MamaBlogga

Some of you know that in my “day” job, I’m an Internet marketing blogger. Occasionally, I come across something cool enough in my line of work that I have to share it with you here.

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!

Do you read a blog that you love to see their posts about gardening, but could care less about their posts about dog grooming? You (or the blogger) can remedy this problem by offering category feeds, or RSS feeds (What’s RSS again?) of individual categories on a blog.

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/feed/ (or http://YOURBLOGADDRESS.wordpress.com/).

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