Blogineering

In the previous post, we have discussed some tips about designing blogs. In this post, we are going to suggest the pages, widgets, and sharing buttons that you should place in your home page. We are not saying you include them all, but you might want to experiment to see their effect to your traffic.

• Post List Tab/Page. As early as one month, create a Post List tab or page. This will enable you to organize your posts list later.  If your blog has grown much, you may want to create a page for each ‘big’ category. An example of this is Math and Multimedia, our main blog . Oor posts are divided into four: Mathematics, Multimedia, GeoGebra, and All4Free(for freebies).
• Calendar Widget. Many blog platforms include a calendar of posts. This will make navigation easier and would likely generate more traffic. In most calendar widgets, the colored dates indicate that a post was made.

• Top Posts/Popular Posts. If people visit a blog with a lot of posts, aside from searching in the search box, they would probably take a peek at the most popular posts. Read the rest of this entry →

Aside from the content of your blog, the two other things that you should consider are its appearance and ‘structure.’ These things represent you — these are the what readers see first. If you own a restaurant, for example, to attract customers you would probably make the front of your building as clean as possible; you probably would put some streamers with a catchy tag line; or you would probably display large tarpaulins or posters of our best menus.

This is similar to blogs. To attract readers, in your posts, you would probably want to add a very intriguing photos, or think of titles that are puzzling, thought provoking, or controversial. You do not want your blog to be cluttered and disorganized. You would want  the appearance of your blog simple, easy to read, and elegant. The list below are some of the most practical tips on how to improve the design and appearance of your blog.  Read the rest of this entry →

One thing that new bloggers usually worry is file of storage. WordPress.com for instance, as of this writing, only gives 3GB of storage, so if you are storing heavy graphics or video files, you’re probably be out of space after a while.

Worry no more because there are a lot of  free line storage sites that you can use. Here are some of the most popular storage sites used by bloggers on the web:

1. YouTube. You can store your video files on YouTube.  Although there is a limit in the file size of upload, I haven’t heard of Youtube limiting to the number of videos uploaded. Salman Khan of Khan academy have uploaded more than 2100 video files, so if Youtube has a storage limit, it’s probably very large.
2. Google Docs. Google Docs offers more than 7GB of storage, and 1GB for storing documents. If you are just storing office files with no drawings or pictures, then Google Docs is more than enough.
3. Amazon Cloud Drive. Amazon Cloud Drive is the newest storage in town. You can store up to 5GB of photos, videos, and document files.
4. Scribd, Issuu, and Slideshare.  These three services are some of the online services that you can store your files. Scribd and Issuu are document storage, while Slideshare is used to store presentation files.
5. Dropbox. Dropbox is another excellent free storage  file.  Dropbox allows you to store up to 2GB of your files on multiple computers by synchronizing your file.
6. Windows Skydrive. Windows Skydrive offers 25GB of file storage. Files in Skydrive can be made public, private, or can be shared.

Files in Youtube, Scribd, and Slideshare can be embedded directly in a WordPress.com and Blogger blog posts, while Issuu can be embedded in hosted WordPress blogs.

In last Monday’s post, we have learned how to add a Follow me on Twitterbutton using a code generator.  In this post, we are going to learn a little HTML which will enable us to customize our button.

First, we will use the img src code to display the Follow me on Twitter icon. The img src code is the html code used to display images.  The code is as follows.

<img src = “the URL of your Twitter button”>

For example, the URL of my Twitter button at my side bar is http://www.howtonew.com/wp-content/themes/Simplista/twitter.png. So, to display button in this post, the code should be:

<img src = “http://www.howtonew.com/wp-content/themes/Simplista/twitter.png”>

The output of this code is the small Twitter button shown below.

We have have now displayed the button. The next step is to link the button to your Twitter account. Read the rest of this entry →

Introduction

When you are reading a book, you use a bookmark to mark a page where you stopped or a page which is important to you. This also happens on the web. You probably have a list of the URLs of websites you like. Some of you are probably familiar with the bookmark feature of your browsers: the star in Google Chrome’s address bar, the Favorite>Add to Favorites in InternetExplorer, and CLTR+D in Firefox.

Browser bookmarking is good way to mark your favorite sites, but the problem is that browsers are not capable of informing you when site you bookmarked new articles or updates.  You have to visit the website to check for new articles.

This is where RSS comes in.  It’s like a browser saying ‘Hey, Blogineering has a new post.’ This is similar to email subscriptions: users are informed whenever a site is updated.  Some RSS feed management providers such as Feedburner offer RSS email subscriptions as well. Read the rest of this entry →