So, you’ve got yourself a domain. Sure, it helps people get to your website, but what else can you use it for? Google’s got the answer. Do you hate your webhost’s webmail program? Do you like GMail? Well, now you can have your own copy of GMail (with 100 free email accounts)….but at your own domain. That’s right, you can have your own mini-GMail with email addresses resembling you@yourdomain.com. You get more than just email, but the email’s the best part. Forget your host’s SquirrelMail system, switch to Google Apps.

Wouldn’t it be cool if you could easily manipulate HTML elements onscreen? Wouldn’t it be nice if AJAX requests could be sent with only one line of code? Take a look at Script.aculo.us.

What is Script.aculo.us? It’s a set of JavaScript files (based off the Prototype JavaScript library) that lets you do numerous cool and/or useful things with ease. Fading, sizing, and movement actions are only a couple lines of JavaScript away. Not to mention easier AJAX techniques.

Rarely does a day go by without someone bashing table-based design. Not long after the HTML <table> element was introduced, people started using it to lay-out their web pages. Before the days of CSS, people used tables so they could have sidebars and such.

Nowadays, we have Cascading Style Sheets, or CSS for short. With CSS, you can make amazing designs like the ones seen on Digg, The Leaky Cauldron, North X East, or Ars Technica. With a lot of effort, you can pull-off designs like that.

Table-based layouts are far from dead however (despite some peoples’ ravings). Take a look at TemplatesBox, one of the largest and most popular places to get free site templates. Notice that all of the pre-sliced ones are done with tables? There’s no doubt that tables are easier to implement, despite the advantages of CSS. There still quite a few major websites still using tables for layouts. Ever heard of Mugglenet? It’s the second-oldest Harry Potter news site. They’re pretty big, but not Yahoo-big. Would you have guessed that the shopping-giant Amazon had a table-based design? They do. Read the rest of this entry »

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? Read the rest of this entry »

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? Read the rest of this entry »

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. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

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.