Sunday, September 21, 2008
Wednesday, July 12, 2006
What's the best blogging tool?
Here's a good article from TechSoup comparing the seven most popular blogging tools: Blogger, LiveJournal, Typepad, Movable Type, WordPress, ExpressionEngine, and TextPattern.
It's a good read.
It's a good read.
Thursday, June 29, 2006
How Do I Create Links on My WebPage?
Little Cicero asked:
Can you show me how to put links into comments?
Your web browser uses HTML, HyperText Markup Language, to interpret a webpage. HTML tags tell your browser (Firefox, I hope) whether to display text as Bold, Italics, or as a link.
Anytime you post something on the web, you should be able to use HTML to format your text. There are exceptions: sometimes blog owners will turn off html, some forums use their own brand of code, and wikis have their own markup language.
Anyway, when you want to post a link in Blogger, you use HTML. Say you want to post a link to The Swipefile. The code you use will look like this:
The "<>" brackets tell the browser that your code is HTML. The browser will not display what's inside the brackets.
"a href" tells the browser that the next bit of text is a link.
Just get the URL for your link from the address bar of your browser. Right click it and copy it with your mouse, then paste it in between the quotation marks after "a href=".
Of course you only want a certain piece of text to show up as a link, so you have to "close the tag" by putting "/a" at the end.
The text in between the opening and closing tags (in this case the text is "The Swipefile") is what will show up as the link.
In case you're not sure what I mean by opening and closing tags, here's another example. Every time you use HTML to format a piece of text on the web, you use an HTML tag. "a href" is a tag. "b" (you're supposed to use "strong" now, but "b" works) is another tag, which makes the selected tag bold.
Every time you use a tag, you have to close that tag. That's simple to do. Just put a "/" after your text. For example, to make text bold:
to make text italic:
Can you show me how to put links into comments?
Your web browser uses HTML, HyperText Markup Language, to interpret a webpage. HTML tags tell your browser (Firefox, I hope) whether to display text as Bold, Italics, or as a link.
Anytime you post something on the web, you should be able to use HTML to format your text. There are exceptions: sometimes blog owners will turn off html, some forums use their own brand of code, and wikis have their own markup language.
Anyway, when you want to post a link in Blogger, you use HTML. Say you want to post a link to The Swipefile. The code you use will look like this:
The "<>" brackets tell the browser that your code is HTML. The browser will not display what's inside the brackets.
"a href" tells the browser that the next bit of text is a link.
Just get the URL for your link from the address bar of your browser. Right click it and copy it with your mouse, then paste it in between the quotation marks after "a href=".
Of course you only want a certain piece of text to show up as a link, so you have to "close the tag" by putting "/a" at the end.
The text in between the opening and closing tags (in this case the text is "The Swipefile") is what will show up as the link.
In case you're not sure what I mean by opening and closing tags, here's another example. Every time you use HTML to format a piece of text on the web, you use an HTML tag. "a href" is a tag. "b" (you're supposed to use "strong" now, but "b" works) is another tag, which makes the selected tag bold.
Every time you use a tag, you have to close that tag. That's simple to do. Just put a "/" after your text. For example, to make text bold:
to make text italic:
Sunday, June 18, 2006
What is a trackback?
It took me forever to figure it out, but a trackback is pretty simple.
It works like this:
It's really that simple. But implementing it requires some special tools.
I'll get to that in a minute - but first, why bother with trackbacks?
It will boost traffic to your blog. If you trackback a blog with high traffic, everyone who visits that post will see your trackback. A few of those will visit - and if you've got quality content, they'll come back for more.
Trackbacks can also boost your rank in search engines, since most search engines rate your site by the number of links to it. This is especially effective if the site that links to you is highly ranked as well - that is, if it has lots of incoming links and high traffic.
Blogger Tools
Backlinks for blogger: If you enable backlinks in your settings Blogger will keep track of the sites that link to your posts.
This is not quite the same as trackbacks.
Haloscan offers trackback for Blogger. To use it, you need an account with Haloscan - it's free. Login to their page, go to "manage trackbacks", and enter the trackback URL for the blog post you referred to and want to trackback. You'll have to visit that blog post and get the trackback URL. If they use a blogging tool with trackback enabled, you'll see a link on the post that says "Trackback." click on that link and you'll get a URL, like this: http://haloscan.com/tb/geekfuture/115066447462520985. Copy that, and past it into the appropriate space in Haloscan's trackback manager.
If you want other people to trackback your posts, you'll need to cut and paste some Haloscan code into your blogger template.
Other tools:
Performancing offers trackback. When you are using it, go to "Post Options." Towards the bottom of the Options frame you'll see an input box for Trackback URLs. Go get the trackback URL from the blog post you referenced (see haloscan, above) and paste it in. Simple as that!
Moveable Type and Wordpress both have trackback features. So does Typepad. Not all blogging services will have this tool, but if you have it, it's very useful.
For more information, read Wikipedia's entry about Trackbacks.
It works like this:
- You post something in your blog.
- In that post, you refer to a post on another blog.
- You send a trackback to the other blogger to notify him or her that you've posted a reference to their blog.
- They link to your post. Anyone who reads their post and wants to read more will then be referred to your post.
It's really that simple. But implementing it requires some special tools.
I'll get to that in a minute - but first, why bother with trackbacks?
It will boost traffic to your blog. If you trackback a blog with high traffic, everyone who visits that post will see your trackback. A few of those will visit - and if you've got quality content, they'll come back for more.
Trackbacks can also boost your rank in search engines, since most search engines rate your site by the number of links to it. This is especially effective if the site that links to you is highly ranked as well - that is, if it has lots of incoming links and high traffic.
Blogger Tools
Backlinks for blogger: If you enable backlinks in your settings Blogger will keep track of the sites that link to your posts.
This is not quite the same as trackbacks.
Haloscan offers trackback for Blogger. To use it, you need an account with Haloscan - it's free. Login to their page, go to "manage trackbacks", and enter the trackback URL for the blog post you referred to and want to trackback. You'll have to visit that blog post and get the trackback URL. If they use a blogging tool with trackback enabled, you'll see a link on the post that says "Trackback." click on that link and you'll get a URL, like this: http://haloscan.com/tb/geekfuture/115066447462520985. Copy that, and past it into the appropriate space in Haloscan's trackback manager.
If you want other people to trackback your posts, you'll need to cut and paste some Haloscan code into your blogger template.
Other tools:
Performancing offers trackback. When you are using it, go to "Post Options." Towards the bottom of the Options frame you'll see an input box for Trackback URLs. Go get the trackback URL from the blog post you referenced (see haloscan, above) and paste it in. Simple as that!
Moveable Type and Wordpress both have trackback features. So does Typepad. Not all blogging services will have this tool, but if you have it, it's very useful.
For more information, read Wikipedia's entry about Trackbacks.
Saturday, June 03, 2006
Performancing for Firefox - 4 Stars!
I've used Performancing for Firefox for the past week, and I'm impressed.
It's so easy that I've been posting to my other blog much more frequently just to use it.
Performancing allows you to post from within your browser. Just hit F8, or click the icon in the lower right corner of the screen, and it pops up. You can type a little, save an url or two, and hit F8 again to keep surfing.
You can add technorati tags to your posts from within Performancing, and post the entry to del.icio.us, with those same tags, at the same time. I'm still playing with this, because I had a system set up using greasemonkey to deal with del.icio.us tagging.
They also have a "Metrics" feature, for tracking visitors. The metrics require that you cut and paste a little code into your template. I just set mine up today, but it looks great, with in depth information about visitors, post and commenting activity, and referrers.
There is plenty of user support available at their site, Performancing.com
It's the blogging tool I'll be using from now on.
Technorati Tags: blogging, performancing, firefox, blogtools
It's so easy that I've been posting to my other blog much more frequently just to use it.
Performancing allows you to post from within your browser. Just hit F8, or click the icon in the lower right corner of the screen, and it pops up. You can type a little, save an url or two, and hit F8 again to keep surfing.
You can add technorati tags to your posts from within Performancing, and post the entry to del.icio.us, with those same tags, at the same time. I'm still playing with this, because I had a system set up using greasemonkey to deal with del.icio.us tagging.
They also have a "Metrics" feature, for tracking visitors. The metrics require that you cut and paste a little code into your template. I just set mine up today, but it looks great, with in depth information about visitors, post and commenting activity, and referrers.
There is plenty of user support available at their site, Performancing.com
It's the blogging tool I'll be using from now on.
Technorati Tags: blogging, performancing, firefox, blogtools
Tuesday, May 30, 2006
Boost Traffic With One Click Social Bookmarking for Blogger
You want to maximize traffic for your blog - and you want to get people to return again and again.
A great way to do this is by making it easy for people to post your page to del.icio.us, furl, technorati, or the other social bookmarking services.
The simplest way to do this is to just copy and paste the html below into your blogger template. Paste into the template between "" and "div class="post-body"".
A great way to do this is by making it easy for people to post your page to del.icio.us, furl, technorati, or the other social bookmarking services.
The simplest way to do this is to just copy and paste the html below into your blogger template. Paste into the template between "" and "div class="post-body"".
- For del.icio.us:
- For Digg:
- For Technorati:
- Furl:
- Spurl:
I chose these sites because they are popular. There's a host of social bookmarking sites out there, and you could add a link for every one if you wanted to. No need to overdo it, though.
If you wanted to create your own links, you could play with the html I have above. (That's what I did - I cut the html from other pages with those links, and figured out how to make it work for blogger.)
You can see that the html has some basic pieces: It's a hyperlink, so it has the "a href" tag. Then you need the address of the "post to" page for whatever bookmarking service you are using. For del.icio.us, that's "http://del.icio.us/login/". Then comes a command that tells the bookmarking site what you are doing: "?add=" or "?url=", for example.
Then comes the blogger code for your permalink and post title. At the end, close your tag with "". Put the text you want in between the "a href=" and "/a" tags.
These links allow people to bookmark a useful post. I use these links to boost my traffic another way, too: I bookmark each new post in all of these services (digg is the exception. It has a narrower range of topics than the other services.) When people see the bookmark, they'll come to check it out.
Try it!
Technorati Tags: blogger, blogging, blog, delicious, furl, spurl, technorati
Monday, May 29, 2006
Performancing - Another Blogging Tool for Firefox Users
I'm using Performancing to post this, and let me tell you, I'm excited about it. It has all the features of deepest sender and a lot more. I'll need to spend some time with it to give a full report of the features, but it looks great right now.
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