Month: July 2007

Categories
MetaBlogging

Seven Ways to Master FeedBurner

Table of contents for Blogging Add-ons

Last week, I offered some basics of FeedBurner. This week, I have seven ways to master FeedBurner. You probably won’t need or even want all of them (I don’t), but they’re pretty cool and you never know what might come in handy!

1. MyBrand. This service, found under My Account, is absolutely great for anyone who owns his or her own domain. Instead of your feed address being http://feeds.feedburner.com/feedname, your address can be http://feeds.yourblog.net/feedname. Feedburner MyBrandWhy is that so cool? It means that, should something terrible happen to FeedBurner, your subscribers are all subscribed to your domain and it will be easy to keep your subscribers and move them. Although BlueHost hasn’t been very helpful (why can’t I just make my own CNAMEs?!), this should be very easy to do, if a bit technical. Danny Sullivan of Search Engine Land wrote a definitive tutorial on MyBrand back when the service charged a nominal fee; today the service is free!

2. Title/Description Burner. Found under the Optimize tab, FeedBurner’s Title/Description Burner let you change the title and description on your feed without altering your site in anyway. If the title of your blog is coming through garbled or would be displayed better in a different format on your feed, use this easy service to make them pop!

3. Feed Image Burner. Speaking of popping, FeedBurner also has a service to insert an image into your feed. Also found under the Optimize tab, the Feed Image Burner is great for adding a logo to your feed stories to distinguish your blog from the dozens of other identical-looking stories passing through your subscribers feed readers every day. It’s also a good way to brand your blog and quickly remind your visitors of what blog they’re reading. I know I’m not always the best about remembering which mommy (or search marketing) blog is which on name alone—but a logo might help!

4. Headline Animator. Another great way to brand your blog, the Headline Animator is found under the Publicize tab. Use the same colors and images that appear in your website and logo to create a custom animator, then include that graphic wherever appropriate. I’ve seen them in email signatures, blog sidebars and, as FeedBurner puts it, “anyplace you can put a snippet of HTML,” all promoting your blog.

5. Email Branding. Under Publicize>Email Subscriptions, Email Branding can help you make the email version of your feed stand out in your subscribers’ inboxes—and make your email subscription look more like your blog itself. Here you can customize the subject MamaBlogga logoline of your feed emails as well as their appearance. As with the Feed Image Burner, you can include a logo to remind readers what blog they’re reading. You can also customize your font (but you’re limited to the five major font families: Arial, Verdana, Trebuchet, Georgia and Times New Roman), size and color of text and links. As with the Headline Animator, using images and colors from your blog can provide a sense of continuity for your readers. My own logo, at right, is a version of my header.

6. Link and/or Photo Splicer. Under the Optimize tab, these two options make it easy for you to include extras in your feed that you might not be able to otherwise: links from various social bookmarking sites (del.icio.us, Digg, etc.) and photo sharing sites (Flickr, Buzznet and Webshots only). No tweaks, no plugins, and you can even set them to update once an hour, once a day or once a week. If you tag your images in Flickr, you can set it to only include pictures with a particular tab, too—keeping the rest of your photos more private.

7. FeedBurner Ad Network. Found under Monetize tab, the FeedBurner Ad Network can help you make money from running ads in your RSS feed. I personally cannot vouch for how hard it is to be invited into the network, since I’ve never tried, nor can I vouch for how much you can make off the ads, but if that’s something you’re interested in doing, FeedBurner already has a way to do it set up.

feedburner edit feed detailsOne last capability that isn’t as neat-o as these seven, but is one of the major advantages of FeedBurner is the ability to change your blog address and easily transfer subscribers. Click on Edit Feed Details to find the box where you entered your feed address. Should you move your blog, you can easily update this address to your new one, without sacrificing your subscribers.

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Categories
Contests

July Group Writing Project Finale

With twenty-eight twenty-nine awesome entries, I’m happy to say that the July Group Writing Project has gone very well, in spite of my intermittent maintenance as I traveled for my brother-in-law’s wedding (which was lovely!). Without making you wait a moment more, here is the final list of entries:

All of these great entries clearly took time and consideration. Read through them and find inspiration from adults and mothers now thanking their own mothers for everything from hair color and blue jeans to looking forward to spending time with them and creating simple memories. I hope you’ll find someone offering thanks for the very thankless thing that you’re struggling with doing for your children now, wondering whether they’ll ever appreciate your efforts. And I hope that they do appreciate your efforts.

Now, feel free to spread the link love by copying the above list (instructions) and posting it to your own blog. Believe me—they all deserve it.

The Winna!
Chosen at random, the winner of our prize, a $30 Amazon.com gift certificate, is <drum roll>…

Thanks, Mommy! by Stacey @ Look, Mom, Look!

Congratulations, Stacey, on not only winning the gift certificate (again, she was chosen at random!) but also on writing a most excellent entry! The gift certificate will be winging its way to you soon!

Still working on your entry? Even though we’ve awarded our prize, we’ll continue to accept, read, link to and comment on submissions through next week.

Categories
Contests

July GWP Days Four and Five

A strong finish for our last two days: eleven great entries for the July Group Writing Project, and once again all these entries are of the highest quality! Again, we have a wide range of thanks for everything from simple memories to Levi’s. As always, read, comment and enjoy!

A simple one for today: thank you, mom, for being such a good example of a stay-at-home mom. When I was little, it was difficult for me to understand that there was any other kind of mom.

But you were never “just” a mom to us. Thank you for proving that you can—and even should—be there with your kids.

Tune in Monday to get the final list and find out who wins the $30 prize!

Categories
Kids/Parenting

Right from wrong

Dear Mom,

Thank you for teaching us right from wrong. It’s so easy these days to let children and teenagers just do whatever they want. I see it all the time. Everything from letting children run wild in public places, trample strangers and ignore basic courtesies to passively allowing teenagers to engage in any behavior they think will make them happy. “Standards are antequated,” everyone seems to say today. “Kids are going to do what they want anyway.”

While some teenagers and children will always do what they want no matter what you say or do, that doesn’t mean that we should just give up and let our children run amuck. Just because a child or teenager wants to do something or thinks that it will make him or her happy in the short run doesn’t mean it’s actually a good idea.

And my mom knows all this. She knows the pressures of raising teenagers today—just six years ago, she had four daughters at home. We didn’t grow up in some idyllic time when it was easy for teens to choose the right. We dealt with pressures and my mother did everything in her power to steel us against them.

And she did quite well. To date, my three sisters and I have yet to make the big, life-altering bad choices that I’m so very afraid my children will make one day. When my mother was asked to teach a class on coping with children who go astray at a church women’s conference, she told me with visible mirth—it was the third year in a row she was teaching a class on something she felt she had little personal experience with.

And it’s not a coincidence. My mom didn’t just end up with good ones. That contributed to this outcome, certainly, but without proper standards instilled in our minds and our hearts, even good children wouldn’t have made the same choices we did. I also think that having these standards rooted in something concrete to us, our religion, reinforced them in a way that an amorphous “you should do this because it’s right/it’s for your own good/I said so” never could.

So thank you, Mom, for what was probably one of the most important gifts you’ve given to us. I know sometimes it was hard and my reactions to the rules (not the rules themselves, as I almost wrote) strained our relationship from time to time. But honestly, looking back, sometimes I wish the rules had been stricter.

Thank you for caring about us enough to work so hard to instill core values in us. And thanks especially for proving to me that it can be done, even in this day and age, and that it’s worth it.

Love,
Jordan

Categories
Kids/Parenting

Dancin’ Fool

Hayden loves to dance. Now presenting Hayden’s first music video!

Note that he does, in fact, say, “Kitty” (or “Ditty”) as he’s getting up. And then he makes monkey sounds. What can I say? He’s a talented kid!

Categories
Contests

July GWP Days Two and Three

With thirteen more entries over the last two days, things are moving right along for the July Group Writing Project, and of course all our entries are of the highest quality! Today we have a wide range of thanks for everything from hugs to hair color. So read, comment and enjoy!

And don’t forget to submit your entries before Saturday!

I’m grateful to my mother for working so hard to establish family traditions. Everything from nightly dinner together and monthly dinner with our extended family to crafts throughout Christmas has not only given me wonderful memories but helped me to build a relationship with all of my family.

I know my mother did this deliberately (of course). I didn’t realize it, though, until I heard her talk about how hard she worked to establish these family traditions. We got to know each other, stay involved in one another’s lives and build relationships with my sisters that I know our friends envied. (Somehow, though, that relationship always seemed to manifest itself by quoting television commercials in unison, which is hardly enviable, but still.)

I suppose I don’t really need to thank my mother for this, since I’m sure she doesn’t feel underappreciated in this aspect of our lives—she’s already been able to reap rich benefits from our family’s traditions.

Thanks, mom. I’m looking forward to seeing you tomorrow! Or, as Cookie (Monster, not Brooke) would say: “Ha ha ha ha! Ha ha ha ha! Oh boy, oh boy!”

Don’t forget to submit your entries!