Welcome to Blogging Sueblimely. To keep up with my posts you can subscribe to my RSS feed and follow me on Twitter. Thanks for visiting!
I have had to return from my self imposed (need to get a website finished) blogging exile to let you know about Ivy and show how bloggers when they join together in one voice can have a powerful effect.
Today has been an emotional day for me. The relief of having found out that my son has been accepted into our first choice of adult day centre for next year was great. I was over the moon. He has a disability and I was so concerned about his future in an adult world, post school.
Tonight I read about Ivy, a poor little mite who has suffered so much in her first years of life. I have been following her story on Tiff’s (her mum’s) blog, Three Ring Circus, always hoping to read that she is improving, but her auto immune disease rarely seems to let go of its grip. Ivy was being denied a drug that could improve her life, reduce her pain and allow her to do things and go places like any other 2 year old.
A petition was organised by Veronica of Sleepless Nights and I was intending to write about this to gather your support. In fact, feeling outraged and sad, I had already jumped right in and started to write this when I read, with delight that Ivy is now being allowed to have the medicine she desperately needs. I was so pleased I went back and altered the “is” to was as I still wanted to share this with you.. The voices were heard! Isn’t it wonderful news?
Now I am returning to the depths of a Wordpress theme but hope to find my way out again very soon, although I then need to delve further into the database - if I am missing for too long please send out a search party. I hear it can be scary in there and I may be hiding behind a table.
Popularity: 7% [?]
Apologies if you have been visiting here in the last week looking for new posts. A website I am working on has been taking up a fair bit of time. The site is powered by Wordpress but I have had to create a theme with quite a few tweaks to turn it into a CMS system that does what I want it to do. It has been a good learning experience and I am now getting my head around PHP - the simpler Wordpress sort at least. However much I have enjoyed this, it has not stopped me getting regularly sidetracked and wandering around the web looking for things of interest. Here are a few things I thought you too may find of interest.
Reading
-
20 Myths About Blogging That Many New Bloggers Actually Believe
- Windows Live Search Tricks You May Not Know Aboutby digital inspiration. What interested me most in this was the ability to subscribe to searches via RSS. I use Google alerts which sends me results by email but wanted to display a feed of specific search results for a website that I am building. I am going to compare the results for a particular search term from Windows Live Search RSS feed with Google Alerts.
- Learn Illustrator CS3 in 30 Days
- Vectordiary has just finished posting 30 days of tutorials teaching beginners the basics of Illustrator. If you would like to learn how to create your own illustrations, design your own logos and create special effects these will be very useful to you.
News
- Google’s own browser. Chrome, not an unexpected addition to their suite of services has just been released. I will likely write about this further once I have had chance to look more closely at its features and had longer to try it out. The fact that each tab is isolated to prevent one tab from crashing another appeals to this multi tab browsing person. Multi tab bars in Firefox 3 do tend to keep me in check though - when I get to the third I realize it is time to start closing some tabs. Google’s cartoon announcement is a good place to start to find out about Chrome. My son read this yesterday and reckons it was really effective as he was able to remember and reel off its contents to me hours later. Even if you do not want to use the browser it is wise to view your blog in it as the Tech Herald reports that there is at present an issue with some fonts not displaying correctly.
- Yahoo Buzz - has just been opened to all publishers, six months after initially launching. Buzz, with its wider subject areas, will produce serious competition for Digg which still appeals more to those interested in technology. I am working on a tutorial, which I will publish soon, giving you more information and details on the various methods of adding Buzz buttons to your blog.
- Something For Your Time - Monetizing Video Phil Butler reviews Zadby on Online Public Relations . Zadby is an "online marketplace where advertisers, marketers, and brand managers can connect with freelance video producers to create innovative product placement videos tailored for sites like YouTube, AOL, and MySpace". If you already create videos for your blog perhaps you may consider taking more advantage of your talent.
- HowToBlog has come up with an innovative idea for members of its site to promote their own sites - a Review Exchange System. Add your website to the review directory and review other blogs. Those that review the most appear higher in the directory, giving more prominence to their own website.
- The HowToBlog also alerted me to news for those using Google Adwords that Landing page load time now affects keywords’ Quality Scores- This may be old news for some but, not using Adwords myself I was not aware of this.
- What’s new in Picasa & Picasa Web Albums For those who use Picasa for your photo albums or because you use blogspot you may wish to check out the new Picasa interface and features, which include adding name tags to photos and adding photos via email. Picasa Web Albums (the desktop image managing tool) has a new etouching tool and new Sync functionality.
- Mozilla’s Snowl — A Unified Messaging Interface - rj3sp from ClipsToNote reviews an experimental firefox extension that gathers all your inbound communications from email, RSS, Twitter, social network updates ….
- If you use IE, Opera or Safari and would like some of the editing features allowed by the Firefox Firebug exension then the new Firebug Lite is for you.
- Text Link Checker Tool by Bad Neighbourhood scans the links on your website, and on the pages that your website is linking to, alerting you to possible problem areas which may affect your standing with search engines. The scan will bring up some sites that you do not need to worry about because of keywords it discovers and the number of links to blogs etc so please read the Bad Neighborhood Clarification post in conjunction with the first search you do to set your mind at rest.
Blogger
- Followers is a new graphical Blogger Widget that is being rolled out to all users as from the end of August. It allows people to follow your blog and for you to see who is following you. A new "Blogs I’m following" tab on your Dashboard allows you to read the posts of those you follow. I will be looking out for it on the blogspot blogs I visit and will add them to my follow list. I will start off with blogspot users who comment here - hopefully a bit of encouragement for you to talk to me:-) Thanks to Tech Flaps, who wrote a post which alerted me to this new feature.
Wordpress
- Yoast Breadcrumbs pluginConstructs customisable breadcrumb navigation for single posts and pages. This allows “ease of navigation for your readers as well as providing an additional way for search engines to determine the structure of your site”. Yoast also has an extensive guide on Wordpress SEO Tested up to Wordpress 2.6. Review on Blogging Tips
A couple of question for you - do you think I should date these news posts or give them a number? Do you think having multiple posts with the same words in the title could be bad for search engine purposes? Would Google bot get all confused and think it was spammy?
Popularity: 8% [?]
.Lijit is a search tool that offers a lot more features than the run of the mill default blog searches. I have just installed the Lijit Widget (Wijit) in my sidebar. Automatic installation is available for Blogger and Typepad via the widget setup and there is a brand new Lijit Wordpress plugin that gives you the option of using Lijit as a stand alone search or incorporating it into the default Wordpress search widget.
Features
- Optional addition of some or all of your bookmarking, social networking and photo sites to Lijit will allow search of not only your blog posts but of sites you have bookmarked, your blogroll sites and your social networking contact’s posts and their contacts and bookmarks. Most of the popular sites are included although my favorite bookmarking site, diigo, is as usual not included. There is also a feature to add feeds and site url’s so adding my diigo bookmarks feed solved this problem for me.
The search result window shows tabs for results from your blog, your network, your content (on any site), and the web. You set your widget’s default search to show one of these tabs as the front page of the results. I have set mine up to show search results from my blog first. I recommend this as you will keep searchers on your own site longer if the search term brings up satisfactory results in your blog (in terms of what the user wishes).
- Choose to have your search results show up only on the Lijit site or in your blog window via a pop up screen.
- Statistics available on your Lijit page will give you information about:
- the number of times you have been searched,
- the results that have been clicked,
- information sources that have provided the most clicked results,
- blogs that have linked to you,
- searches that have brought people to your blog .
You can choose to make your statistics publicly viewable.
Widgets can be created to display some recent reader stats on your blog via a list or map:
- An optional “Surprise me!” button produces a list of random content from your blogs and added services - and the results did surprise me as MyBlogLog blogs, that I was not even aware of, showed up there. (MBL automatically adds blogs that you have visited a certain number of times) I may remove MyBlogLog from my options so that results are more relevant to my blog topics.
- A feature named ‘Re-search’ displays extra information for those reaching your blog via a Google search. Here are the results which showed up after I had done a Google Search for “blogging sueblimely images”.For this example, I had to use my blog name in the search terms so that I guaranteed that one of my posts came up in a google search! Options allow you to either display these results below your widget or across the top of your blog.
Below Lijit Wijit
Top Placement - this image was created by a Lijit preview feature
- The widget can be configured to show ‘Popular Searches’ and ‘content’ icons’ I chose not to include these features on mine, being mindful of above the fold sidebar space and page load time, but this is what they would have looked like had I installed them:
- Along with search results comes an option to add a search of the blog you are searching to your browser search engines.
- Lijit uses Google search but also has its own search infrastructure. Om Malik reports that there are plans to add an opt-in ad network to search results and to allow publishers to sell their own keyword inventory in as well as giving them the opportunity to “use Lijit to back-fill the advertising spots”
Advantages of using Lijit Search on your blog:
- Lijit search stats are very useful and are displayed in a simple to understand way.
- The browser search engines feature is useful for yourself to add for a quick search of your own blog as well for others to add to encourage others to revisit your content..
- Searching of your blogroll and social networking contact sites. This could be seen as a resource for your readers as well as a way of recognizing your blogging contacts - another form of link love.
- When results
- Search of your bookmarking sites is another resource for your readers to tap into. I consider my online bookmarking sites a research tool for you, adding links that I think you would find useful relating to topics I cover here, rather than using them for personal purposes. I already display my diigo bookmarks so for me the Lijit search is an extension of this principle. As you will know, if you read this blog often, I tend to ignore SEO recommendations for more incoming links than outgoing as I wish to provide useful information, whether written by myself or others, and to give recognition to the good blog content of my contacts. .
- Keeping the search result window on your blog, rather than purely on the Lijit site, will retain your readers on your site for longer.
Setup was simple and, if you change your preferences, you do not have to alter the widget code as new or changed features are automatically added. The widget itself did not seem to impact my page load time although the search results are a little slow to show up. Disadvantages - yet another widget added to your sidebar and for me another tool to divert me away from my tasks at hand today - my (semi) regular news post and a tutorial on Yahoo Buzz - which now allows anyone to add content a la Digg but with some different and useful features.
Popularity: 12% [?]
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