blogging 102

Reading time: 1 – 2 minutes If you followed this post over from Blogging For Noobs, then you know this mornings story.  The summation is I found a potential spamback link in my comments at the Celebrity Rumors and decided to follow it with due diligence before allowing it.  it was a spamback, but it had links to a wealth of good sites worthy of showing you.  Here they are. While not the most important thing in a theme, the color scheme is certainly the first thing noticed by a visitor to your blog. This handy little color scheme picker will help you come up with an appropriate scheme quickly and easily. I also found this three part series on usefull css code snippets. Part 1, 2, 3. This is a nice graphically based use of rounded css corners complete with free graphics and code. The size they give you could easily work as a background image for your blog page. This Web 2.0 Generator link page had a lot of great links for theme builders as well as just general bloggers. convey_source... 

Reading time: 1 – 2 minutes There were several old combinations that worked well together but since WordPress 2.3 came out many of them stopped working properly or stopped working altogether. Fear not there are replacements out there. Unlike many of the regurgitated idiot lists currently out there, everything I list will work in WordPress 2.5 the only version of the blog software you should be running. Ultimate Tag Warrior hasn’t been supported by the author since WordPress 2.3 came out. Many of its features and those of Bunny’s Technorati Tags, Jerome’s Keywords, and other tagging programs are easily replaced in better plugins. The All in One SEO Pack can even be replaced now. The new power plugin combination consists of Headspace2 and Simple Tags. Between these two plugins you can hand every task that you used to require half a dozen plugins and tweaks. convey_source = "English"; 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... 

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... 

Reading time: 2 – 4 minutes I hit the jackpot on good plugin finds today for all you junkines. This morning I found myself sitting face to face with a site called Coffee 2 Code and a long list of WordPress 2.5 compatible plugins. I won’t go through the whole list but here are the ones you can bet will find their way into my blogs very soon. · Auto Hyprelink URLs. It does just what it says by coding any plaint URL from your post or comment into a clickable link. While this has the potential for abuse with spam, it does mean you can remove the linking feature from the comments that might redirect someone elsewhere. · HTML Special Character Helper. I don’t this very often, but when I do I really hate looking it up in an external program. · Post to Post Link. While this is easily done with some preplanning normally, the description makes it look even simpler. I haven’t gone through the full trial on it, but it looked too good not to mention. · Extra Sentence Space. As a novelist,...