Technical tips on blogging

**duncan drennan** · 24-Mar-08, 04:55 PM

Dave, if you are setting up a new blog you should seriously consider Wordpress, as the features and add ons are a bit more comprehensive than blogger. As with all things, there are advantages and disadvantages.

If you stick with blogger you should set up a custom domain rather than use the blog spot domain.

There is also an SEO hack to swap the page title and blog title on post pages, but there are currently some issues with this (although there is a hack to work around these - see the discussion of the issues). This has now been resolved.

You can add meta data to each page which will hopefully help the SEO a small amount.

A nice thing to do is to setup Feedburner for your RSS feed which will allow you to track the number of people reading your blog via a feed. There is also a way to use your own domain for this (I still need to swap mine over). You should make some changes to the auto-discovery feed options so that only that feed is available to users. It also allows adding some funky extras, making sure your feed is readable by most readers, and provides an email subscription form.

There are also some extra beta features which are available through draft.blogger.com.

**duncan drennan** · 24-Mar-08, 05:08 PM

I had a look at your comments. I would recommend opening up the options for leaving comments. Currently you only have the google account option, which unfortunately leaves a link to the users blogger profile. If they don't have a google account this means a few steps before commenting (which could mean no comments). If you allow anonymous comments then people can at least put in a link to their site, even though the default is NOFOLLOW. Personally I haven't had spam issues.

I don't like bloggers commenting system - mainly that it either opens in a whole new page or another window. Of the two options I prefer to have the comments in a pop up window, which at least feels a little like the original site rather than going to a different site to comment. It also keeps your site open and available to continue rather than the commenting page.

**Dave A** · 24-Mar-08, 06:08 PM

I've already registered the "My Business Machine" domain. I was gently thinking of going Wordpress on the domain there, but wanted to lay down some ideas and get some experience at blogger too in the meantime.

I've made the other setting changes you've suggested - thanks, Duncan.

**duncan drennan** · 24-Mar-08, 09:10 PM

You can add your blog to Technorati and Amatomu. Technorati picks up the blogger labels as tags.

**Dave A** · 27-Mar-08, 10:13 PM

I've just got to giggle at this message that accompanies the photo upload tab when updating your profile on Technorati.

Tip: Please do us a favor and upload a photo that does not show your very special but also very private parts. When you do that, we have to take time away from making our website faster and better to go find your profile and hide it, and that's bad for you and us. Thanks for helping!

Reckon they've had this problem from time to time?

**Seagyn Davis** · 07-May-08, 11:33 PM

Its great to get some more people into the local blogosphere, a few trends and a few ideas:

Recent Comments - promotes commenting on your site
Popular Posts - nice way to make the posts even more popular
A big subscribe to RSS button - get the subscriber base
Social Media quick links - enables you to add an article to your favourite social network, like (local) amatomu, muti, laaik.it (international), digg, delicious etc

Then a quick tip and a current SEO must do is if you write related articles, put a link to the related article - eg (if you read my post about the person you would know...) and make my post a link to it.

Last thing to do is network - the best way to boost search engine ratings is links.

hope this helps, if you need any help in getting a WordPress site going just send me a message - I have about 8 running/being developed now. Also know the big dogs

**Seagyn Davis** · 07-May-08, 11:38 PM

I see you do the social bookmarking on this website. great way to do it!

**Dave A** · 08-May-08, 07:40 AM

I added muti yesterday. Duncan was dropping hints elsewhere

Which social bookmarking sites would you add to the ones we've already got here, Seagyn?

**Seagyn Davis** · 08-May-08, 08:04 AM

laaik.it and facebook - laaik.it is a local company and facebook - well do i need to say anything more?

**Seagyn Davis** · 08-May-08, 08:09 AM

Oh and how can I forget, amatomu is brilliant but becoming something like Alexa rank which has so many people it kills the chances of you site being viewed by users rather than networks. Also look at afrigator.co.za, nice African aggregator similar to Amatomu.

There is another one, but it has slipped my mind.

**Seagyn Davis** · 08-May-08, 09:58 AM

I see you fast onto the ball. The next step would be to politely ask people to add it. So in a place closer to where readers read, have a little message - 'Like this article? Share it with your favourite social network.'

**Dave A** · 08-May-08, 11:19 AM

Thanks for all the ideas, Seagyn.

**Seagyn Davis** · 08-May-08, 11:43 AM

More than a pleasure. Funnily I came upon this website when I was seeing how low my forum dropped after an upgrade. Talk about luck. Really enjoy some of the discussions.

So when are you looking at putting up a WordPress site? The new WordPress is amazing, the features are so far ahead of any OS CMS I have ever seen and played with.

**Dave A** · 08-May-08, 01:02 PM

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 also been testing Joomla as a CMS elsewhere, so the Joomla-Wordpress comparison should also be interesting.