Table of contents for Blogging Add-ons

• Quick Guide to Google Analytics for Bloggers
• Five Ways to Win Links—and Technorati’s Heart
• 5 Steps to Getting Started with FeedBurner
• Seven Ways to Master FeedBurner
• Blog Carnivals, Start to Finish
• Get even more out of FeedBurner

Guess who’s featured in today’s edition of MommyBrainOnline’s The Boost newsletter? It’s me! Welcome to new visitors! Please subscribe to MamaBlogga to get more posts on finding fulfillment and blogging tips!

It’s been a while since we went through the five easy steps to getting started and seven ways to get more from FeedBurner, the RSS service. Well, FeedBurner recently added a feature to help you get even more out of the service!

FeedBurner has offered email subscriptions for a while, for your blog readers who want to get updates in their inbox instead of in a reader. But while you could customize lots of options for your email newsletters, the subject line was always the same. For years, the only way you could make your email subject line change to match your content was to login every day and do it manually.

But that’s changed! Now you can add a custom feature to your subject line to make it match your post titles. Under Publicize > Email Subscriptions > Email Branding, here’s the new “hot tip”:

Just add ${latestItemTitle} to your subject line, and the title of your latest post will appear in your subject line.

If you have more than one post per day, you can customize your subject line even more if you check the checkbox. A popup menu appears giving you even more options:

Why is this helpful? It will help your email subscribers see what’s coming in your email. It should also increase the number of email subscribers who actually open your email, since it won’t get lost in a sea of same-subject emails (like Darren Rowse of ProBlogger points out).

Here’s the official Google announcement of the FeedBurner change.

More Works-for-me Wednesday

So get out there and make your email newsletters even better!

Last week, a Google-watching blog, Google Blogoscoped, reported this week on features coming up for Blogger—and a lot of them are pretty cool. Like other beta features (a search box, future posting), they’re currently available on the Blogger Draft site.

The latest features, ranked by order of coolness (IMO):

• Comments form embeddedable below the post. Can you believe it? Soon (well, now if you want to switch to Blogger Draft) even Blogger blogs can have the comment form right on the post page, rather than a “Post a comment” link. Google Blogoscoped explains how to get this feature on Blogger Draft now: go “to Settings -> Comments, and in the Comment Form Placement segment check the “Embedded below post” box. Click Save Settings to approve.”
• Integration into Google Webmaster tools. A link in the Dashboard takes you to Google Webmaster Tools. Now, you may not be familiar with Webmaster Tools (and if not, let me know and I’ll be happy to write about it!). The short story here is that Webmaster Tools helps you to interface directly with Google to see any problems with your site in the search engine index, to see keywords people use to find your blog in search results, and to see their click data (though I still recommend using a separate analytics package like Google Analytics). If you don’t want your blog listed in search engines, this isn’t really as useful .
• Exporting and importing your blog. Not only will this make it WAY easy to backup your blog regularly, it may also make it easy to move to a new blogging platform if you so choose. Posts, comments, etc. will be downloadable as XML files. This is under Settings, as Import blog and Export blog.
• A new post editor with new image handling. Google says, “When you upload an image to the new post editor it will appear as a thumbnail in the image dialog box. That way, you can upload several images at once, and then add them into your post at your convenience.” Very nice.
• Star ratings. Personally, I don’t find this one as interesting, but it could definitely be useful for getting feedback from your readers on what kinds of posts they like. It adds a five-star rating system and readers can rate the post. You can then see the average rating for each of your posts. This feature is under Layouts, at Edit at your Blog Posts element. Select the Show Star Ratings box.

If you don’t want to switch between regular Blogger and Draft, you can now also make the Blogger Draft site your default dashboard. But if you don’t mind switching, you can make these changes in Blogger Draft now and still post from regular Blogger with the changes intact.

If you always want to stay on top of new beta-stage features for Blogger, head on over to the Blogger in Draft blog and you’ll always be in the know!

Most of us already know how to use categories on blogs—we use them on our own blogs to break the content up by major subject; we use them on other people’s blogs to learn what they write about, to navigate their content and to find posts on a particular subject.

The general convention for most blogs is “Categories” are the larger topics of the blog and “Tags” cover narrower topics or subtopics. Blogger, of course, just has to be different and use “Labels,” which usually seem to function as both categories and tags, since they don’t give you any other option.

By creating category feeds, you allow your readers to pick and choose which topics they want to read about. This could be good for you—you get to target readers who are most interested in this area of your blog, while not risking losing them because of the stuff that they’re not so interested in.

Creating Label Feeds in Blogger

from Blogger Design

To create a label-based feed on Blogger, the feed address is:

http://YOURBLOGNAMEHERE.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/YOURLABELNAME

Obviously, you’ll have to change the blog name and the label name to match what your blog. This will give you the address of an RSS or Atom feed that you can offer to your readers. Note that label and category feeds can be burned with FeedBurner.

Creating Category Feeds in WordPress.com and WordPress.org

For once, it doesn’t make any difference whether you’re using a self-hosted or WP-hosted flavor of WordPress. To create a category-based feed with WordPress, the feed address is:
http://YOURBLOGADDRESS.com/category/CATEGORYNAME/feed/ (or http://YOURBLOGADDRESS.wordpress.com/). (You have the option of using something else for the first /category/—some blogs choose to use /archive/, etc.)

You’ll have to change the blog address and the category name, but appending /feed/ to any category page (or, incidentally, any tag page, too) automatically gives the address for the RSS feed. (Want Atom? add /feed/atom/ instead.)

Once again, category feeds can be burned with FeedBurner.

Creating Category Feeds in TypePad

As I generally like to say, TypePad, being evil, makes this difficult—or at least relatively more difficult than the other standard platforms. However, if you can create a new index template as part of an Advanced Template Set (does that cost extra?), then you can create a category feed.

The full instructions are available from Six Apart, and require you to cut . . . and paste (can you believe it?!) and change the listed category to whichever category you’re looking for. Follow the directions carefully, and your feed will be at the address you specified when you created the new index template.

And, one more time, category feeds can be burned with FeedBurner.

Conclusion
This is, of course, an individual choice—but if your readers (or you as a reader) really want to, they can create these feeds (and even burn them in FeedBurner) themselves.

Please note that it would be wrong to “steal” another blog’s category feed and burn it, and especially to promote your burned version of the feed elsewhere on the Internet. I don’t think that any of you gentle readers would do that, but you never know what the Internets might bring in here.

More Works-for-me Wednesday

Table of contents for Blog comments

• Four Ways to Encourage Comments on Your Blog
• Protect Your Blog with a Comment Policy
• Subscribe to comments to follow blog conversations
• You have spoken . . . about speaking
• Handling negative comments
• Handling negative comments part II

Maleficent doesn’t know anything about love, or kindness, or the joy of helping others. You know, sometimes I don’t think she’s really very happy.

—Fauna, Sleeping Beauty

It’s been a long time since I’ve gotten negative comments, but last week I had a few. Some were allowed to stay. But they progressively got worse and violated the written comment policy here on MamaBlogga and some were deleted.

While we’ve discussed handling negative comments here before, I’ve seen a few good posts on this around the blogosphere lately. Last month, ProBlogger had a guest post about dealing with negative comments. The author reminds us:

A good rule of thumb is that nasty or negative comments are never about you or what you’ve written, they are always about the person who wrote them. (Even if people disagree with what you’ve said, most of them can do it in a sane & respectful fashion.)

(Hence the quotation from Sleeping Beauty above.)

She addresses both the drive-by troll (“Delete their comment & if what they’ve said is really nasty, just ban them. You don’t need the strife!”) and the long-time commenter turned nasty (to whom she sends a friendly email).

Just last week, Scribbit posted about this issue, too. She said:

Be careful how you treat readers, even the negative ones. Not just for fear of them never returning—rude ones probably never will anyway—but because it’s common courtesy and because they’re people too with thoughts and opinions that won’t always mesh with yours and darn it, that’s what makes the world so exciting. Who knows? Maybe they’re even right once in a while.

She also included a very fun flowchart for guidance on whether to delete nasty comments.

On my work blog, I delete almost nothing but spam and blatant self-promotion—and I get a lot more nasty (and dumb) comments over there. I’m slowly learning to walk away from people who simply aren’t listening to me while trying to engage in a “debate” (though this would normally be called a “monologue”).

But here on MamaBlogga, a personal, mom blog, I can delete with impunity, and I have deleted more than just spam comments. I still feel a little weird about it sometimes, though. Do you have any qualms about deleting rude, mean or simply borderline comments?

When creating your new design, keep in mind the subject matter, goals and theme of your blog. Try to match your color scheme, graphics and layout to those. If you aren’t sure how to do this, talk to someone (like your readers or a professional blog designer). Outside input can be hugely important in creating a blog design that works for you and your blog.

As I mentioned last week, a key feature to your blog design is user-friendliness. This bears repeating: “light text on dark backgrounds are very hard on your readers’ eyes. Having music, flashing text or graphics and/or scrolling text or graphics is also tough on readers’ (and their browsers).”

When working on your blog design, it’s a good idea to set up a test blog. If you’re modifying your current design, you can import that into your test blog to start. If you’re creating a new design from scratch, create it there first. Not only will this make sure that all your changes work with your blog software and layout, but you won’t risk “breaking” your main blog.

When creating your new design, go slow. By that I mean change just one thing at a time on your test blog. This isn’t just for aesthetic reasons: if you “break” something, you’ll know what caused the error. If you change six things in one edit and suddenly your test blog doesn’t work, you won’t know which of the things caused the problem.

However, be sure to try different things. I recently did a blog design with a color palette the client had chosen from ColourLovers.com. The palette was beautiful—but the way I used the colors on the page wasn’t. I could have redone the entire color scheme (which wouldn’t take that long), or changed the way I used the colors on the page, but instead I went hunting for more colors (back on ColourLovers) that worked with the “good” colors.

Other than new colors, here are some other small tweaks that can really change your blog’s feel (and the appropriate caveats):

• Font face: make sure it’s easy to read and works across many different computers (not everyone has the same fonts preinstalled on their computer as you do!)
• New header: I recommend not making the header so large that visitors can’t see at least your first post when the page loads. Also, be careful how wide you make it: not everyone has a widescreen laptop.
• Layout: If at all possible, use your blog software’s options to change the number or layout of columns

Now I think I’ll take my own advice: Readers, what do you think of this blog’s layout, colors and graphics? Are they easy to read and understand? Do they match what you perceive as the purpose, goals and theme of MamaBlogga? I’m ready for your feedback (*braces self*)!

Do you have experience with a graphics program?
Virtually all layouts feature custom graphics, at least in the header. Do you know how to make one?

Do you have an idea on how to convey your blog’s theme graphically?
Does the color scheme, graphics and layout you’re thinking of make sense for your blog and its topic? Do you know how to make that statement graphically?

Do you know how to make a blog layout and color scheme user-friendly?
A few things to remember here: light text on dark backgrounds are very hard on your readers’ eyes. Having music, flashing text or graphics and/or scrolling text or graphics is also tough on readers’ (and their browsers).

Do you need to make substantial changes to the layout of your blog?
Do you want to go from two columns to three? Unless you have some coding experience, this can be a lot tougher than it looks.

Do you have experience with coding CSS and/or HTML?
CSS is the more important of the two; you can change the entire look and feel of your blog without touching the HTML.

Will your blog software let you make the changes that you want?
Be sure to check whether your blog software will let you use a custom, graphics CSS or layout.

If you have the technical skills to accomplish a new blog design, it can still be helpful to consult a professional to get an outside idea about how to best convey your blog’s theme visually.

If you decide to do it yourself, be sure to come back next week for tips on creating your own blog design!

First, let me say that a blog redesign isn’t a little extra something. It’s a BIG extra something. And it may be a big extra something that you’re not ready for. Here are a few questions to ask yourself:

Do you feel like you’ve “outgrown” your default/free template?
Be careful as you answer this one. Would you be happy just switching to another free or default template? Or how about making (or buying) a custom header? If rearranging your sidebar widgets just won’t hold you, start looking for a blog designer.

Do you feel like it doesn’t “fit” your blog and/or you anymore?
If your blog has grown and changed considerably—or your life, and therefore, your posts and your blog—it’s probably time to go look for another design.

Have you changed focus, topic or theme since choosing your last design?
If you used to blog about high tech devices and now you’re writing about spit up, I probably don’t have to tell you that your old blog design probably won’t quite work here.

Do you have ideas about your ideal site design?
Not only does this make your blog designer’s job easier, but if you know where you want to go in your design, you can better judge if your current design will do.

Have you explored many free options (all the Blogger Templates, themes.wordpress.net, etc.)?
You can customize the graphics and colors on many blog platforms, so even if you don’t like the color scheme or header image, you can ‘fix’ many templates as long as other important things are right for you, like blog layout.

Only you can know for sure if you’re ready to “make the leap.” Thankfully, in the mombloggyworld, it’s usually not a huge investment to get a new blog design, so your budget probably won’t figure in as much as it would for a professional business website.

Be sure to check in for more blogging tips next week and learn if you should try to redesign your blog yourself!

Agree on payment
You probably set the price in the “opening negotiations” that we discussed last week, or your designer has a set price. Your designer probably also has a preferred method of being paid—PayPal, Google Checkout, check in the mail, your first born. Paying in advance (or at least on time) helps the process along, Elizabeth says.

Agree on a (working) deadline
Depending on how popular your designer is, this could be several months or a few weeks. Can you live with the deadline?

Naturally, you should be flexible with your designer: they’re doing you a service, and we all know how crazy life can get. Generally, etiquette asks that a designer let you know in advance if there will be any delays, but sometimes that’s not possible (hospitalization, for one example).

Have an idea in mind
Either from your favorite designed sites or (better yet) from the designer’s portfolio. Try to identify what it is you like about the sites: the colors, the layout of the columns, the clean lines, the way the header stands out or is integrated into the body.

Also helpful: Have at least one color chosen (I totally recommend ColourLovers.com for designing palettes; hat tip to Kasie).

Elizabeth agrees. She says that it’s easier to work with a client:

• when they have a well articulated goal in mind. (ex. I would like 3 columns, girly blog, I like flowers, and have a passion for education. My main focus will be homeschooling.)
• When they provide links to blogs (or sites) that have things they like about them. Anything that can give me an idea of what they like and what they don’t.

So, conversely, if there are some site designs that you don’t like, it can be helpful to point those out (especially if you can be more specific than ‘I hate this one.’) Another important point that Elizabeth makes is that it’s important to share with your designer what the themes for your blog are—and not just the colors. If you have any specific photos or clip art (which you own the rights to), obviously, share them with the designer.

Be specific and polite
Kind of reiterating what I just said, but by pointing out exactly what you want and don’t want, you’ll get there a lot faster than if you leave your designer to stab in the dark.

Be constructive and specific (again) about revisions
If you don’t like something in your new design, it’s up to you whether you want to try to live with it or ask the designer to fix it. Most of the time (especially if you’re polite about it), a designer wants to work with you to make you as happy as possible.

Bad examples of this might go:

Dear Designer,
You really screwed this up, didn’t you? Back to the drawing board.
Love,
Blogger

Dear Designer,
I don’t like it. Can you fix it?
Love,
Blogger

Better examples:

Dear Designer,
Thank you for my design! I like the design overall, but there are a few things that I don’t care for. Can we work on the way the comments display and the color of the headings (especially post titles and in the sidebar)?
Thanks again!
Blogger

Dear Designer,
Thank you for working on my design. I see how you incorporated a lot of what I wanted into it. However, I was hoping for a bigger header and a darker background color. Could you fix that?
Thanks,
Blogger

Sometimes your designer will automatically include a number of revisions (or batches thereof) in their price, though occasionally some will charge extra.

How do you know if now is the right time to buy a custom blog design? Come back next week to read more. Be sure to join in the Group Writing Project if you haven’t already!

More WFMW

Woohoo! Whether you decide to do it yourself or find a web designer, this is a very exciting time for your blog.

So, if you’re going the web designer route, how do you find one that will work for you?

See samples of their work
Look at your favorite blogs. Okay, blogs that you think are pretty. See if they have a designer credit (usually at the bottom of the page), or ask the bloggers who did their design.

If you already have a designer in mind, be sure to look through their portfolio (they should definitely have a collection of sample themes or clients’ blogs that you can look at).

What should you be looking for? You should be looking to see if you like some (or better still, all) of the designs that person has done. It can be helpful to point to elements their previous work and ask for something similar in your design.

You should also look to see if they work in the same “genre” (or at least style) as your blog. If they’ve done exclusively corporate blogs and you have a mom blog, they might not be a good match.

Check prices
You know how it goes: good stuff don’t come cheap. Generally, if you’re working with a designer that specializes in mom blogs, their prices will be far more affordable than “professional” blog designers’. Many blog designers charge flat rates and publish those rates on their websites. Others may give ballpark prices and/or estimates on the website, but the final price will be based on how extensive and custom your blog design is.

Make sure they work in your platform
If you’re on Blogger and they only do WordPress, that’s a problem. Blogger and WordPress are worlds apart; it would take a lot for a designer to learn an entire new platform just for one design.

Again, most blog designers will state directly on their blog what platforms they design for. If you’re using something other than WordPress, TypePad or Blogger, it may be a bit harder to find the affordable mom blog designer you’re looking for.

Make sure you understand exactly what you’re getting
Will your blog design include a just a new header? What about a favicon? Customized sidebars? For that matter, one or two sidebars—and will they cost extra? How many widgets will they include? Will the design for specific plugins? Will the designer “install” your new design for you and make sure it works on your blog?

Ask what kind of input they’d like
I believe most designers appreciate some direction when you’re working with them. I know that it’s really hard to make something a client likes when you have no idea what they’re looking for. I’ll have more on this topic next week, so stay tuned!

That’s right, next week we’ll have more on working with your chosen blog designer as well as another Group Writing Project!

Get more Works-for-me Wednesday!

Table of contents for Blog comments

• Four Ways to Encourage Comments on Your Blog
• Protect Your Blog with a Comment Policy
• Subscribe to comments to follow blog conversations
• You have spoken . . . about speaking
• Handling negative comments
• Handling negative comments part II

I haven’t had to do this on here very often, but pretty regularly on my work blog, I have people comment who are . . . well . . . less than nice, we’ll say (or just wrong). While sometimes it’s pretty easy to handle comments I don’t really appreciate over there (often with more facts to back up my story), it’s a lot harder to do that in the realm of mom blogging.

If you’re posting about how cute your kids are or how you’re struggling with this behavior or how you’ve come to a self-discovery, it’s more than just annoying to have someone contradict you or treat you unkindly. It’s a bit of a personal affront—sometimes even an attack on your children or your parenting!

There are a few ways you can handle this. The best ways (the ways you would tell your children to handle this):

1. Ignore it. If you’re really lucky, your bloggy friends will even come to your defense. Just the other day, I saw a friend of mine share a personal story and someone called her out for being unchristlike. I was the first person there after that comment was left, and I vehemently (but hopefully respectfully) disagreed. Several subsequent commenters did the same.
2. Settle it privately. If your blogging platform allows, email the person directly. You could explain that, while you don’t particularly appreciate the way that they’ve phrased their concerns, you’d like to know if there’s something you could do better in your blogging (or parenting, if you’re really feeling generous) in the future.
3. Use concrete facts. If the person is disagreeing with a factual assertion (instead of just your opinion), you can provide more information on the facts you’re citing, such as their sources.
4. Point to your blog comment policy. If you’ve already written one, and this comment violates the guidelines you’ve set forth, inform the commenter privately (via email) or publicly (via the comments on that post). Take whatever action you say you will in your policy (deleting the comment, banning the commenter, etc.)

Possibly less productive:

5. Call them out. In the very next comment you make, point out that they’ve been unkind, that that kind of behavior would be unacceptable from your children, and it’s unacceptable on your blog.

Downright counterproductive:

6. Tit for tat. Reflect everything they’ve said back on them in your next comment or, worse yet, track down their blog and make a similar comment.

There are a few other solutions that I’m not sure what category to put them in:

7. Play the martyr. Face it, we’re moms: we can do this with the best of them. As we should all remember from being children, guilt trips and the martyr card don’t really solve anything though.
8. Delete it. If your comment policy says you’ll delete abusive comments, or negative comments, do it. If you don’t have a comment policy, the general bloggy community shuns deleting comments just because they disagree with you. However, on a personal blog—it’s your blog.
9. Block that commenter. Depending on the nature of the comment, it may take only one comment to warrant blocking them, especially if it’s in your comment policy. Even if it’s not, it’s your blog, your family and you. Protect them if you feel you need to.

What do you do when you receive a negative comment? What has worked for you? What hasn’t?

More WFMW.