How To Blog

Excerpts of posts from the NEW How to Blog Site

Remember, How to Blog has moved to it's own domain at http://www.emilyrobbins.com/how-to-blog/

In order to stay current with How to Blog's content, you should start bookmark the new location - thanks!

Starting a new blog? Get your own domain name! Do NOT use a subdomain of typepad.com, wordpress.com, blogspot.com (etc)

THIS POST HAS BEEN MOVED TO:

http://www.emilyrobbins.com/how-to-blog/starting-a-new-blog-get-your-own-domain-name-do-not-use-a-subdomain-of-typepadcom-wordpresscom-blogspotcom-etc-334.htm

Please update your bookmarks to reflect the new, permanent location of How to Blog.  Comments and trackbacks on this post are now closed.  If you wish to comment on this post, please visit the new site!  Thank you!

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

So, you want to start a new blog. Maybe you don’t have much experience with blogging, so you don’t think it’s that big of a deal which platform you choose or whether you have your own domain name. Well think again.

Don’t fall trap to the disaster that I landed myself in, where I started casually blogging and ended up regularly blogging and hating the platform I was using but can’t easily switch because I stupidly put my blog on a subdomain of typepad (http://blogging.typepad.com)

Now I’m at TypePad’s mercy. They own my ass because they own my address - even though I’m paying $150+ a year for their service. The same could happen to you whether it’s a subdomain on typepad.com, blogspot.com, or wordpress.com.

By not having your own domain name, if you ever decide to move to another blogging platform you run the risk of losing all (or a lot) of your traffic, your search engine rankings, all of your hard earned incoming links, etc because you cannot take your URL with you.

How are you going to redirect your traffic to your new blog when you have NO ability to, say, set up a 301 Permanent Redirect? Which, for those who are wondering, would both:

• automatically redirects human visitors to your new blog site
• tells the search engines that your blog has permanently moved and gives it the new location

(BTW - has any TypePad user (whose blog address was a subdomain) had a high traffic blog with a lot of backlinks into it that they then moved to a WordPress blog hosted on their own server? Please tell me what your experience was, whether you lost pagerank, traffic, search engine rankings, etc!!!)

Domain names are cheap - about $9 a year for a single one, as low as $6.75 a year if you own more than 50. There is NO excuse to not have your own domain name for your blog. You will regret if at some point down the road if you don’t start out with your own domain name.

www.GoDaddy.com is the site that I use to register my domain names, although there are numerous other options such as $5.99 Domain Names at 1&1, and, if you only need a single domain name the cheapiest option is domain names from Yahoo! for only $2.99.

The irony here is that I actually own a lot of domain names and I genuinely can’t fathom why I didn’t just use a domain of my own when I started this blog. Don’t make the same mistake as me or you could end up feeling trapped like I do right now. Consider yourselves warned.

UPDATE: Just to clarify, my point is that you need to own your own domain name so the URL for your blog points to a domain you own and control. It’s okay to use a subdomain off a domain that you own, but not one that belongs to someone else such as that of a hosted service like typepad.com.

Furthermore, I don't actually hate TypePad itself - there are truly many things about it as a blogging platform that I love.  What I despise is how poorly TypePad handles comment and trackback spam, which forced me to disable trackbacks because I was getting hundreds of trackback spams a day (much of which was obscene) and didn't have time to wade through them all - but in disabling trackbacks I'm removing one of the features that is at the heart of blogging and thus particially crippling my blog.  I want to be able to have trackbacks on for all of my posts without spending exhorbitant amounts of time dealing with spam every day.  I also have to moderate all of the comments on this blog because of the spam it gets (although not nearly as bad as the trackback spam) and that's a bummer, too - genuine comments don't appear immediately on my blog as a result (and due to the migraines I've been having lately, I haven't always been able to approve the comments in a timely manner).  The difference with WordPress is that it's plugins can tell which comments and trackbacks are likely spam and hold those comments/trackbacks (and ONLY those ones) in the moderation queue, while publishing everything else immediately if you so desire (which I do).  From what I've heard, MovableType (which is owned by Six Apart and is what TypePad is based off of) also has plugins that handle spam management well, so I don't get why they haven't utilized these plugins to handle the massive spam problem on TypePad.

And it’s okay to use a hosted solution - just make sure you pick one that allows you to use your own domain name and always reference your blog’s URL w/your own domain so that if you ever decide you want to go elsewhere, at least you’ll be able to take your traffic with you. Right now, the only hosted solutions that allow you to use your own domain are TypePad and Blogger (supposedly wordpress.com will down the line (possibly for a fee) but as of now there's no support for this).

Also of note if you're going to go the hosted blogging solution route: it’s also a good idea to check to see if whatever blogging platform you start with has the ability to export your posts (and comments/trackbacks) for easiest porting of your site to another platform down the road. As of this writing, TypePad is the only hosted system that with this functionality. Blogger doesn't have an export post function, but provides these instructions for backing up your Blogger blog (don't know if that file would then be importable into another blog system, though). While WordPress.com does not have an export function, it will let you import items from another blogging platform - but it's a one way ticket.

For full disclosure, links to TypePad are affiliate links (but as this post shows, just because I'm posting affiliate links doesn't mean I present biased info)

Technorati Tags: Blogger, Reviews, SEO, TypePad, Weblogs, WordPress, Domain names, Domains, Subdomain, Blogging, Blogs, URLs, URIs

Need someone to create a custom template or plugin for your blog? Need help with SEO? Check out Rent A Coder!

THIS POST HAS BEEN MOVED TO:

http://www.emilyrobbins.com/how-to-blog/need-someone-to-create-a-custom-template-or-plugin-for-your-blog-need-help-with-seo-check-out-rent-a-coder-294.htm

Please update your bookmarks to reflect the new, permanent location of How to Blog.  Comments and trackbacks on this post are now closed.  If you wish to comment on this post, please visit the new site!  Thank you!

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I just found the coolest resource!  It’s called Rent A Coder, and you can post any project that you need help with, whether it be as simple as installing WordPress / MovableType / etc for you on your server, or as complex as asking someone to write a custom blogging platform for you.  Want a custom template for TypePad or a special WordPress theme and don’t have the time or skills to do it yourself?  Just Rent A Coder to do it for you.  You can even find people to help you with Search Engine Optimization, people to write content for you, etc.

Once you post the specifics of the project you need help with, coders will then bid on your ‘job’ and you can decide who you want to hire based on their bid, the feedback they received from other users on other projects they’ve completed, etc.

From their website:

Need a coder to help you create the next 'killer app' or answer questions?  Just post your program or question here and coders from around the world will email you bids on doing the work.

    You can review each bidder's resume and reputation online, and when you're ready to make your decision, you can rent  your personal, expert, coder with just a few clicks! Its that simple!


     Posting a bid request is free, and you are under no obligation to accept any bids sent to you unless you choose to.   Once you accept a bid, you will place your payment into escrow. The money is not released to the coder, till they complete the work according to your original specification. There are no service charges or finders fees for buyers.

On the flip side, got skills?  Flaunt ‘em and earn cash!

Looking to earn extra income using your hard-won technical skills?  Rent a Coder lets you locate and bid on coding projects and questions from around the world!  By completing a free registration, you can publicize your skills on the online resume system and receive emails as new bid requests come in.

So those of you who are creating all those great free themes and plug-ins (which I hope you’ll continue to offer for the sake of the blogging community), you may wanna consider listing your talents at Rent A Coder and earning some extra $$ through freelancing. 

I just did.

HaloScan brings TrackBack functionality to Blogger, Blogspot, and other blogging tools w/o their own commenting and trackback features

THIS POST HAS BEEN MOVED TO:

http://www.emilyrobbins.com/how-to-blog/haloscan-brings-trackback-functionality-to-blogger-blogspot-and-other-blogging-tools-wo-their-own-commenting-and-trackback-features-259.htm

Please update your bookmarks to reflect the new, permanent location of How to Blog.  Comments and trackbacks on this post are now closed.  If you wish to comment on this post, please visit the new site!  Thank you!

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Link: News - HaloScan.com.

Trackback and commenting go hand in hand, especially in the weblog community, but unfortunately, there hasn't been an easy way for Blogger, Blogspot, Diaryland, Diary-X, iBlog, Newspro, Pitas, and many other weblog users to implement trackback capabilities until now.

HaloScan fills this need by providing you not only with the (free) commenting services we have provided for the last one and half years, but also easy, seamless integration of trackback services (both incoming and outgoing ping support) to all existing and future Haloscan members. All this at the unbeatable price of $0.00--FREE. Getting started requires minimal work--sign up, log in and follow the simple, two-step directions to install trackback and/or commenting into your weblog. We highly recommend that all existing and new users install both the commenting and trackback services but you can also install just one or the other as needed. If you have trouble with any part of this process, we'll be glad to help! Also, be sure to send a trackback ping to this post if you install the trackback system or write about us in your weblog.

Hmmm -- so many things on my plate, but I can't wait to try out Blogger combined with HaloScan's free remote commenting and trackback system.   Could this make Blogger a true competitor to TypePad (or perhaps even superior - given that its FREE)?

I'll post my findings soon!

Update: It's not as simple as it seems.  According to their tutorial on sending a trackback ping, each time you want to send a trackback from Blogger (or similar tool), you have to

1. login to HaloScan
2. click 'Manage Trackback"
3. click "Send a trackback ping"
4. Paste the TrackBack ping URL into the edit box for 'URLs to Ping'
5. Fill in your blog name
6. Paste YOUR permalink URL
7. Paste a copy of your Post Title
8. Paste (or write) an excerpt from your post
9. Click the 'Ping Now' button.

Yikes - that's more work/typing/copying & pasting than I want to bother with. 

There's a thread in their forums about adding some code to your Blogger templates which enables auto-discovery of TrackBack URLs (something that tools like MovableType and TypePad already do), which, if it works, could save some time - but as you'll see in the thread people have found it difficult to implement.  Your mileage may vary.

Wordpress plugin - Running PHP in Wordpress posts

THIS POST HAS BEEN MOVED TO:

http://www.emilyrobbins.com/how-to-blog/wordpress-plugin-running-php-in-wordpress-posts-252.htm

Please update your bookmarks to reflect the new, permanent location of How to Blog.  Comments and trackbacks on this post are now closed.  If you wish to comment on this post, please visit the new site!  Thank you!

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Mark Somerville wrote a REALLY cool Wordpress plug-in that allows you to include PHP code in your wordpress posts, which really expands the potential of what you can do with Wordpress.  I highly recommend checking it out!

Wordpress Customization for Newbies

THIS POST HAS BEEN MOVED TO:

http://www.emilyrobbins.com/how-to-blog/wordpress-customization-for-newbies-251.htm

Please update your bookmarks to reflect the new, permanent location of How to Blog.  Comments and trackbacks on this post are now closed.  If you wish to comment on this post, please visit the new site!  Thank you!

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Elliot Back has written a really cool Wordpress Customiation for Newbies guide that helps you convert a new Wordpress installation into a customized blog in just a few steps.  You should definately read his full article, but in a nutshell he suggests you start with the following tips (& he goes into far more detail on exactly how to implement them)

1. Get Kubrick, a drop in template for Wordpress, and install it
2. Import your links. The fastest way to do this is to use OPML from your favorite RSS reader. It will have an “export to OPML” option somewhere, which you can use to save all the feed URLs to a file that you will import via WordPress->Links->Import Blogroll
3. Get some plugins, and modify them to suite your tastes. Asymptomatic, the WordPress Wiki, Kitty’s Plugins, and the Web Log Tools Collection are all good places to start.  Elliot's top 5 (quoted from his post):

   1. Insert a breadcrumb navigation on your page
   2. Add an Acronym Replacer so when your write AOL, it looks uber-stylish
   3. Turn on the built-in WordPress->Plugins->Search Hilite
   4. Get an automatic linkifier to create links for you, when you only have the URLs.
   5. Random file is another useful WordPress plugin. I use it to rotate the banner of my Kubrick by adding a folder for random images.
4. Turn on pretty links.  Actually, I wrote an entire post on how to create search engine friendly permalinks that I think explains it a little better, so I'd recommend giving my post a read on this topic.
5. Ping some services. If you ping popular blog notification services, you’ll start getting traffic to your blog nearly immediately!

Great post - thanks Elliot!

Feedburner service allows bloggers to add Amazon associates links to your feeds!

THIS POST HAS BEEN MOVED TO:

http://www.emilyrobbins.com/how-to-blog/feedburner-service-allows-bloggers-to-add-amazon-associates-links-to-your-feeds-246.htm

Please update your bookmarks to reflect the new, permanent location of How to Blog.  Comments and trackbacks on this post are now closed.  If you wish to comment on this post, please visit the new site!  Thank you!

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

If you're hoping to make some extra cash from your blog, but all of your monetized links are in your sidebars or headers, etc, then you're losing out when people view your blog from feed readers. Not so if you use Feedburner - now you can beef up your feed to integrate links to relevant products using your amazon associate ID, as well as further enhance your feed by splicing photos and links into it AND get stats on your traffic. VERY COOL!

Neil Turner has blogged about his experience with experimenting with Feedburner, and while his post doesn't reference the ability to incorporate amazon links, he does show you how he's spliced in his Flickr photostream.

Here's how the service works:

FeedBurner detects your feed categories and then asks you to assign an Amazon store to any category for which you want to include the Amazon Associates program. For example, you might choose to associate the music store with your music category, DVD's with your Pop Culture category, and nothing at all with your Personal and Family categories. You, the publisher have total control over the frequency with which Amazon Associates links appear, and whether they should appear alongside really short posts or only very detailed posts.

FeedBurner then leverages the latest 4.0 release of Amazon Web Services to match your posts to relevant Amazon content for that store, and FeedBurner transforms that link and content from Amazon Web Services into a simple linked GIF tied to your feed item.

Publishers have total control over which (if any) parts of their feed get amazon links, which amazon stores they want to map to their content, and how frequently they want these associate links to appear.

TypePad blog gets indexed & ranks very highly in Google...

THIS POST HAS BEEN MOVED TO:

http://www.emilyrobbins.com/how-to-blog/typepad-blog-gets-indexed-ranks-very-highly-in-google-244.htm

Please update your bookmarks to reflect the new, permanent location of How to Blog.  Comments and trackbacks on this post are now closed.  If you wish to comment on this post, please visit the new site!  Thank you!

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I've noticed that this blog has been picked up by google and has been getting a fair amount of traffic for terms like 'blogger vs typepad', 'wordpress templates', etc. That was fast! I wonder if having your site hosted on typepad is actually beneficial for your ranking to the point of making it the most appropriate blogging tool if your aim is to make any money with your blog (i.e., your blog has some commercial purpose)

How to configure WordPress to create search engine friendly URLs for permalinks

THIS POST HAS BEEN MOVED TO:

http://www.emilyrobbins.com/how-to-blog/how-to-configure-wordpress-to-create-search-engine-friendly-urls-for-permalinks-242.htm

Please update your bookmarks to reflect the new, permanent location of How to Blog.  Comments and trackbacks on this post are now closed.  If you wish to comment on this post, please visit the new site!  Thank you!

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

WordPress's default behavior for permalinks is to create a URL that looks something like this:

http://www.yoursite.com/index.php?p=2

where p is the post id.

If you care at all about the search engines indexing your blog, and you should if you want anyone to read it :), you'll want to use a little SEO (search engine optimization) trick by having nice, neat URLs that describe your post.

In my case, I wanted my individual post archives to be in the root of my domain, as search engines like Google devalue a page the deeper it is into the site. I also wanted the link title be the posts name, so that my permalinks will look like this: http://www.yoursite.com/this-is-my-posts-title.htm

To do it:

- log into WordPress, and then click on 'Options'. Next click the sub-category under options entitled "Permalink"

- the page you're on will now describe all the fields you can use to create your permalink. I only cared about the post name so in the edit box just underneath where it says, "Use the template tags above to create a virtual site structure:" I typed the following:

/%postname%.htm

- at this point you should click the button to Update Permalink Structure.

Now you will need to modify your .htaccess file to do some mod-rewriting. Sounds hard, but WordPress makes it easy. First of all, if you don't know what it is, an .htaccess file is simply a text file that can contain instructions for the webserver. If you have an .htaccess file already, then you will need to edit it to add the code that WordPress provides for you (see below). If you don't have an .htaccess file, you'll need to create a text file using any text editor (notepad will do) that simply has the contents (again, see below) that WordPress tells you paste in. Those directions will be specific to the linking structure you choose, but if you go the route I went, then WordPress will have you add the following lines to your .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteRule ^category/(.*)/(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom)/?$ /wp-feed.php?category_name=$1&feed=$2 [QSA]
RewriteRule ^category/?(.*) /index.php?category_name=$1 [QSA]
RewriteRule ^author/(.*)/(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom)/?$ /wp-feed.php?author_name=$1&feed=$2 [QSA]
RewriteRule ^author/?(.*) /index.php?author_name=$1 [QSA]
RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-z-]+).htm([0-9]+)?/?$ /index.php?name=$1&page=$2 [QSA]
RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-z-]+).htm/(feed|rdf|rss|rss2|atom)/?$ /wp-feed.php?name=$1&feed=$2 [QSA]
RewriteRule ^([_0-9a-z-]+).htm/trackback/?$ /wp-trackback.php?name=$1 [QSA]
RewriteRule ^feed/?([_0-9a-z-]+)?/?$ /wp-feed.php?feed=$1 [QSA]
RewriteRule ^comments/feed/?([_0-9a-z-]+)?/?$ /wp-feed.php?feed=$1&withcomments=1 [QSA]

So now, my first WordPress post on my Tool Reviews Site can be found at http://www.toolreviews.biz/porter-cable-cffn250n-finish-brad-nailer-combo-kit.htm (btw - that post is more of a placeholder while evaluating WordPress than anything else..)

WordPress lets you have Sub-Categories

THIS POST HAS BEEN MOVED TO:

http://www.emilyrobbins.com/how-to-blog/wordpress-lets-you-have-sub-categories-233.htm

Please update your bookmarks to reflect the new, permanent location of How to Blog.  Comments and trackbacks on this post are now closed.  If you wish to comment on this post, please visit the new site!  Thank you!

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I just started creating my categories for my Tool Reviews site (Power Tools, Hand Tools, Lawn and Garden Tools, etc) and discovered that you can create sub-=categories off of a parent category. Now that's cool (and something I haven't encountered in the other blogging tools I've tried - blogger, movabletype (update: MT 3 has subcategories), and typepad). And I'm sure it makes things even better for the search engines to figure out what you're writing about.