Archive for June, 2007

Congratulations, you’ve finished the Starting a Great Blog tutorial! By now you should have a blog that stands out from all the Blog*Spot and Livejournal users out there. Why? You spent the time, effort, and small amount of money, to start a better blog. You paid $7/year for a real domain name, you installed the powerful Wordpress blogging system. You took the time to market your blog, submitting to social bookmarking sites and commenting on other blogs.

Great job. Now what? Well, I recommend that you not just blog, but read other blogs as well. Read blogs on the topic you blog in, and read blogs on blogging. Below are some good blogs about blogging/websites:

• Webmaster-Source
• ProBlogger
• North X East
• The Blog Herald
• Smashing Magazine

There are more, of course. Just cruise around Technorati and Google.

Don’t get discouraged, even if it seems as if no one’s coming to your blog sometimes. Just keep blogging, and do a bit of publicizing. After six months or so, blogs generally start to gain momentum, so to speak.

Happy blogging!

Welcome to part eleven of the Starting a Great Blog tutorial. Today we address social bookmarking, and how it’s effects on blogging.

How does social bookmarking affect blogs? Have you noticed those little icons at the bottom of posts on most blogs? You know, those little buttons to submit the post to Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us, etc? Social bookmarking has changed blogging, most likely for the better. How? (more…)

Are you using Feedburner? North X East has an excellent tutorial on customizing the Feedburner Subscriber Count Chicklet. Using a Wordpress plugin, and a bit of CSS, you can go from the default chicklet to something totally different. You didn’t honestly think you were stuck with the default one, did you? It doesn’t look good with very many site designs. If you’re a Feedburner-using Wordpress blogger, take a look at the tutorial. Also note this: If you have less than 30 people subscribing to your feed, It’s perhaps better to not show-off your subscriber count. You don’t want to look like a puny blog, do you?

Welcome to part ten of the Starting a Great Blog tutorial. Today we cover Wordpress’s plugin system. No, Wordpress’s abilities aren’t limited to what the developers wrote in. Anyone who knows PHP can write a plugin that extends Wordpress’s capabilities. Ready to get started? (more…)

Welcome to part eight of the Starting a Great Blog tutorial! We’re getting close to the end, but there are still a few installments to go. What’s today’s topic? Stat tracking with Google Analytics. What’s stat tracking? Have you ever wanted to know how many people read your blog in a day/week/month/year? How about how many repeat visitors you get? You can learn that and more with Google Analytics. (more…)

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Back in the early days of RSS, webmasters used to link to their feeds using little rectangular orange buttons labeled “RSS” or “XML”. Then along came Mozilla Firefox, the web browser that re-started the Browser Wars. Since Firefox had RSS support built-in, the developers created a cool new icon to use in the browser: An orange rounded-square with an odd symbol on it. The symbol depicted an antenna. Since then, the Firefox feed icon has become the standard one used throughout the web. There’s no confusing it with anything else.

Grab a copy of the “Standardized Feed Icon” at FeedIcons.com They offer a .ZIP archive with different sized and colored variations of the image. Several formats are available in the package. There’s PSD, AI, EPS, SVG, PDF, PNG, JPG, and GIF. Get the standardized feed icon for your site.

Welcome to part eight of the Starting a Great Blog tutorial. So, what are we doing today? Monetizing your blog. While you can do this now, some people prefer to wait awhile before putting ads on their website. As a starting blog, you’re not likely to make much money off ads. I’ve been a webmaster since 2004 (though I haven’t been doing ads on any of my sites that long), and with mixed success I’ve made small amounts of money off ads. I’m still only 1/4 of the way to an adsense payment. I’ve made larger amounts of money with other ad networks, though AdSense is undeniably the easiest to deal with (despite their high minimum check amount).

The question is: Is your blog ready to have ads on it? There are no definite answers to that question. Some people wait until they have 50 regular visitors, while others jump right in and add some ads (pun unintended). It’s up to you.

Whatever you choose, I’m still going to write about monetizing your blog. Let’s start with AdSense. (more…)

This is old news by now, but Technorati’s got a new layout. A couple of weeks ago, I was surprised when I headed over to Technorati to search for something. I was shocked to see a new design. I immediately checked out Digg, and other websites to see what everyone was saying about it. I’m still not sure if I like it better than the old one or not. What do you think? (more…)

Need some design inspiration? Take a look at Screenalicious. They have, as of this writing, over 8800 screenshots of websites with interesting designs. There are some really good designs there.

If you’re a designer, take a look at this site for a quick bit of inspiration.