Snoskred – Life in the Country

Google, heatmaps, comments and spiders, oh my! There’s so much to know when you’re a blogger, so I keep putting together some of the little tips I am picking up to share with you. Blogger users take note, I have a couple of great ones for you here.

Have You Googled Your Blog Lately?

In order to get specific results for your blog put the following into the search box – site:www.snoskred.org – just replace the www.snoskred.org with your site URL.

If you want to search your own site only, you can also use Advanced Search and put your site in where it says Domain – Only return results from the site or domain. I use this all the time when looking for past things I wrote here.

For those of us getting frustrated with Technorati, it may be time to consider a Google search widget instead. I’m going to be checking further into this later today and may put a how to together for ya’all for future blogging tip goodness posts..

Find Out What Your Readers Click On

I read Create a Heatmap of Where Readers Click on Your Blog at Problogger and thought it might be something interesting to try. I put it on less than 24 hours ago and it is already showing me interesting information.

If you want to know more about your blog readers, this is an absolute must do. It is also really simple to do – and completely free!

Don’t Forget

I added a new section to my sidebar called Bloggers Are Helpful. It contains some of the best articles I have found about blogging. It is also constantly updated and in the weekly wrap up I will let you know what new articles have been added to it over the week.

If you have a helpful article which should appear in Bloggers Are Helpful, please email me or leave a comment linking to your article.

Blogger Issues.

Comments Policy.

Did you know you can add your comments policy to Blogger? It will show up just above the box where people enter their comments. Here’s a quick screenshot guide on how to do it.

From your Blogger Dashboard – click on settings. Click on Comments. Find the box that looks like this. Type your comments policy into the box – and don’t forget to click save when you’re done! Now when your blog readers want to comment, they will see what you typed into the box directly above the comments box. It will look like this – Or perhaps like this if you have your comments appear in a pop up box.

With Blogger you have a choice between a pop up comments box and a comments page – I prefer the comments page myself, which do you prefer as a commenter? and if you want your comments to be do follow I believe you can’t use the popup box. I’m not 100% sure on that one – anyone?

Where’s That Spider?

You may have read this post by Sephy where he talks about Blogger messing with the search engines. If you did not and you are using blogger, you need to know that Blogger has added a robots.txt file to your blog – without asking you, and without giving you any options of changing it.

What is a robots.txt? It simply tells the search spiders what to look at and what to ignore.

Blogger users are not able to submit a sitemap to Google – something ALL other bloggers can do, because it has to be on your site itself in .xml format and blogger does not allow you to upload .xml files to your blog. Blogger is telling the search spiders -

Sitemap: http://www.snoskred.org/feeds/posts/default?orderby=updated

That means my feed read becomes my site map. Not an ideal situation at all.

Bloggers on WordPress and some of the other blogging platforms have a huge advantage over us – they can tell Google what pages to look at, what pages to ignore, and also get their labels listed.

Get Smart

Therefore we Blogger users will need to become smarter about how we do things. That is what the Snoskred Is section is about.

I only had 297 of my 500 posts on google for some strange reason. Some of my much older posts which I used to get hits for on certain search terms seemed to stop getting those hits.

What I chose to do was take the time to go back through my posts and make a links list with keywords appropriate to the post. I put it in my sidebar. It is long (if you choose to do the same, you may need to use the scrolling html just to make it workable) and nobody may ever actually look at it other than the spiders. However I do hope that my readers find it useful as well, if they want to know more about me it’s pretty much all there.

You may want to consider doing something similar yourself. It’s your blog. At the very least my thought is that you should have your favourite 10 posts available in your sidebar for your readers to check out and get to know more about you.

Consider WordPress.

I am working on learning a bit about WordPress. I have it installed on another domain I own, and Sephy and I are just messing about with it, learning how it works.

I had been getting mixed messages on WordPress. Some people told me WordPress was difficult to use and for more technical type people. Some people told me it was the best thing since sliced bread. Having now messed about with it I can say both are true. It does require some technical knowledge, but it is also is the best thing since sliced bread.

Blogger is great for most bloggers, I completely agree with that. It is easy, simple to use and you can now get templates for Blogger that look fantastic. If you’re looking for a great Blogger template, I found this site the other day – Pannasmontata Templates – some of these are simply stunning.

For those of us who want a little more control – who want to be in charge – who don’t want Blogger making decisions on their behalf without asking them – WordPress may be the better option. Will I be moving this blog to WordPress? Probably not at the moment, but maybe in the future. I am going to use WordPress for the business blog, though.

I have a brand new title bar graphic which I spent hours working on, and I’ve changed a few of the blog colors to suit it better. I would really appreciate it if ya’all could let me know your thoughts on it. Be honest now, I won’t be offended. I’m not sure about the colors but we’ll give it a try for a bit.

All the images in the title bar are our own photos, and you’ll see these and other photographs of ours from now on with the daily thought posts, I’ve gone through and sorted a bunch of them all ready to post.

So what do you think? Leave a comment, don’t leave me in the dark. Is it an improvement, or did you like the old photo and color scheme better? Do you like the blue date and the dark purple post titles, or did you prefer the pink date and burgundy post titles? What do you think of the new title bar photo at the top?

I’m in the process of adding a few sections to my sidebars. Is there anyone reading this who has an article or post which would be useful to other bloggers? Would you like me to link to it in my sidebar? Just drop me an email or a blog comment with the link and the title of the post and I will add it to a new section I am creating over the next week – designed to help bloggers find useful posts that can help them blog better or do things they don’t know how to do, like how to guides etc. There’s so much bloggers need to know!

So on the right hand side bar you may spot a new scrolling list titled Bumpzee No-No Follow Faves. This list is slowly coming together as I read through the RSS feed. It will contain some of my favourite blogs from that community, the ones I am learning a lot from, the ones that I enjoy reading, the ones that make me think and challenge me. Please note I won’t be adding blogs that are already listed in other sections of my sidebar – some blogs belong to many communities on Bumpzee.

I’m feeling a bit restless with the blog template again. I found some today that are flat out incredible however I’m not sure they work with the new blogger. If you don’t like the current template I have here, please let me know in the comments section and if enough of you agree it needs changing I’ll look at changing it. Any new template would still be 3 column, hopefully. I am hopeful I might be able to talk Sephy into creating a clean 3 column template which the rest of us can build on.

What I want to do right now is make a new title bar graphic, so I’m going to focus on that for the rest of today. I have an idea of what I want to put there, we’ll see how it goes.

I also have an idea for a business, and I can’t really think straight right now, my head is whirring and yet somehow still managing to play Hotel California which has been on repeat in there for a couple of days now – you can all hear the whirring, right? HUGE thanks to Meg from Dipping Into The Blogpond for posting this brilliantly helpful post The Business Of Blogging which has got me all fired up and thinking of business names and to do lists and next steps.

So what is this great idea I have? I’d love to tell you. But not just yet. I’ll let you know when I know more.

If you are viewing this with Firefox, it will all look fine. That’s because Firefox rocks. If you are viewing this with Internet explorer, you will see one entire sidebar missing which is now at the bottom of the site somewhere. That’s because Internet Explorer is pure evil.

Let me not get into my.. hmm, how can I word this.. prejudiced view of people who use Internet Explorer. I’m not racist or sexist or any other ist, except for *browserist*. It’s wrong of me to think like that, it is unfair and I know I’m a browser snob but I can’t help it! I just don’t know how anyone could use Internet Explorer when Firefox exists. I know a lot of people end up using it by default and switch over when they know more about the interwebs.

I know a lot of workplaces make people use Internet Explorer but damnit, people, RISE UP and fight such stupidities! It’s pure discrimination in the work place, forcing you to use one kind of browser. In my opinion, this is just as bad as saying “you have to be heterosexual to work here”. But they’re saying “you have to use an evil piece of software to work here, and compromise everything you know to be right and good in the world”.

And no offence intended to you if you’re using it by choice. But if you are, this site will look pretty bad until Sephy and I figure out how to fix this. May I recommend..

Mozilla Firefox – get it here.