# General Business Category > Technology Forum >  Technical tips on blogging

## Dave A

I've just started a blog on www.blogger.com (it's in my signature just in case anyone is interested in actually reading it) and have started taking a closer look at blogging in general.

Although setting up a blog seems dead easy (at least it was at blogger) I'm now looking at some of the technical options available.

So far I've added the following:
an RSS feed widget (from part of The Forum SA of course)Google analytics for tracking as I couldn't find any default widget that does thata label widget
I was thinking of adding the link back feature, but apparently the blogger one doesn't work that well. 

Are there any other must-have widgets I should be looking at?

----------


## duncan drennan

Dave, if you are setting up a new blog you should seriously consider Wordpress, as the features and add ons are a bit more comprehensive than blogger. As with all things, there are advantages and disadvantages.

If you stick with blogger you should set up a custom domain rather than use the blog spot domain.

There is also an SEO hack to swap the page title and blog title on post pages, but there are currently some issues with this (although there is a hack to work around these - see the discussion of the issues). This has now been resolved.

You can add meta data to each page which will hopefully help the SEO a small amount.

A nice thing to do is to setup Feedburner for your RSS feed which will allow you to track the number of people reading your blog via a feed. There is also a way to use your own domain for this (I still need to swap mine over). You should make some changes to the auto-discovery feed options so that only that feed is available to users. It also allows adding some funky extras, making sure your feed is readable by most readers, and provides an email subscription form.

There are also some extra beta features which are available through draft.blogger.com.

----------


## duncan drennan

I had a look at your comments. I would recommend opening up the options for leaving comments. Currently you only have the google account option, which unfortunately leaves a link to the users blogger profile. If they don't have a google account this means a few steps before commenting (which could mean no comments). If you allow anonymous comments then people can at least put in a link to their site, even though the default is NOFOLLOW. Personally I haven't had spam issues.

I don't like bloggers commenting system - mainly that it either opens in a whole new page or another window. Of the two options I prefer to have the comments in a pop up window, which at least feels a little like the original site rather than going to a different site to comment. It also keeps your site open and available to continue rather than the commenting page.

----------


## Dave A

I've already registered the "My Business Machine" domain. I was gently thinking of going Wordpress on the domain there, but wanted to lay down some ideas and get some experience at blogger too in the meantime.

I've made the other setting changes you've suggested - thanks, Duncan.

----------


## duncan drennan

You can add your blog to Technorati and Amatomu. Technorati picks up the blogger labels as tags.

----------


## Dave A

I've just got to giggle at this message that accompanies the photo upload tab when updating your profile on Technorati.



> Tip: Please do us a favor and upload a photo that does not show your very special but also very private parts. When you do that, we have to take time away from making our website faster and better to go find your profile and hide it, and that's bad for you and us. Thanks for helping!


Reckon they've had this problem from time to time?

----------


## Seagyn Davis

Its great to get some more people into the local blogosphere, a few trends and a few ideas:

Recent Comments - promotes commenting on your site
Popular Posts - nice way to make the posts even more popular
A big subscribe to RSS button - get the subscriber base
Social Media quick links - enables you to add an article to your favourite social network, like (local) amatomu, muti, laaik.it (international), digg, delicious etc

Then a quick tip and a current SEO must do is if you write related articles, put a link to the related article - eg (if you read my post about the person you would know...) and make my post a link to it.

Last thing to do is network - the best way to boost search engine ratings is links.

hope this helps, if you need any help in getting a WordPress site going just send me a message - I have about 8 running/being developed now. Also know the big dogs  :Smile:

----------


## Seagyn Davis

I see you do the social bookmarking on this website. great way to do it!

----------


## Dave A

I added muti yesterday. Duncan was dropping hints elsewhere  :Big Grin: 

Which social bookmarking sites would you add to the ones we've already got here, Seagyn?

----------


## Seagyn Davis

laaik.it and facebook - laaik.it is a local company and facebook - well do i need to say anything more?

----------


## Seagyn Davis

Oh and how can I forget, amatomu is brilliant but becoming something like Alexa rank which has so many people it kills the chances of you site being viewed by users rather than networks. Also look at afrigator.co.za, nice African aggregator similar to Amatomu.

There is another one, but it has slipped my mind.

----------


## Seagyn Davis

I see you fast onto the ball. The next step would be to politely ask people to add it. So in a place closer to where readers read, have a little message - 'Like this article? Share it with your favourite social network.'

----------

Dave A (08-May-08)

----------


## Dave A

Thanks for all the ideas, Seagyn.

----------


## Seagyn Davis

More than a pleasure. Funnily I came upon this website when I was seeing how low my forum dropped after an upgrade. Talk about luck. Really enjoy some of the discussions.

So when are you looking at putting up a WordPress site? The new WordPress is amazing, the features are so far ahead of any OS CMS I have ever seen and played with.

----------


## Dave A

I'm going to load Wordpress on my-business-machine.com when I get a chance to get round to it. I'm also keeping an eye on Blogger's new beta features before I commit as to where the blog will end up, though.

I've also been testing Joomla as a CMS elsewhere, so the Joomla-Wordpress comparison should also be interesting.

----------


## duncan drennan

> I'm going to load Wordpress on my-business-machine.com when I get a chance to get round to it. I'm also keeping an eye on Blogger's new beta features before I commit as to where the blog will end up, though.


I've been thinking about moving my blog to Wordpress and hosting it myself for a while now. Wordpress offers quite a bit more adaptability with all the various add-ons, and is a high quality blogging platform. Blogger is probably a little bit more difficult (although, maybe not?) to customise and add things to.

The big advantage of Blogger (and this is probably why I will stick with it for the foreseeable future) is that I don't have to maintain (or worry about) the servers. If I have a readership of 10000 people a day, it is not going to cause me any sleepless nights (although if that was the case I would probably be so excited that I wouldn't be sleeping  :Smile:  ). I did not have to worry about setting up spam filters and don't have to worry about upgrading software (and all the issues that come with that).

For me, the thought of worrying about servers, upgrades, spammers, and so on overwhelms the desire to move from Blogger. At this stage I don't see any compelling reason to move, so I'm saving myself the grey hairs, and focussing on the writing rather.

----------


## IanF

My blog for the printshop is a wordpress blog. I have just updated my signature and there should be a link. I just need to make the time to write more as it does help with business. It is hosted on my website and I haven't hit the limits of Hetzner yet. 
 :Wink:

----------


## Seagyn Davis

Having your own domain is critical for a brand.

I would take WordPress over Joomla! any day, and that from a person who has designed themes for both.

WordPress has a huge community behind it and is probably the most used blogging software out there.

Upgrading WordPress is not a huge thing, just upload and over write the files and then your done. Then most web hosts should worry about the server not you unless your website has affected the server.

----------


## Dave A

> Then most web hosts should worry about the server not you unless your website has affected the server.


That can be a concern at times. In the power of international on the internet I mention Peas on toast which went from a couple of hundred uniques a day to over 25000 in 24 hours. I suspect that many shared hosting packages would throw up the white flag and crumble.

----------


## Seagyn Davis

WordPress has a few plugins that make website run on WordPress on any server very scalable. Charl Norman wrote an article about it. Will find it and put it up here.

----------


## duncan drennan

Yay! Blogger has finally added a blog.pageName tag so that you can have better SEO by placing your posts name before your blog name in your page titles (without any crazy hacks).

You can do something like this,



```
  <b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;item&quot;'>
    <title><data:blog.pageName/> - YOUR BLOG NAME</title>
  <b:else/>
    <b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == &quot;archive&quot;'>
      <title>Archives <data:blog.pageName/> - YOUR BLOGS NAME</title>
      <meta CONTENT='Archives of YOUR BLOGS NAME.' name='Description'/>
    <b:else/>
      <title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
      <meta CONTENT='YOUR DESCRIPTION META CONTENT' name='Description'/>
    </b:if>
  </b:if>
```

Replace the <title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title> code with this code above, and change the names to your blog's names. You can add (and take away) whatever you like.

With blogger and 'item' is a single post, 'archive' are archive pages. In the example above it always falls through to the default Blog Name page title.

The example above places post pages title first, followed by the blog's name. It also places different meta content description tags on the different types of pages.

@Chatmaster: is it better to have no description meta content, or lots of duplicate description meta content across pages?

----------

Dave A (13-May-08)

----------


## Dave A

It seems a little ironic that one needs to do SEO mods on Blogger  :Stick Out Tongue: 


> is it better to have no description meta content, or lots of duplicate description meta content across pages?


Google webmaster tools warns you of duplicate description META content, so I would think it better not to have too many repeats. I'll be interested in Chatmaster's take on this too.

----------


## duncan drennan

> Google webmaster tools warns you of duplicate description META content, so I would think it better not to have too many repeats. I'll be interested in Chatmaster's take on this too.


That is exactly the reason that I changed it to only generate the description meta content on the archive and index pages! I decided Google's webmaster info messages should be taken to heart.

----------


## Dave A

Duncan - have you got a link to the list of Blogger data variables? There must be one for content. A little trim job and that would make a great description META generator.

I'm working on coding something like that as a stand-alone mod for vB at the moment.

----------


## duncan drennan

> Duncan - have you got a link to the list of Blogger data variables? There must be one for content. A little trim job and that would make a great description META generator.


Unfortunately not quite as simple as that. The Layout Tags are only valid for certain parts of the page. For example, the content is only available in the blog post part of the layout. In the case of the header the only tags available are the Global and Page Header data tags.

I don't see it as too big an issue (my SERPS are fair I think), just wondering what is best - leave it out for post pages, or just insert the generic one.

----------

