Jump Breaks have been around since September 2009 (announced on 09/09/09). Up until a few days ago, you could use Jump Breaks on your blog to truncate posts displayed there. Write a long post, but don’t want it making your homepage load so long? Insert a Jump Break a few paragraphs in, and the main page of your blog will only display the post to that point, with a link to see the full version.

To insert a Jump Break, you can click on the Edit HTML tag and enter <!– more –> . Or, in the Compose tab, you can click on the Jump Break button:

Now you can use the same function in your feeds. To enable the Jump Breaks in your feed, go to Settings > Site Feed. By “Allow Blog Feeds,” select “Until Jump Break.”

You can even customize the “Read more” text. Go to Design > Page Elements. Under Blog Posts, click Edit.

Then just change the Post Page Link Text in the popup window:

Why would you want to use Jump Breaks?
There are a lot of reasons to use Jump Breaks in your feed and on your blog. For example:

• To cut off a long or image-heavy post that would take a long time to load.
• To customize when and where you publish a “snippet” or “preview” feed.
• To keep your homepage from getting too long.
• To display a larger variety or number of posts on your homepage.

On other blogging platforms
If you use WordPress, this all might look a little familiar: you can also split posts in WordPress with the <!– more –> tag. You can type that in the HTML version of a post, or just use the more button: in the Visual tab or the HTML tab . You can even customize the text of the link it inserts, if you’re feeling ambitious.

In TypePad, you can split posts if you’re a premium subscriber.

What do you think? Do you or would you ever use this function? Why or why not?

I still get a lot of ideas for posts. Sometimes, they’re thoughts that come out of the blue, and sometimes they’re good enough that I can just hang onto them until I’m ready to write them (I did that with yesterday’s post on hard work for about a week and a half). Some are inspired by others’ posts, others by my every day life or pictures I’ve taken of the kids.

Once I get a good idea, especially if it’s inspired by another post, I write up a little draft of it. Sometimes it’ll be nothing more than a phrase or a link.

And usually, that’s about where they stay, sometimes even after I write the post on that topic. So right now, I have over 100 unfinished blog post drafts.

On the one hand, hooray! I have so much stuff to write about! On the other hand, boo! I don’t want to go through 100 posts looking for something I feel like writing about today (especially not if I have to read something first!).

So today I realized, that’s where I get stuck blogging—taking it from idea/draft to post. (And it’s not like my every post is a masterpiece that I spend days crafting.)

Confession: I wrote this post a couple days ago and thought I posted it. I was all sad because I didn’t get any comments. Then I was checking something on the site and discovered . . . I never hit Publish. What a great illustration of this, LOL!

So today I’m turning it over to you for a little help. How can I take more drafts to posts? Where do you get stuck blogging? What blogging questions do you have?

Photo by Shovelling Son

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!

A little blogging help here, Mom?

1. “Guest blogging also helps to build relationships with other bloggers, introduce you to new readers and increase your subscribers.”: Get the most out of guest blogging

2. “Blog branding, in practical terms, is providing a unique experience for your blog visitors as well as promoting your blog’s name, look, feel and mission throughout the Internet.”: 7 Ways to Brand Your Blog

3. “‘Stickiness’ on a blog (or website) is getting visitors to stay longer, read more, subscribe and leave comments.”: Increase Your Blog’s Stickiness (with a free guide to increasing your blog’s stickiness, “Get Your Visitors to Stick!“)

4. “Here’s some of the collective wisdom of MamaBlogga readers on making photo posts GREAT!”: How to Make a Photo Post Great from the comments on Making a photo post

5. “How much do you really know about your visitors? . . . [This information is] easy to find, use and understand with a free web analytics package (software installed on your site that tracks what visitors do on your site)—no coding, just cut and paste.”: Quick Guide to Google Analytics for Bloggers also available as a free PDF

6. “FeedBurner is an excellent blogging add-on service that makes your feeds more accessible to readers and easier to subscribe to. Plus, you can move your feed easily when you move to a different blog address without losing any subscribers”: 5 Steps to Getting Started with FeedBurner (and for the more advanced, Seven Ways to Master FeedBurner)

7. “No matter what you define as blog success, it’s important to set out at least one specific goal for your blog so that you have something to work for and can see how far you’ve come.”: Setting goals for your blog

What’s your best blogging tip, in this post, in another MB post or (best of all) one all your own?

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?

Today is RSS Awareness Day (and no, I didn’t make that up: see RSSDay.org). Tired of visiting all your favorite blogs only to discover that they don’t have any updates? Maybe it’s time to look at converting to RSS.

RSS, which is usually said to stand for “Really Simple Syndication,” is an easy way to have updates from your favorite blogs sent to you—either to your email or to an RSS reader.

If this sounds appealing to you, check out my post on What’s RSS? to learn more. Already using RSS in a reader and your blog? The post also has tips for getting more out of your blog’s RSS feed!

If RSS still sounds rather mysterious, you might want to review the video in the What’s RSS post for an easy-to-understand explanation of how it all works!

My readers’ most popular feed readers are Google Reader, which is what I use (you can also use the iGoogle personalized homepage under this one) and Bloglines. To receive updates from MamaBlogga in your RSS reader or email inbox, click on the image or text links to the right!

Back to your regularly scheduled blogging, already in progress.

Table of contents for Mom Blogging Advice

• A little advice to mom bloggers
• Your own domain
• What’s RSS?
• Blog headers & favicons
• Connect
• Follow through on comments
• Making a photo post
• Making a photo post GREAT

Three weeks ago, I gave a couple tips on making photo posts—and then I turned the mic over to you for your input on making photo posts GREAT. Here’s some of the collective wisdom of MamaBlogga readers!:

from the original post, seconded by readers in the comments:

Resize your pictures before uploading them
Figure out how wide your post column is and in a photo editor, resize the image to fit. It looks a lot better than making your browser resize them. And if you make your pictures too wide (post them exactly as they come off your camera, for example), they can break your blog or your readers’ feed readers. We’re probably not going to scroll side-to-side to see pictures of your kids. Sorry.

(Exceptions: if you upload photos to Flickr or Photobucket and they make some good looking, smaller versions, or if you use Blogger. They resize them to look good pretty consistently.)

Reader MamaBugs concurred:

Resizing is vastly important! So is arranging the photos neatly so they don’t seem like they just thrown in the post.

Use pictures in “regular” posts
This is a principle I know (but usually don’t apply) from my professional blogging (i.e. not MamaBlogga), and yet I hadn’t really thought about applying it in the “momblogosphere.” Several readers pointed out the advantages to this method:
Christy:

My favorite posts are those with photos. I have over 150 blogs in my reader and if there are no photos, I often will just skim the text to see if it catches my eye.

Deb, Mom of 3 girls:

I like seeing posts with pictures – I definitely prefer those to ones with just one long paragraph of text. For my own posts, I usually try to either add in funny captions or stick to one topic or event in each post to help with the onslaught of photos…

And warillever gives some great examples:

. . . I can recommend one mommy blog that uses pictures extremely well — Notes from the Trenches. Chris makes liberal use of pictures both as an accent to her textual posts and as the meat of other posts. Even her photo posts, however, include humorous captions that capture the essence of the action.

Look at her Easter (I Hope You Dance) or American Idol (Geeks Gone Wild) for evidence.

Incorporate pictures into your posts
This dovetails with both of the above points and comments. Don’t just throw some pictures into your posts and hope they’ll fit; resize them so that they’ll fit where you want them and arrange them nicely.

Typical conventions for using images in posts are “smaller” pictures (ones that don’t take up most of your horizontal post space) aligned to the right or left with relevant text wrapping around them and larger images breaking up the text, usually centered, and sometimes with captions underneath them.

And, of course, key in incorporating your images with your posts is making them relevant to one another. Some topics (like our kids ) would seem incomplete without some sort of photo reference. This doesn’t mean you have to write a post describing exactly what’s going on in the photo; you can use your imagination (and humorous captions) to make even a tenuous connection.

Over the last few weeks, I’ve been making an effort to do better with this; see my post from last week Crazy talk for an example of all these conventions.

If I may say so, I’m particularly proud of that post because it gave me an opportunity to incorporate cute pictures and talk about some of the cute things Hayden’s been doing lately. I’m reluctant to post about both of these topics sometimes because I don’t know if most of my readers are really interested in Hayden’s little (mis)adventures. However, I thought (and I hope you agreed!) that the format of the post, and the pictures, helped to make the post more enjoyable all ’round.

Any more photo post advice?

Note that I still have two coupons for free professional photo montages—see the giveaway post for details, and leave a comment there to enter.

More tips from Works-for-me Wednesday

Table of contents for Mom Blogging Advice

• A little advice to mom bloggers
• Your own domain
• What’s RSS?
• Blog headers & favicons
• Connect
• Follow through on comments
• Making a photo post
• Making a photo post GREAT

Sigh. Every so often, I gather up a bunch of pictures of Hayden and post them. Let’s face it: this can be like being caught in an elevator with an overeager parent, grandparent, aunt, uncle, or other relative, armed with the seven hundred most recent pictures of their beloved child. Mom bloggers do this probably more than most other bloggers.

Maybe the best photo posts are “real” posts with photos that go with them. I always feel like no one will be that interested in my pictures, unless they’re really funny.

So today I’m going to your collaboration in creating a “blogging tutorial.” As a reader, what do you think makes a photo post good? What makes it less like the caught-in-the-elevator scenario I imagined above? As a blogger, what makes them easier for you to do?

Here are some of my thoughts, please add yours!

Put it in context
We’ve all heard it: a picture is worth a thousand words. In high school, I was reading a book about the Vietnam War and was struck by the commentary on a very famous Pulitzer Prize-winning photo. The text read something to the effect that photographs can’t stand alone. You need words to tell you what happened before and after, to put the photo into context. Because out of context, pictures (like words) don’t mean anything.

Your context doesn’t have to detail how everything happened to get to that point—though if the picture isn’t fairly obvious, some explanation of what’s going on (and what we’re supposed to see) could help. Otherwise, your context can be as short as a silly comment about the photo (but try to let us see why you’ve chosen that photo in particular).

Make it funny, cute, or both
We’re moms. We can appreciate cute pictures of cute kids. We can appreciate funny pictures of funny kids. Funny comments can help, too.

Make it unexpected
The pictures I can’t wait to post are the ones of Hayden doing surprising things: wearing his shirt around his waist, wearing Mr. Potato Head’s glasses, etc.

Make it not too long
I’m very guilty of this one: I wait so long to post pictures (because I figure no one’s interested) that I stuff 8 or 10 or more pictures into a photo post. As if forcing more pictures on you would make you happier to look at them all. I still envision most of my readers as the victims in my elevator, backed into a corner, nodding politely and mentally vowing to take the stairs for the rest of forever.

Resize your pictures before uploading them
Figure out how wide your post column is and in a photo editor, resize the image to fit. It looks a lot better than making your browser resize them. And if you make your pictures too wide (post them exactly as they come off your camera, for example), they can break your blog or your readers’ feed readers. We’re probably not going to scroll side-to-side to see pictures of your kids. Sorry.

(Exceptions: if you upload photos to Flickr or Photobucket and they make some good looking, smaller versions, or if you use Blogger. They resize them to look good pretty consistently.)

Maybe the best photo posts are still “real” posts with photos that go with them. What do you think? What makes you enjoy photo posts more? What tips do you have for making them easier to do?