Technical tips on blogging

[duncan drennan]

I'm going to load Wordpress on my-business-machine.com when I get a chance to get round to it. I'm also keeping an eye on Blogger's new beta features before I commit as to where the blog will end up, though.

I've been thinking about moving my blog to Wordpress and hosting it myself for a while now. Wordpress offers quite a bit more adaptability with all the various add-ons, and is a high quality blogging platform. Blogger is probably a little bit more difficult (although, maybe not?) to customise and add things to.

The big advantage of Blogger (and this is probably why I will stick with it for the foreseeable future) is that I don't have to maintain (or worry about) the servers. If I have a readership of 10000 people a day, it is not going to cause me any sleepless nights (although if that was the case I would probably be so excited that I wouldn't be sleeping ). I did not have to worry about setting up spam filters and don't have to worry about upgrading software (and all the issues that come with that).

For me, the thought of worrying about servers, upgrades, spammers, and so on overwhelms the desire to move from Blogger. At this stage I don't see any compelling reason to move, so I'm saving myself the grey hairs, and focussing on the writing rather.

[IanF]

My blog for the printshop is a wordpress blog. I have just updated my signature and there should be a link. I just need to make the time to write more as it does help with business. It is hosted on my website and I haven't hit the limits of Hetzner yet.

[Seagyn Davis]

Having your own domain is critical for a brand.

I would take WordPress over Joomla! any day, and that from a person who has designed themes for both.

WordPress has a huge community behind it and is probably the most used blogging software out there.

Upgrading WordPress is not a huge thing, just upload and over write the files and then your done. Then most web hosts should worry about the server not you unless your website has affected the server.

[Dave A]

Then most web hosts should worry about the server not you unless your website has affected the server.

That can be a concern at times. In the power of international on the internet I mention Peas on toast which went from a couple of hundred uniques a day to over 25000 in 24 hours. I suspect that many shared hosting packages would throw up the white flag and crumble.

[Seagyn Davis]

WordPress has a few plugins that make website run on WordPress on any server very scalable. Charl Norman wrote an article about it. Will find it and put it up here.

[duncan drennan]

Yay! Blogger has finally added a blog.pageName tag so that you can have better SEO by placing your posts name before your blog name in your page titles (without any crazy hacks).

You can do something like this,

  <b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;item&quot;'>
    <title><data:blog.pageName/> - YOUR BLOG NAME</title>
  <b:else/>
    <b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;archive&quot;'>
      <title>Archives <data:blog.pageName/> - YOUR BLOGS NAME</title>
      <meta CONTENT='Archives of YOUR BLOGS NAME.' name='Description'/>
    <b:else/>
      <title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
      <meta CONTENT='YOUR DESCRIPTION META CONTENT' name='Description'/>
    </b:if>
  </b:if>

Replace the <title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title> code with this code above, and change the names to your blog's names. You can add (and take away) whatever you like.

With blogger and 'item' is a single post, 'archive' are archive pages. In the example above it always falls through to the default Blog Name page title.

The example above places post pages title first, followed by the blog's name. It also places different meta content description tags on the different types of pages.

@Chatmaster: is it better to have no description meta content, or lots of duplicate description meta content across pages?

[Dave A]

It seems a little ironic that one needs to do SEO mods on Blogger

is it better to have no description meta content, or lots of duplicate description meta content across pages?

Google webmaster tools warns you of duplicate description META content, so I would think it better not to have too many repeats. I'll be interested in Chatmaster's take on this too.

[duncan drennan]

Google webmaster tools warns you of duplicate description META content, so I would think it better not to have too many repeats. I'll be interested in Chatmaster's take on this too.

That is exactly the reason that I changed it to only generate the description meta content on the archive and index pages! I decided Google's webmaster info messages should be taken to heart.

[Dave A]

Duncan - have you got a link to the list of Blogger data variables? There must be one for content. A little trim job and that would make a great description META generator.

I'm working on coding something like that as a stand-alone mod for vB at the moment.

[duncan drennan]

Duncan - have you got a link to the list of Blogger data variables? There must be one for content. A little trim job and that would make a great description META generator.

Unfortunately not quite as simple as that. The Layout Tags are only valid for certain parts of the page. For example, the content is only available in the blog post part of the layout. In the case of the header the only tags available are the Global and Page Header data tags.

I don't see it as too big an issue (my SERPS are fair I think), just wondering what is best - leave it out for post pages, or just insert the generic one.