A Signature For Your Blog Post?

Have you ever thought about to add a signature to you blog post? Adding a signature to each post of you blog will no doubt bring your personal touch to your readers. It is an identity of representing you online. Moreover it brings an uniqueness to your blog as well. I was inspired by Lorelle VanFossen’s signature on her blog.

For WordPress.com Blog

I think it is fun to have your own signature for your blog just like you sign your signature in each email. It also serves a purpose: that is something uniquely reflects your personality. I like to do things differently because we are all unique in many ways. So if you are like me, then go ahead to create your unique signature using your desired program. Make sure you save your signature and copy and paste it at the bottom of each post. I use My Live Signature program to create mine here. What do you think?

For WordPress Blog (WordPress.org Blog)

If you have a WordPress blog, you can just download LiveSig v0.4 plugin here to your PC (personal computer). LiveSig: WordPress Plug provides step-by-step instructions of how to install it. Basically you just need to unzip LiveSigv0.4 file that you’ve just downloaded, then upload it to the folder public_html/wordpress-content/plugins/ using any FTP. Then login to your WordPress Dashboard, and click on Plugins/LiveSig v0.4 to activate it. Finally click on Settings/LiveSig/LiveSig Options. Make sure you select an appropriate user, enter the corresponding MyLiveSignature code and hit Save button to save it. It is Free to obtain MyLiveSignature code, but you need to register in that site to get it. For a small amount of money, you can get animated signature code there too. Have fun bloggging!

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Get a Trackback Service for Your Blog

If you don’t know what a trackback service is, you may find out from this post. A trackback service is a mechanism that allows two blogs to communicate each other. Suppose you find an useful article and it is related to what you like to say, so you decide to write about it and link to this article in your post. If both blogs support a trackback service, then you may see your post’s permalink as well as excerpts showing up on the other blogger’s comment section. See the screenshot below:

This is fun since I am always curious of who links back to my blog. It is one way that I can track what post(s) of mine the other bloggers are interested in. Getting a trackback service can help you boost your blog/website traffic too. So it is important that your blog supports a trackback service.

Some blog softwares supporting automatic pinkback service are WordPress, Movable Type, Typo and Community Server. However, Google Blogger still doesn’t support a trackback service yet. Instead it provides a backlink service from Google Blog Search. You may find out how to get a third party trackback service for your Blogger from this article: Get a Trackback Service for Your New Blogger. Learn How?. As for WordPress.com/WordPress.org blog, go to WordPress Dashboard, click on Settings/Discussions/; make sure you click to tick Allow link notifications from other blogs (pingbacks and trackbacks.) to enable it. See the screenshot below:

Click to enlarge the picture

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How to Add a Favicon to Your WordPress Blog?

Adding a favicon to your blog/website is one way to express yourself. It tells people a little bit about your blog/website too. Professional blogs/websites will never leave it out. If you don’t know what a favicon is, it is a 16×16 pixels or 32×32 pixels image (icon) that is displaced in your browser’s address bar. Check the screenshot below:

I just added a favicon to my WordPress blog. Now it is your turn to add yours. If you don’t know how, the following steps could be useful:

1. First you need to have your image ready in your PC (personal computer).
2. Second visit FavIcon from Pics and follow its instructions there to create a favicon.ico image file.
3. Third download favicon.ico image file to your PC and unzip the file.
4. Next upload the unzipped favicon.ico image to public_html/wp-content/themes/your-theme-name/. Make sure you change your-theme-name to be your real theme name.
5. Next login to your WordPress Admin Dashboard; click on Design/Theme Editor/Header (header.php).
6. Then insert <link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”<?php bloginfo(‘template_directory’); ?>/favicon.ico” /> in your header.php file; more specifically between <head></head>.
7. Finally save your header.php file.

If you use Internet Explorer as your browser, then holding Ctrl and hit R at the same time to reload your blog/website. If you use Mozilla Firefox as your browser, then holding Ctrl and hit F5 at the same time to refresh your blog/website. You should be able to see a favicon which is next to your URL now. However, some people’s favicon may not be shown immediately.

Update: This is for full version WordPress blog only. If you have a WordPress.com blog, this will not apply to you since you don’t have access to all the files.

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What WordPress Plugins do Most Bloggers Like to Use?

I searched around the Internet and found some very useful Plugins most WordPress bloggers like to use. These Plugins are for full version WordPress (WordPress.org) blogs. That means if you have WordPress.com blog, then you can’t use them. As you know Plugins extend WordPress to do almost everything for your blog/website. Check out the following articles to see what Plugins other bloggers have suggested:

• 10 WordPress Plugins Every Blog Should Be Using – This article’s author, Kyle Eslick, has listed 10 WordPress Plugins that every blogger should be using. Reviews were provided for each plugin.

• The Top Ten WordPress Plugins – The author has picked the top ten WordPress Plugins out of hundreds. Those WordPress Plugins will make your blogging life easier.

• WordPress Plugins Every Blogger Should Be Using – A collection of the most popular WordPress Plugins such as find related posts, ultimate tag warrior, the best adsense Plugins, and more…

• 25 WordPress Plugins Every Blog Should Have – Wow! A list of 25 WordPress Plugins for your blog or website? What a collection! Read through to see which Plugins you might be interested.

• 15 WordPress Plugins That a Professional Blog Should Install – A well prepared list of 15 WordPress Plugins that every professional blog/site should install. Pickup some useful ones there, will you?

• 10 Must-Have WordPress Plugins – One of the biggest advantages to use WordPress software is that it provides bloggers countless of Plugins that you can use to extend your blog software.

• Top 10 WordPress Plugins – The wonderful thing about WordPress Plugins is that it allows you to add so much functionalities to your blog/website. Leap to the site to see what WordPress Plugins the author has rounded up for you.

• ^new TOP 30 WordPress Plugins in Blogosphere – The author of this article made an analytical review of the top 30 most used WordPress Plugins in Blogosphere. It was based on Lists of favorite WordPress plugins, made by Lorelle a year ago. Lorelle found 48 lists out of 280 plugins that were recommended by other bloggers to their readers.

After I’ve read the above articles, I am amazed WordPress Plugins can do so much for our blog/website. Maybe you have already had installed some of them. So what are your favorite Plugins you are using now? or what Plugins do you want to recommend to your readers?

How to Get Your WordPress.com Blog Verified By Google?

A couple weeks ago, I wrote a post, How to Add Google Sitemap to WordPress.com Blog?, which showed you how you can submit your blog’s feed to Google Webmaster Tools account. Now you might wonder how you can get your WordPress.com blog verified by Google too. It seems it is impossible to do that because we don’t have controls of our files; but hope is always there. The article, Get your WordPress.com Blog Google Verified, will guide you the way of how to do that. Still I want to show you the way I got my WordPress.com blog verified here:

• Go to Google Webmaster Tools account. If you don’t have one, get a Free one here.

• Once you got one; sign in with it.

• If this is the first time you sign in, then type your blog’s/website’s URL (the address for your blog/website) in the text field and click on Add Site.

• Under Verified? click on Verify button

• A new window is shown; saying Verification Status: NOT VERIFIED.

• In the drop-down list; choose Upload a HTML File.

• More information will be shown here. Here you have two choices to submit your blog/website:

1. I’ve created a file named google2ae4cd3d07afcb8a.html.

(google2ae4cd3d07afcb8a.html is given by Google. You’ll get your own)

2. I’ve uploaded the file to http://yoursitename.wordpress.com/ and can view http://yoursitename.wordpress.com/google2ae4cd3d07afcb8a.html in my browser.

(Make sure you replace yoursitename with your own domain name.)

• Since you know we don’t have controls of our files; so we’ll go for the choice 1.

• Go to your WordPress.com Dashboard, click on Write/Page to create a new page named http://yoursitename.wordpress.com/google2ae4cd3d07afcb8a.html. This page can be empty. Make sure you change yoursitename to be your own domain name. (Keep it private once Google has verified your blog/website)

• Go back to your Google Webmaster Tools account and click on Verify button.

Now wait for Google to update your status. Google Webmaster Tools will inform you once your blog/website are being verified. After you’ve succeeded, you will enjoy reports about your pages’ visibility on Google.

SEO Tips For Your Blogs

The topic of SEO (Search Engine Optimization) has been hot and it has been discussed all over the Internet. Still it is worth mentioning here. Why do you want to optimize your blog/website for search engines? How can you optimize your blog/website for SEO? You may find the answers to these questions in the following articles:

• Free SEO Tips for WordPress – If you search in Google or Yahoo about SEO tips, there are countless information out there. Optimizing your blog/website using these tips here.

• Search Engine Optimization – Find out how to optimize your blog by adopting the methods offered by Brad Callen, who is an expert in SEO field. You can download his Search Engine Optimization Make Easy from this site.

• Top SEO Tips for WordPress Blog – Top SEO Tips for your WordPress Blog. Very useful tips for beginners and even advanced bloggers. Especially for those who are using WordPress software.

• SEO Secrets to Writing the Perfect Blog Post – The best SEO tips and tricks revealed by this article. You can use the complete list of all the SEO tips and tricks to generate more traffic to your blog/website.

• 20 Practical SEO Tips to Super-Charge Your WordPress Blog! – Use these 20 prastical SEO tips to supercharge more traffic to your blog/website. Great tips for WordPress bloggers.

• Search Engine Optimization for Blogs – SEO – Uncovered the secrets of SEO by applying offsite and onsite techniques. Leap over there to see what Darren Rowse is talking about.

• ^new SEO Tips for Your Blog – This article talks about the basics of SEO. Then It goes to talk about more advanced stuff such as checking your broken links, building a sitemap for your blog/website, and using a robots.txt wisely.

• ^new SEO Tips – These Will Make A Massive Difference – Drive more quality traffic to your blog/website with these SEO tips listing in this article. Mostly people find your blog/website by search engines using keywords. So learn how to optimize your blog/website for search engines.

By now you should know why optimizing your blog/website is so important. Hope the above links help you optimize your blog/website efficiently. If you have any opinions about this topic, why not talk about it in comment section?

Free Editors for Your Blogs

I am not familiar with the default editor that came with my WordPress.com blog. I don’t think it allows us to use a table because I find nowhere on the editor’s menu that I can implement it. This led me to think about finding the content-rich editors that can allow us to blog easily. So I searched in Google and found some free and decent editors that you might want to consider to use. It’ll have no doubt of making your blogging life easily too.

• AIRPress – AIRPress is a rich blog editor based on AIR technology. With AIRPress, you could easily upload media (images, videos, mp3 … ) without the need of another software or hosting.

• Bleezer – Bleezer is a powerful blogging client and it is Free.
  

• BlogDesk – BlogDesk is totally free of charge and optimized for the blog systems. It is really a desktop blogging client. It makes easy and pleasant for you, a blogger, to use.

• BlogMate – BlogMate is a free, graphical plug-in (+ a bundle too) for the popular TextMate editor that enables creating and editing blog posts for MetaWeblog-enabled …

• FCKEditor for WordPress plugin – This plugin replaces the default WordPress editor with FCKeditor 2.6. FCKEditor is a full feature web based WYSIWYG html editor, it’s lightweight and is compatible with most internet browsers.

• Flock – Flock is a free web browser. Built on Mozilla’s Firefox, Flock enables you to instantly upload photos, share photos and videos by drag-n-drop, blog within its blog editor.

• Google Docs – Free web-based word processor and spreadsheet, which allow you share and collaborate online.

• IrfanView – IrfanView is a fast and compact image viewer/converter. It is trying to be simple for beginners … IrfanView is free for individual use.

• Post2Blog – Post2Blog is a handy blog editor for posting and updating your blog from Microsoft Word, Internet Explorer or Firefox. It is a Freeware equipped with live spell-checking support for pro-bloggers.

• ScribeFire – ScribeFire is an extension for the Mozilla Firefox Web Bowser that integrates with your browser to let you easily post to your blog: you can drag and drop formatted text from pages you are browsing, take notes, and post to your blog.

• Thingamablog – Thingamablog is a cross-platform, standalone blogging application that makes authoring and publishing your weblogs almost effortless. It will work on any platform on which Java can run.

• w.blogger – w.blogger is freeware. It acts as an interface between you and your blog(s). WordPress is one of the services that supports it.

• webpad – webpad is a web-based text editor which gives you access to files from your own computer, your server, FTP server, any website, and popular blogging tools such as Blogger.com, MovableType, TypePad, LiveJournal, blosxom and WordPress.

• Windows Live Writer – A desktop application. Easily publish pictures, videos, and other rich content to your blog and it is Free.

• WriteToMyBlog – Online (web) Blog Client. Free web word processor for your Blog. Create Posts for your Blog from right here with an advanced word processor.

• WYSIWYG Plugin For WordPress – This plugin replaces the default WordPress wysiwyg(what you see is what you get) editor with a more advanced version.

• Xinha Here! Firefox Extension – Xinha Here! is a Firefox extension wrapper for the Xinha HTML editor. It enables WYSIWYG editing in any text area and text box on any website. Xinha Here! opens a Xinha HTML editor in your browser allowing you to edit the data in a WYSIWYG on any website without copying and pasting to secondary HTML editor.

• Zoundry Raven™ – Zoundry Raven™ is the most advanced WYSIWYG full featured editor that makes posting to your blog easier and faster. It’s new and still Free.

What is your favorite editor? Is it listing here?

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How Often Should a Blogger Write?

As a blogger, how often should he/she write? This topic has already been discussed all over the Internet from other bloggers. I almost wanted to drop it. However, I was inspired by Darren Rowse’s How Often Should a Blogger Post? and Lorelle VanFossen’s How Often Should You Publish Your Blog Posts to go on and gave my thoughts about it.

Now to answer that question: I think there should not be a guideline for this. It should all depend on a blogger’s perspective. If you have something meaningful to say, then you should write it down. Otherwise just relax because no one forces you to write. Don’t just produce boring information because you are scheduled to do so. It’ll only waste your energy and time. As a reader, I only like to read the topics that interest me. Well, I think it is the case for everybody else too. An article has to be short, direct to the points otherwise I’ll lose my patience to it.

As a blogger, I think we should always keep our readers in mind while writing an article. Ask yourself: What kind of information I want to convey to my readers: Is it to persuade them? Is it to inform them? or is it to educate them? Put that in mind, you’ll have a clear purpose to write. Develop a tone for your readers too while you are writing: funny, serious, or etc. Ask these questions when you produce a post:

• Will my readers be interested in what I write?

• What would be a good length for my readers to read?

• How often should I post for them?

• Do I deliver the messages to them?

To me quality weighs a lot more than quantity. I also believe the saying: Content is king! What’s your thoughts about this topic?

Comparison of Google Blogger and WordPress.com Blog

As a new blogger, you probably like to choose a Free blog service to get started. Both Google blogger and WordPress.com provide this kind of Free service you can get. However, you may want to find out the similarities and differences between them before you decide to pick one. Since I own both Google Blogger and WordPress.com blog, I can tell you what the similarities and differences between them:

Google Blogger	WordPress.com
Requires minimal HTML knowledge	No need to know anything about HTML
Allows CSS edit	Don’t allow CSS edit unless you upgrade it
Allows Google AdSense	Don’t allow any third party codes
Allows you to edit HTML code	Can’t access any files
Allows you to add your own footer	Can’t do anything about the footer
Can’t create any pages	Allows you to create pages
Can’t import other blogs	Allows you to import other blogs
Layout is narrow but can be modified	Has more variety wider themes
newNo trackback service instead has backlink service	Has trackback service
No comment spam protection	Offers anti-spam protection (Akismet)
Can add images & videos	Can add images, videos, audios, and media
Labels (can be Categories/Tags) is available	Tags and Categories are available
Can add your own widgets	Some themes came with certain widgets. newAllows you to add text widgets
Hard to redirect to your paid-hosting server	Can easy redirect to your paid- hosting server
Allows you to schedule future-dated posts (just added by Blogger)	Allows you to schedule future-dated posts
newHas OpenID Service	newHas OpenID Service
newNo undo/redo function in its editor	newHas undo/redo function in its editor
newNo table function in its editor	newNo table function in its editor
newComment editor is in-line (just added by Blogger)	newComment editor is in-line
newAllows you to moderate comments	newAllows you to moderate comments
newOffers feed service	newOffers feed service
newNo Blog Stats, no Blog Suffer, and no Tag Suffer services	newOffers Blog Stats, Blog Suffer, and Tag Suffer services
newNo sign up service	newAllows your readers to sign up

These are all I can recall so far. Make a wise decision before you choose one. For me I prefer Google Blogger since it allows me to hack the codes the way I like. I also like my self-hosting WordPress blog too for it also allows me to study those PHP files there. However, if you are thinking to temporarily use a Free blog service and eventually transition it to a paid-hosting service. Then I suggest you to get WordPress.com blog since it will make your life easier when one day you are ready to pay for your own hosting. WordPress.org blog doesn’t give those limitations listed above from WordPress.com. See The Difference Between WordPress.com and WordPress.org here. WordPress.org gives all the freedoms you need; no limitations such as posting third party codes. Moreover you can have full access to all the files.

Update: I’ll add updates to this post whenever I recall some features about Google Blogger vs. ordPress.com. More updates have been added. See the items marked new.

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What is The Purpose to Have Social Network Service?

Why do people sign up for social network services? The main reason for having these services is to drive more traffic to your blog/website. If you run a business blog/website, getting more visitors will no doubt bring you more sales and thus gain more profits. Therefore getting more traffic to your blog/website through these social network services is really important. The list below shows the Free social network services I’ve signed up so far:

• BlogRush – BlogRush is a “Cooperative Syndication Network.” It’s a network of blogs that run a small “widget” on their pages. Shut down by its owner.

• Del.icio.us – Del.icio.us is a social bookmarking web service for storing, sharing, and discovering web bookmarks.

• Google Reader – With Google Reader, keeping up with your favorite websites is as easy as checking your email.

• MyBlogLog – A Yahoo! service … MyBlogLog is now a part of the Yahoo! family. Sign up now using your Yahoo! ID. Don’t have a Yahoo! ID? Signing up is easy.

• Technorati – Real-time search for user-generated media (including weblogs) by tag or keyword. Also provides popularity indexes.

• Yahoo! Bookmarks (beta) – Allows users to import bookmarks and organize them into folders. Also offers a toolbar to add into the browser.

• YouTube – Hosts user-generated videos. Includes network and professional content.

What are your opinions about this topic? Do you think they will bring more visitors to your blog/website? Or not at all?

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