blogging 102

Reading time: < 1 minute

5) Don’t Advertise On Your Noobie Blog. People who tell you not to advertise don’t usually have your best interest at heart.

The first kind of people to give that advice are readers who want something for nothing. Second kind are bloggers who think if you don’t have ads their advertising will get a better click through ratio.

4) Gadets and Widgets are the bomb and you should use all the latest and greatest. The fact is unless it is unobtrusive and either useful to you or your readers it is pointless and slows down your load times. Read more »

Reading time: 2 – 2 minutes

The question of whether you should make theme adjustments is always a difficult one to answer. It is even be harder to do and not negatively affect your onsite readers. That being said here are my thoughts.

• Limit major theme changes to no more than once a month. Anymore than once a month clearly defines you as a noob. A complete theme change is sometimes necessary especially as you are learning, but should be done with caution.

• When building or choosing a new theme make sure that it is easily tweaked later on. Having a CSS class that will allow the quick insertion of more banners or advertising will save you countless hours of work down the road.

• Work out all changes before hand on a test blog with actual posts and pages. I prefer to run a local server using Apache, mySql, and php management on my windows PC

• Make changes when the fewest people are reading your blog and with a very clear head. A pot of coffee by your side while making these changes isn’t a bad idea either. Only make the changes to your real blog after you know they work perfectly on the test blog. Upload the entire theme under a new name if it is a variation of your current theme. If you need to switch back to your old theme quickly, because the test blog and the real blog had some difference or something got distorted in the FTP transfer having your old theme will save you a lot of time, panic, and cursing.

• Make minor tweaks as necessary, but keep them small and do them one at a time. As noted before always have a backup of your current theme or you can really screw yourself.

With these tips in mind you should be able to make changes with the smallest possible impact on your readers. Good luck and never stop improving the functionality of your blog anytime you can.

Reading time: 1 – 2 minutes

It has been another behind the scenes weekend for me tweaking the theme over at Brad’s Tiny World and editing Pack hopefully some agent will just fall in love and be on my side for a six figure advance. Alright I know I really looking at probably a $5k advance at best, which means I have to sell 4900 copies of it in paperback just to cover that so when it is out I expect every damned one of you who read my blogs to buy at three copies.

I was going through my feed this afternoon when I found the coolest new tool to share with you. It isn’t out yet but that shouldn’t stop you from drooling over it tool. i found Utility Poster through Jack Humphrey’s Friday Traffic Report. If you aren’t reading this you should be, and I have added it to my blogroll just for you guys.

Reading time: 2 – 3 minutes

I was researching this topic for you when I ran across this excellent article and decided just to give you the whole thing.  it has some stuyff that I am going to go put in practice on my other blogs right now so have a good day.

How to Get Inbound Links from Government and University Sites   by Dr. Deepak Dutta

The inbound link is the holy grail of web traffic. Getting inbound links from government and university sites is a testament to the quality of your site.

You accumulate inbound links not only to increase traffic, but also to establish your site for providing high value to visitors. However, getting inbound links by link exchange or buying text links is not going to get you anywhere. You need to abandon those archaic ideas and jump forward with an inbound link strategy that provides high value authoritative links.

To obtain high value authoritative links, your site must provide high values to its visitors. Original authoritative articles and tools to solve everyday problems are a few ways to provide a lasting value to web surfers. Before you embark on your link-building mission, create something valuable.

Links from the government sites have very high value. If your site enables citizenry to interact directly with the government, it is an excellent candidate for a link back from the government site.

Sites that provide community level services, for example location of Social Security Offices in the USA with interactive maps, will also have high potential for outbound links from government sites.

Other types of sites that do well are sites that provide information about service performance, for example, a nursing home comparison site; sites that cross inter-governmental boundaries; and sites that allow transactions with the government, for example, filing taxes. Read more »

Reading time: 3 – 4 minutes

I am in no way an expert in Blogger or BlogSpot, but I am passing along to your a nice free article on how to write a theme there since I know some of you blog there.

How To Create A Blogger/Blogspot Theme by Brad

This tutorial will cover the steps needed to create your own blogger template. Many people have used blogger to run blogs and have wondered how they can make their own theme to use with it. There are a very few hard to find guides on how to do this, so I’ve decided to take up the task to help as many people as I can, create one. Incase you are skimming over the content, this article is teaching you “How to create a blogger / blogspot theme“

To create a blogger template, you will need a graphic editor (Such as Photoshop, GIMP, or even Paint will do) to create images for backgrounds, post headers, sidebars, etc.. We will get to that later. You will also need an idea or vision about what you want to create. Without that, you are just wasting your time and electricity. Lastly, you will need to know about C.S.S (Cascading.Style.Sheets) and how to operate them. If you do not know how to do that, you cannot apply interesting effects to your newly designed template (Such as: Positioning pictures or text, creating repeated backgrounds, moving around pictures and text and more). A great guide on how to get started with this is available here.

Once you have got everything you need, you should start the C.S.S Framework by putting properties such as

body[ background-color: #000000; margin: 0 auto; font-family: “Trebuchet MS”, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 14px;}

#title [ font-size: 32px; color: #000011; }

so-on and so forth. A basic list of these tags that were taken from Blogger’s simple white theme are available here: (PDF File) XML Tags Blogger List Of CSS. An easier way to do this would be to find a theme that you like and copy and paste the C.S.S, editing it along the way so that time is saved. The only problem with doing that is that every theme is engineered differently so the tags will change.

After configuring your CSS Stylesheet, you must piece it together in HTML. This can be achieved using similar structures.

<div id=’main-wrapper’> <b:section class=’main’ id=’main’ showaddelement=’no’> <b:widget id=‘Blog1′ locked=‘true’ title=’Blog Posts’ type=Blog’/> </b:section> </div>

Do not forget to reference blogger templates that have already been created for the required widgets that you are supposed to put in certain spots. Without doing this, you could not complete making your own template.

Now comes the grueling part that you can either do yourself which could take hours to finish, or copy from another site and edit accordingly. Blogger is configured using widgets. All your posts are just one big widget hence the code up there. An Example of the code that you could type yourself or copy is: Read more »