Blogging tips and tricks - anyone got any?

M

Melchior

Taking History Too Far
So I've started blogging, but haven't had much time to make my blog my own yet. I'm going to be redesigning the damn thing once the semester is over I suspect, but in the mean time I was wondering if there were any little tips and tricks to organising blogs people would like to share?

I'm particularly interested in how to make categories for my posts so that a reader could looka t all the music posts or whatever. Any ideas?
 
M

Melchior

Taking History Too Far
And while I think of it, how do you check stats related to your blog? Like visitors, google searches etc?
 
john eden

john eden

male pale and stale
Is that S Buchanan of zerogweb? :)

errrrrrr I am not sure if blogspot does categories and all that, but I think you can do something clever with Technorati tags.

There a little widgets like siteweb or whatever it's called (sitetracker?) which can tell you about stats.

You generally get all of this built in if you get a domain, hosting and software like Wordpress or moveable type, tho.
 
M

Melchior

Taking History Too Far
john eden said:
Is that S Buchanan of zerogweb? :)
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No, it's Kiwi anarchist Sam Buchanan...

errrrrrr I am not sure if blogspot does categories and all that, but I think you can do something clever with Technorati tags.
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I just joined technorati, so I'll see what I can do,

There a little widgets like siteweb or whatever it's called (sitetracker?) which can tell you about stats.

You generally get all of this built in if you get a domain, hosting and software like Wordpress or moveable type, tho.
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Yeah, for the moment I'm trying to avoid that route as I don't really want to spend extra cash.
 
john eden

john eden

male pale and stale
I've sort've hijacked your thread a bit!

Best thing to do is look at other people's blogs and see what they use - there are usually links to set up your own code in your template...
 
R

Rambler

Awanturnik
www.sitemeter.com - free, and had basically no problems with this in two years (once it lost a couple of weeks of hits for some reason). You get basic user stats, referrals, that sort of thing.

Blogger catergories are trickier: Blogger doesn't support them, so you have to come up with an imaginative work-around. Usually these involve either a combination of Technorati and del.icio.us, or setting up separate blogs for each category that then feed into a master blog. I've never tried doing either of these, but here's a guide to the former:

http://blogfresh.blogspot.com/2005/04/how-to-use-delicious-for-blogger.html

and a more complex version (but quicker to use) that uses the Greasemonkey Firefox plug-in:

http://blogfresh.blogspot.com/2005/07/using-greasemonkey-delicious-for.html

the category results look like this:

http://del.icio.us/jrfj44/blogger

which is not all that classy, but there are ways (eg. feeddigest.com) to incorporate del.icio.us XML into your site template.

As for the latter, this looks like a pretty slick work-around:

http://oldcola.blogspot.com/goodies/BloggerCategories.html if you can ignore the errors in spelling, punctuation and grammar...
 
M

Melchior

Taking History Too Far
john eden said:
Oh right - did he used to be in with McGillykuddys in Hamilton? I think I may have met him as well. Didn't know he'd been banged up in Genoa.
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Yes, that's the one. What a small world it is. The Genoa thing was pretty full on, not least the part here e was deported back to the UK without his NZ passport and then had to argue his way through Heathrow customs without documents. But he managed it all ok in the end.

Rambler, that looks great. Thanks for that. I'll have a play tomorrow maybe.
 
N

Ness Rowlah

Norwegian Wood
  • write short, clear headlines. blogs are often read through RSS-readers and then a headline like "Check out this cool link" or "Yesterday was interesting" are going to leave your potential readers baffled. Try something like "The giant whale-killing squid" or "Why Phil Collins is a genius" to give your readers an idea what the subject of your post is.
  • keep at it. I've gone from 0 readers to a stable readership of around 400 unique readers a day (and over 1 million "hits" a year). Don't expect audiences to find you straight away.
  • use paragraphs
  • if it's heavily linked elsewhere/the source is widely read (say Wired) don't bother linking to it, unless you've got something to say about the subject
  • many might disagree on this, but instead of having a hundred external sites listed on the sidemenus I prefer to list just a few (I trust people to go to Gutterbreakz via Blissblogger)
  • don't overdo the graphics (ie K-Punk has nice balance)
 
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M

Melchior

Taking History Too Far
john eden said:
This is Rule Number One.
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And one that I follow. I suspect proper spelling and grammer are rule number 2? Or rule 0?

I've installed that tracker Nick, cheers for the suggestion.
 
R

Rambler

Awanturnik
Ness Rowlah said:
  • write short, clear headlines. blogs are often read through RSS-readers and then a headline like "Check out this cool link" or "Yesterday was interesting" are going to leave your potential readers baffled. Try something like "The giant whale-killing squid" or "Why Phil Collins is a genius" to give your readers an idea what the subject of your post is.
  • keep at it. I've gone from 0 readers to a stable readership of around 400 unique readers a day (and over 1 million "hits" a year). Don't expect audiences to find you straight away.
  • use paragraphs
  • if it's heavily linked elsewhere/the source is widely read (say Wired) don't bother linking to it, unless you've got something to say about the subject
  • many might disagree on this, but instead of having a hundred external sites listed on the sidemenus I prefer to list just a few (I trust people to go to Gutterbreakz via Blissblogger)
  • don't overdo the graphics (ie K-Punk has nice balance)
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Some excellent points here, which I admit I don't always follow (although I should). Along the lines of the first one, post titles should be properly coded (as, eg, < h3 >) so that RSS-readers recognise titles as titles and not as part of the opening paragraph. Just putting your post title in bold isn't enough.
 
M

Melchior

Taking History Too Far
Rambler said:
Along the lines of the first one, post titles should be properly coded (as, eg, < h3 >) so that RSS-readers recognise titles as titles and not as part of the opening paragraph. Just putting your post title in bold isn't enough.
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Ah... does blogger do this automatically?

Also, can anyone recommend a good PC RSS reader?

Oh, and cheers Gutterbreakz. I'm using that stats page and found out all sorts of interesting things. I write two posts about nazis and half the traffic seems to be about that!
 
R

Rambler

Awanturnik
Melchior said:
Ah... does blogger do this automatically?
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Sort of - it does once you set it up (there's an option in there somewhere about titles). You then need to make sure you've got < h3 > tags in your template, and you can style the header as you wish (or go with your template's default). I think some Blogger templates might already do all this, just not all of them.
 
D

droid

Guest
Nice thread!

Ive got some nice little stylesheet tricks for getting around browser bugs... they've been clogging my mental hard drive for a while, so ill try and get them up here on monday
 
john eden

john eden

male pale and stale
"I liked your stack,"

No Author Biographies
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Yeah right.

not enough to simply say that Joe Blogger writes the content. Readers want to know more about Joe. Does he have any credentials or experience in the field he's commenting on?
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No he doesn't have any fucking credentials. (Them never know Natty Dread Have Him Credential, after all!). He is making it up as he goes along, often whilst drunk out of his mind.

I dunno, the blogs I like are the ones which combine a bit of biography with the subject matter anyway (cf Martin Implode's classic Love's Secret Domain post) OR they write knowledgeably/funnily about things I am already fairly obsessive about.

Even weblogs that provide author bios often omit the author photo. [...] You enhance your credibility by the simple fact that you're not trying to hide.
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Forgetting That You Write for Your Future Boss
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This is completely retarded. The idea that people should limit what they write because they may want to apply for some uber-corporate job in the future. I think all of the blogs in my sidebar would never have existed if they'd thought like that. And this seems like a great reason to not include a photo or even use your real name.

The downside is that you do get people wondering (for example) if you have dreadlocks because you like reggae. Which I would like to state categorically, for the records, is not has not and will never be the case for me. :mad:

There seems to be a number of assumptions about how people want to present themselves and be read here, which I don't think I agree with.

But having said that, the rest of it is alright really. :D
 
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