Archive for April, 2008

I just thought of an interesting idea.

The standard RSS icon is available in a 128×128 pixel size. Using Photoshop, you could reduce it to 125×125 easily, and add a legend to it. Put the name of your blog, or something describing your blog (in my case, “Webmaster Resources”) over the bottom of the icon. Make it visible, but don’t cover-up the antenna symbol. (I’d give an example, but I don’t have a copy of Photoshop on this computer yet.)

Next, purchase a 125×125 ad slot on another blog, give them your ad creative, and tell them to link it to your RSS feed.

What do you think? Would it work well? Obviously this would work better with FeedBurner feeds, since clickers will get a list of recent posts. Some bloggers could reject your ad though, out of fear that viewers would confuse your ad for their feed link.

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Is your sidebar getting out of hand? It’s good idea to go through it a few times every year, and clear out the clutter.

First, rank everything in the sidebar by order of importance. See what your users need to see, and what you want them to see, the most. Cut-out anything that doesn’t

• help your readers navigate your blog
• subscribe to your blog
• highlight content you want them to see
• seriously make money (e.g. 125×125 ads)

Does MyBlogLog really need to be in your sidebar, above the fold? Do you really need that large badge showing your EatonWeb rank? Decide, carefully, what should stay and what needs to go.

Do you prefer to blog with a desktop, or a laptop? Are you a Mac or a PC? What software do you just have to have to get your blogging done? What’s your preferred browser?

Everyone has a unique setup that they use for blogging, unless they blog from libraries or internet cafes. A set of hardware and software that they are more comfortable working in, and using on a frequent basis.

My Current Setup

Computer: 13″ Black Apple MacBook. 2.4GHz Core Duo Processor, 2GB RAM, 250GB Hard Disk.

OS: Mac OS X 10.5

Browser: Mozilla Firefox…with a truckload of extensions.

Essential Software: TextWrangler, an FTP client, Firefox, the Spaz Twitter client, InstantShot.

Essential Webware: Google Apps (mail and calendar), MyNT, Del.icio.us, Google Analytics.

What’s your setup? Where do you like to blog? What software/hardware do you use? I’d like to know.

The (x)html tag blockquote is generally used for, surprise, block-level quotes. For such a useful tag, it’s kind of plain looking, don’t you think? Why not spice it up a bit with some CSS?

This is an example blockquote, after applying some styling. Make something similar, or do your own thing.

Like my blockquote styling? I’ll show you how it’s done.

Here is a CSS rule that outputs a similar result:

blockquote {
margin:22px 40px;
upadding:3px;
color:#575757;
padding: 0 50px;
background: transparent url("images/blockquote.gif") no-repeat 0 0;
}

You will need a “quote-mark” image of about 32×32 pixels for this to work correctly. To make one yourself, create a new image and type a #e5e5e9 quote-mark into it.

Of course, you may want to tweak the color values and spacing so it fits into your template correctly.

The blockquote is one of the bloggers’ most-used tags. It’s a great way to quote an excerpt from a post you’re linking to, as I do frequently.

Web applications, or web apps, have, in my opinion, one huge advantage over “normal” programs. I’m sure you can guess what it is before you finish reading this.

I just got a new Apple MacBook, as I’ve Twittered about, told everyone I know on Facebook, and all but made a T-Shirt that says “I have a MacBook.” I’ve been trying to adjust to the new (to me) platform, and adapt my daily patterns.

Surprisingly, I haven’t had many problems with old Windows habits (e.g. reaching to the top-right corner to close a window). My biggest issues have been with software. Some familiar applications have Mac versions thankfully. (If there wasn’t a Mac version of Firefox, I wouldn’t have been so quick to want to get a Mac.)

I had to find some Mac equivalents of some programs, like NeoOffice to replace Microsoft Works, and CyberDuck to replace FileZilla. (FileZilla is great, and there is a Mac version, but it behaves oddly, lacking a normal window, and extending down from the menu bar.) (more…)

Have you ever wanted to

• use a different stylesheet on a specific date (a holiday, perhaps)
• show/hide part of your template on a certain date?

One example is RSS Awareness Day. I’d suggested that on May 1st, in observance of RSS Awareness Day, some bloggers should edit their stylesheets to make their blog orange for the day. I’ll use it as an example.

Basically, you want to check what day it is, see if it is equal to May 1st, and if it is, display a second stylesheet. So you add your line of code under your existing stylesheet like this:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="url_to_style.css" type="text/css" media="screen" />
<?php if (date('md') == '0501‘) { ?><link rel=”stylesheet” href=”url_to_rss_awareness.css” type=”text/css” media=”screen” /><?php } ?>

As you can see, the first line is the normal stylesheet, and the second line is just another style with a little bit of PHP trickery surrounding it. The bold letters 0501 mean “May 1st.” If you wanted April 1st, you’d change them to 0401, or 0603 for June 3rd.

Since stylesheets cascade, as their name suggests, you don’t need a whole new stylesheet for the RSS Awareness styling. You can just redefine the appropriate portions in your new file. Just add rules for links, colors for certain elements, etc.

Feedburner recently reported that they track around 60 million RSS subscribers. Even if we bump that number to 70 million RSS users (counting people that use RSS with other applications or platforms) this would still convert to a meager 5,4% of the Internet users around the world, as of today. (Daily Blog Tips)

That’s not good, is it? 95% of web users still visit sites manually every day, checking the same sites every day for updates. With RSS, you can, at a glance, see if a site has been updated, without visiting it by hand. The web comes to you, instead of you going to the web. It’s time to spread RSS.

RSS Awareness Day is Daniel Scocco’s latest crackpot brilliant idea to increase his subscriber count, er, improve the internet.

Really, you don’t even have to link to Daily Blog Tips to participate. Daniel is working on a site for the event over at rssday.org.

The goal is to get as many people using RSS as possible, so the event works like this: (more…)

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What can we do to make blogs easier to navigate? As they stand, it can be hard to find things in the archives.

Not everyone has read everyone of your posts as they came out, and people often want to return to pages they’d read before.

Date-based archives aren’t any help. They may be the least-useful of blog navigation techniques. Sure, there may be times when you want to see the posts from a specific month, but not very often.

Search forms are great, possibly the best navigation method used on blogs today, but you have to know what so search before it’s of any use.

Then you have tags and categories, which have their uses, but are just another way to sort data. You need to have tags and/or categories on your blog. They help people find what they’re looking for, though if you have 3+ years of posts in your archives, it may still take awhile to find the posts worth reading.

The posts worth reading…

Essentially, you want a place to highlight your best work, the posts that everyone should read. While you obviously still have a lot of good stuff in your archives, to be unearthed by readers when they need it, this page would have the posts you want everyone to see right away.

Thinking about this, I ended up building my Featured Posts page, which is essentially a yearly archive of a “Featured” category I use for this purpose. Here’s how to set it up.

My Featured Posts scheme helps, but it’s not the ultimate answer. It’s just one piece of the blog navigation puzzle.