to listings?: when you publish a new post to your blog, Blogger will automatically tell blog listings that you have a new post. This can generate traffic to your site. It will be random traffic, but traffic none the less. Usually, people are hitting that ‘next blog’ button at the top of a blog, and you could be the next blog because you have fresh content. You’ll want to say Yes to this. It doesn’t hurt.
Show Quick Editing on your blog?: this will let you get into your settings from your blog. So if you’re reading it over and catch a mistake, you can click on this little graphic to go to your settings. It looks like this:
Show Email Post links?: this does what it says. It’s another way of people to share your blog with other people. Doesn’t’ really hurt, so click Yes.
Show Compose Mode or all of your blogs?: this lets you use a ‘wysiwig editor’ with your blog, which means that, formatting your text will be much easier. It will be like formatting text in Word. You just click in a word you want bolded instead of wrapping code around it.
Under Publishing:
Woa there, Nelly. Don’t mess with this until you’ve done your homework. The only thing you want to change here is to click Yes to Notify Weblogs.com. Again, this notifies a blog-tracking program that you have fresh content on your site. People from far and wide looking at that list of currently updated blogs may see your blog Title and click on it.
As for the FTP and SFTP settings you see there, those are for if you want your blog to live in a website that you already maintain. Think long and hard before you do this, because reversing it could be painful. There are many little changes associated with changing where your blog is published, and you’ll want to think them all through. For a quick dip into it if you’re curious , you can see me flail for help (and get it) when I changed the settings (ouch for the brain).
Under Formatting:
The usual suspects are in here: time zone, how dates are displayed, how your archives are displayed. Keep all other settings at Yes except for the Show Link Field. No one really knows what it does or what it’s for.
Under Comments:
Comments: to show or hide. Showing comments is up to you.
Who Can Comment?: Again, up to you. Anyone gives ability for more people to comment. If it’s only members of your blog, those are more settings.
Default for Posts: do you want comments available every time you create a new post? If so, click “new posts have comments”
Show comments in a popup window?: this let’s your comments pop up separately, leaving your blog still open in the browser window. It allows for quicker loading of comments if you click Yes.
Show profile images on comments?: some people have pictures attached to their profiles, like me (see strange looking mouse above). This picture will be included with the commenter’s comments.
Under Archiving:
Choose your archive frequency (personally, I think monthly is good enough and easier for the user to go through).
Enable Post Pages?: if you click yes, all of your posts will be their own web page. This increases your chance of getting into a web search result for those keyword phrases. This of course not only increases chances for traffic, but gets you traffic who want to be on your blog.
Under Site Feed:
Another good way to get traffic. People can subscribe to services that alert them when new content is posted to their favorite blogs or websites. bloglines.com is one such service. If you click Yes here, then your site feed URL will be enabled.
Site Feed URL: it’s your blog URL plus the atom.xml exension. Unless the user has a special ‘reader’ that can turn this code into a pretty page, it will be a bunch of code. But it’s great to have.
Under Email:
I’ve never used this, so feel free to experiment.
Under Members:
This is where you’ll add members who can publish or do certain things on your blog. If you decided that members only can comment on your blog, than this is where they will live.
I think that’s all for now, don’t you? Check back for adding statistics (and which are the best free statistics) to your blog so that you can see who the heck is coming to your blog.
So You Wanna Publish A Blog
Excellent! It’s not that scary, really. Time-consuming? Sometimes. Possibly addictive leading to obsession? Yes. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s learn how to publish that blog.
1. Find a blog program to ‘host’ your blog
Hosting means that someone is keeping the power on. To go with a blogging program means that someone is giving you tools to create and manage your blog. This should be free. I use blogspot.com. It started out as Blogger, and Google bought it. I have a friend who works there, and he’s a great and efficient guy. He loves the environment, and so do I. So, go to blogspot.com and sign up for an account (although, you're kind of already here, since I'm at blogspot.com...just look up in my URL in the address bar).
2. Create your account
Your Username appears when you comment, no matter how many blogs you have under that account. For example: my username is BloggerMouse. My blogs are “FashionMista” and the one you’re on now. When I comment anywhere in the blogging world (well, blogs that are under blogspot), my name will appear as BloggerMouse. This is changeable anytime.
3. Pick your template
Blogger will present you with a list of templates to choose from. This is the design, or visual layout, of your blog. You can design your own template, but that’s advanced. For more information on it, though, go to the bloggerforum to see what other people say about designing their own templates. Otherwise, the ones Blogger provides are just fine. You can change this at any time as well once you get started, and will actually be presented with more choices. Note: if you’ve done anything customizable to your template, those changes will be lost when you change templates.
4. Go ahead, post something
Christen your blog with your first post. Go to Create Post and write anything you want. If you’re using Windows or on a Mac using Firefox or maybe Mozilla (just not Safari), you have access to a ‘wysiwig’ editor. This stands for ‘what you see is what you get’ and it makes formatting the copy in your blog much easier. You’ll see buttons for Bold, Italic and to make a link. Use them. They work just like if you were formatting text in Word. Just highlight your text and press the formatting button of choice.
Enjoy!
1. Find a blog program to ‘host’ your blog
Hosting means that someone is keeping the power on. To go with a blogging program means that someone is giving you tools to create and manage your blog. This should be free. I use blogspot.com. It started out as Blogger, and Google bought it. I have a friend who works there, and he’s a great and efficient guy. He loves the environment, and so do I. So, go to blogspot.com and sign up for an account (although, you're kind of already here, since I'm at blogspot.com...just look up in my URL in the address bar).
2. Create your account
Your Username appears when you comment, no matter how many blogs you have under that account. For example: my username is BloggerMouse. My blogs are “FashionMista” and the one you’re on now. When I comment anywhere in the blogging world (well, blogs that are under blogspot), my name will appear as BloggerMouse. This is changeable anytime.
3. Pick your template
Blogger will present you with a list of templates to choose from. This is the design, or visual layout, of your blog. You can design your own template, but that’s advanced. For more information on it, though, go to the bloggerforum to see what other people say about designing their own templates. Otherwise, the ones Blogger provides are just fine. You can change this at any time as well once you get started, and will actually be presented with more choices. Note: if you’ve done anything customizable to your template, those changes will be lost when you change templates.
4. Go ahead, post something
Christen your blog with your first post. Go to Create Post and write anything you want. If you’re using Windows or on a Mac using Firefox or maybe Mozilla (just not Safari), you have access to a ‘wysiwig’ editor. This stands for ‘what you see is what you get’ and it makes formatting the copy in your blog much easier. You’ll see buttons for Bold, Italic and to make a link. Use them. They work just like if you were formatting text in Word. Just highlight your text and press the formatting button of choice.
Enjoy!
Wednesday, August 03, 2005
Publishing Site to FTP vs Blogspot
I've just been through a nightmare with publishing my blog to my website via FTP. When I wanted to switch back, Blogspot denied me, telling me that my blog was already in use (ahem - by ME!). BlogForum has been a great help, and finally Blogspot help got back to me telling me that the switch-back was possible. Well, it wasn't until today...
I'll write more about it later, but for now, if you're having problems publishing your site to your FTP, or coming back, click here: FTP SOS
Just know, that as of today, the function works to switch pubishing back to blogspot from your FTP. Very strange.
I'll write more about it later, but for now, if you're having problems publishing your site to your FTP, or coming back, click here: FTP SOS
Just know, that as of today, the function works to switch pubishing back to blogspot from your FTP. Very strange.
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