Category: MetaBlogging

Free advice on blogging and mom blogging from the original affordable personal blog consulting services to help non-professional bloggers grow their blogs.

Categories
MetaBlogging

What’s RSS?

Table of contents for Mom Blogging Advice

RSS is an important acronym in the blogosphere. It’s usually interpreted as Really Simple Syndication, so we’ll start with the really simple and work our way up. I think we have something for even the most seasoned blogger here.

Basic
First, an excellent explanation of the easiest way to keep up with dozens (hundreds!) of blogs from Common Craft:

Also under “basics,” your blog generates an RSS feed automatically (unless you’ve disabled this feature).

Novice
FeedBurner “burns” your blog feed for you, making it easy for your readers to subscribe in any feed reader. If you click on the green “Subscribe” button in the sidebar, you’ll be taken to a page to choose your feed reader.

FeedBurner can also add a lot of cool features to your feed. You can add information at the end of messages in a feed reader like copyrights, number of comments, social bookmarking stuff—there are more than 100 “FeedFlares.” FeedBurner can also track visitors to your site and show you how many subscribers you have.

Intermediate
Many people use only partial feeds for their sites, sending only excerpts or summaries to their readers. There are a few reasons for this; among them is the legitimate concern about unscrupulous people republishing your blog with zero effort—and making money off your hard wraught writing.

However, the benefits of full feeds outweigh the risks. [UPDATE: the full story on full feeds] Also note that many people publish excerpt feeds believing that more people will visit their site to read their full posts—but FeedBurner CEO Rick Klau says they’ve seen no evidence to support that. See Partial Feeds Don’t Draw Visitors at Marketing Pilgrim for more on the subject.

In Blogger, you can switch from excerpts to full feeds by going to Settings > Site Feed. From the pull down menu, select “Full.” (If you’re in Advanced Mode, the second and third options are at your discretion.)

bloggerfullfeedsss.jpg

In WordPress, select Options > Reading.

wpfullfeedsss1.png

Under “Syndication Feeds,” for the option “For each article, show,” select “Full text.”

wpfullfeedsss2.png

See Semantically driven for details on how to switch to full feeds in TypePad.

Advanced
Make sure your readers find your FeedBurner feed (instead of the default, less user-friendly feed Blogger, WordPress or Typepad creates). You may have to code it into your site. For example, in Blogger, go to Template > Edit HTML. In your code, find the line:

<b:include data=’blog’ name=’all-head-content’/>

Delete it and replace it with the following (after you’ve customized it):

<meta content=’text/html; charset=UTF-8′ http-equiv=’Content-Type’/>
<meta content=’true’ name=’MSSmartTagsPreventParsing’/>
<meta content=’blogger’ name=’generator’/>
<link href=’http://feeds.feedburner.com/YOUR FEEDBURNER FEED NAME HERE’ rel=’alternate’ title=’YOUR BLOG NAME HERE RSS Feed’ type=’application/rss+xml’/>

Blogger now offers integration with FeedBurner. Here are the instructions on integrating your FeedBurner feed with your Blogger blog. TypePad also features this capability.

WordPress has a handy FeedBurner feed replacement plugin to do that heavy coding for you.

Total pro
If you’re comfortable in Apache, consider Daniel’s strategy for making sure that your subscribers are using the correct feed even if you leave FeedBurner (from Daily Blog Tips). (To tell the truth, I can only vaguely understand this one.)

Also, look at another post from Marketing Pilgrim (and no, this one’s not by me, it’s by Jeremy Luebke) on why you should not use click tracking on FeedBurner (read on the comments to see how to fix that).

Anybody out there quite proficient in MT/Typepad? I started on Blogger and had to learn WordPress for work before I made the switch to WordPress here on MamaBlogga. If anyone can give some pointers on the same issues on TypePad, it would be appreciated!

UPDATE: A big thank you to Jen once again at Semantically driven for explaining how to set your feed to full posts on Typepad. She had got screenshots and everything. Man, I should’ve thought of that. I’ll have to fix this. Screenshots added. Thank you, Jen!!

Previous in series Next in series
Categories
MetaBlogging

Your own domain

Table of contents for Mom Blogging Advice

Do mom bloggers need their own domains? I might not be the most impartial person to ask, since I just made the switch from a blogspot-hosted blog to a self-hosted WordPress blog on my own domain.

However, after compiling the list of the most popular parent bloggers, I have to say that some of my opinions on the subject were challenged. As an Internet marketer, I would have told you all the live long day to get your own domain—but then nearly half of the most popular parent bloggers don’t have their own domain.

Guess what? ME.blogspot.com (or ME.typepad.com) is working just fine for them. Better than fine—great!

So I’m beginning to think that in the parent substratum of the blogopshere, it’s a lot less important to have your own domain than it would be in, say, the business world.

That being said, it’s not a bad idea—but if your blog is popular enough to make it onto the Popular Parent Bloggers list, it may not be the best idea to change.

Why not? Well, you may have a lot of Technorati clout (ie links) at your old domain (Technorati is a blog search engine, if you didn’t know. Oh, of course you knew, I meant him over there.). Michelle has taught us that Technorati links expire after six months, so you might be able to begin to outpace your old blog URL (and no, you can’t move it on Technorati) after six months, but do you want to e-mail every person that has you on their personal blogroll to get them to fix it? I wouldn’t and I’m only on a couple (thank you, ladies!)

Also important, you may have a lot of search engine clout (ie links) at your old domain as well. On the plus side, it’s possible to channel that clout to a new domain if you use something like Blogger’s Custom Domain kind of thing. You have to make sure that your URL structure doesn’t change (like mine did… gonna have to learn Apache to fix that. You can avoid this fate by consulting my guide, but I went and made things complicated on myself by changing my URL structure and now I definitely don’t want to go back).

One possible solution for someone with a lot of clout at their .blogspot or .typepad domain: if the appropriate URL is available, buy it (I’ve had good experiences with www.GoDaddy.com ) and redirect it to your .blogspot or .typepad blog instead of the other way around. (if given an option, use a 301 redirect). You can also select the option of “masking” the domain so that even though someone is redirected to ME.blogspot.com, their address bar still reads “www.ME.com.” (With GoDaddy, both of these functions are accessible under Domain Forwarding.)

Of course, Technorati doesn’t understand redirects at all, so it may see www.ME.com as a second blog with the same content as your first one (which it actually does to me… it’s really annoying). But you know what? Technorati isn’t the be-all and end-all of your blog.

Disclosure: the GoDaddy link is an affiliate link.

Previous in series Next in series
Categories
MetaBlogging

A little advice to mom bloggers

Table of contents for Mom Blogging Advice

As I did my research for the Popular Parent Bloggers list, I was surprised at a few of the trends I found. As an Internet marketer, I could see a few things that definitely needed attention repeated over and over again. So, here’s some general, technical advice to all mom bloggers (and please don’t feel targeted if you’re on the PPB list; I think you’re already awesome).

  1. Although every blogger and his/her dog will tell you that if you’re serious, you should be on your own domain, I don’t think that it really hurts your blog’s popularity if you’re a momblogger. Sacrilege, I know. However, nearly 50% of the original Popular Parent Bloggers list are hosted on BlogSpot (12) or Typepad (2), including 3 of the top 10. However, you may still want to have your own domain, if it’s available. That topic deserves its own post, maybe next week.
  2. If you have your blog on your own domain, and you have control over your hosting, implement a 301 redirect to create a canonical URL inmediatamente (immediately).UPDATE (27 June 2007): If you run your blog on WordPress, UrbanGiraffe has a handy plugin that will do all this for you, Redirection. (This particular trick is found under Manage>Redirection>Options.)

    If you don’t have WordPress, don’t worry, I’ll tell you how. Probably the most general way I can tell you to do this is to get into whatever kind of file manager your hosting service offers and find a file named .htaccess . Edit it, adding this:

    RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

    (For some reason, mine only worked if I put it after the WordPress stuff already in my .htaccess file, without the first two lines above.) Of course, if your site isn’t .com, change it to the correct extension.

    What does that do? That makes it so when someone types in or links to “yourdomain.com,” it’s automatically redirected to “www.yourdomain.com.”

    Don’t want the www? Use this code to redirect www.yourdomain.com to yourdomain.com:

    RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^yourdomain.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://yourdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]

    Why does that really make any difference? Your traffic, links and search engine ranking are divided between the www and non-www versions of the site until you implement a 301 (permanent) redirect like this.

  3. And, as always, I like to refer you to Michelle at Scribbit, a blog about motherhood in Alaska, for her latest tip: The Biggest Technorati Tip in the World.

Mom bloggers, if you have any other technical blogging questions, feel free to e-mail me blog (at) mamablogga.com

Next in series
Categories
MetaBlogging Contests

Popular Parent Bloggers (Original List)

For the updated version of this list, see Popular Parent and Mom Bloggers.

Inspired by Todd And’s Power 150, a listing of the top English language marketing blogs, I compiled my own set of ranking factors to create a list of Popular Parent Bloggers. Did you make the list? Here they are, ranked in order of popularity:

  1. 5 Minutes for Mom
  2. Fussy
  3. *Rocks in My Dryer
  4. *Parent Hacks
  5. Lil Duck Duck
  6. Troll Baby
  7. *Embracing Momminess
  8. HerBadMother
  9. *Scribbit
  10. Write from Karen
  11. Sprittibee
  12. Trying to Catch up
  13. *An Island Life
  14. Sweetney
  15. amalah . com
  1. Three Kid Circus
  2. Sparks and Butterflies
  3. Here comes a storm…
  4. Principled Discovery
  5. The Bean Blog
  6. Plain Jane Mom
  7. Everyday Mommy
  8. BackpackerMom
  9. Changed by His Love
  10. Sunshine Scribe
  11. Metro Mama
  12. Mommy off the Record
  13. A Doggy’s Life
  14. Flagrant Disregard
  15. White Trash Mom

* indicates blogs that I have read quite a bit and/or subscribe to.

Download the OPML file to subscribe to all these blogs in a feed reader like Bloglines or Google Reader. (While you’re at it, subscribe to MamaBlogga for a chance to win!)

Ranking factors
The Popular Parent Bloggers ranking is based on:

  • Technorati ranking
  • Number of blogs linking to your blog
  • Number of MyBlogLog community members
  • Number of Bloglines subscribers
  • Google PageRank (just for the heck of it)
  • The number of comments received in a week (weighted most heavily; I picked the last week in March 2007 to make it all equal).

Made the list?
Congratulations!

Feel free to take one of the badges below and add it to a post or sidebar. Please link back to MamaBlogga if you take a badge, and please save the picture to your blog.

PopParentsbadge.png PopParentsbadgesmall.png
PopParentbadgeBW.png PopParentsbadgesmallBW.png

Want to be included on the list?
Think your blog should be here? E-mail me at jordan (at) mamablogga.com (be sure to include your blog’s URI!).

Categories
MetaBlogging

Blogging resources

Over at Marketing Pilgrim, I did a series on corporate blogging and concluded with a list of resources for corporate bloggers. So, since I’ve done a series here on blogging this week, I’ll conclude with resources for the rest of us.

Complete Feeds
These are blogs where every post or almost every post relates directly to skills and techniques you’ll want to implement.

Outstanding Posts

Actually, I owe this week’s series on blogging to Michelle. I e-mailed her to get MamaBlogga included in her Google Custom Search Engine for Momblogs and we conversed about blogging. She was glad to talk to a mom blogger who’s a real blogger, too—and I definitely return that compliment.

So this concludes this week’s blogging series: You can stay with Blogger, The Ultimate Guide to Migrating from Blogger to WordPress, Why I miss Blogger and Why I love WordPress.

Categories
MetaBlogging

Why I love WordPress

Yes, I may miss Blogger, but I’m glad I made the switch to WordPress. And I’ll tell you why.

  1. Customizable. You can make WordPress do just about anything, it seems, by simply finding and uploading the right plugin. Like today, I wanted a plugin to selectively remove the “nofollow” on commenters’ links (coming soon). I Googled “selectively remove nofollow links wordpress” and found a big list of plugins to do just that in a few different ways.
  2. I feel professional, probably partially because this is the platform I blog with for work.
  3. It’s pretty easy to use, though there is a bit of a learning curve.
  4. I feel cool when I get to fiddle with things in the back end. Half the time I’m working on my site, I’ve got WordPress and my file manager or FTP open, uploading plugins and tweaking files.
  5. It’s a complete content management system. No comments on that one… Sorry.
  6. All sorts of cool built-in features like password protecting posts and trackbacks (couldn’t do that with Blogger!) and lots of stuff.

Of course, WordPress isn’t for everyone. If you want to, you can stay with Blogger. I give you permission.