Blog Exercises: Excerpts and Continue Reading

Encountered the front page of a blog where the posts ran on and on and on and on, stretching across the length of the page? Do you ever wish you had more control over the length of your posts on the front page of your site? This Blog Exercise explores the use of the “more” […]

Blog Exercises: Feed Readers

Without the feed reader, my blogging life would be seriously hard work. Feed, commonly misidentified as RSS, is the proper name for the contextual version of your site as distributed through various feed types such as RSS, Atom, XML, etc. They are basically your posts stripped of your website design, read like articles in a […]

Power Blogging Tips: Comment on Blogs From Within Google Feed Reader

One of the most frustrating aspects of reading blogs through feed readers is the process of commenting on blogs. The typical step-by-step process is: Scan through the blog post titles. Find an interesting title and click on the title to open it and read. Want to respond or read more? Open the post title in […]

Comment Spam Alert: I Read a Similar Article

Bloggers should now be familiar with the blog comment spam ruse of “X wrote an interesting post” to lure us into thinking this is a legitimate trackback, and now comes “I read a similar article also named…” to lure us into thinking this comment is legitimate. As Tony Hung illustrated, the comment spammers use a […]

What Inspires Your Readers to Interact With Your Blog?

By Rachelle Chase Static content that talks to readers is not enough today, especially with the meteoric rise in popularity of online communities and social networking. Good content is still the key to attract and compel people to return to your site, however giving them more than static content and blog comments for interaction gives […]

Blog Challenge: Whatcha Reading?

I recently finished rereading all the books, one after another, by two of my favorite authors, Alan Dean Foster and Terry Pratchett. I read the whole Discworld series in order, then the Humanx Commonwealth by Foster in “chronological” order. It was wonderful to submerse myself in other worlds for extended periods of time, putting off […]

Are You Ready and Willing for CSS3?

Are you ready for the changes in web page design that will come with the new version of Cascading Stylesheets known as CSS3? In A Refreshed Design for 2008 by Don’t Trust This Guy, I found a glimpse of some of the new CSS3 features and possibilities including multiple background images and CSS drop shadows. […]

Ask Yourself How You Should Get Me to Read Your Blog

In How to Get Me to Read Your Blog, Thord Daniel Hedengren tells us how to convince him, and others, to read your blog. Chances are I’m not reading your blog. That’s not because I don’t like you, most likely I don’t even know you exist, and that’s your fault. Yes, you heard me. Your […]

Reader Appreciation Project: Putting Readers First

Ronald Huereca writes for the Reader Appreciation Project blog and recently caught my attention with My Thoughts on Being Paid to Post. When one starts blogging for money, there are new considerations. Who am I really writing for? Am I writing for my new boss that will pay me per post? Am I writing for […]

Is Your Site Ready for the New Mobile Internet?

By Douglas Bell Now before you start getting any ideas in your head about those baby cell phone web browsers and WML (Wireless Markup Language), just stop right there. This article is talking about the new mobile internet. The new mobile internet doesn’t contain the baby web pages that you may be used to on […]

Bringing the Best of the Best Blogging Resources to Your Feed Reader

I recently highlighted Liz Strauss’ list of 20 Blog Promotion Guides to Inform Your Strategy and she’s done it again with Strategy: 40 Outstanding Blog Links, Bookmark Carefully!. What is blog reading and commenting to you? Is it entertainment, interaction, or research for your work? How much time do you spend on the average day […]

Blog Challenge: Geographical Blog Reading

Where do your favorite bloggers live? Do you know? Does it matter? Well, for this blog challenge it does. This week’s blog challenge is to research your favorite bloggers, usually the ones you read through your feed reader or bookmark and return to repeatedly, to find out where they live and work. The answer might […]

Live Up To The Expectations of Your Readers

In The Perils of Problogging, Stellify makes some very good points in the issue of having ads on your blog and the business of blogging. However, I want to point out a beautiful statement: If you call yourself a writer because you are a blogger, then live up to the expectations of your readers. More […]

Aggcompare – Comparison Directory of Feed Aggregators and Readers

I had no idea there were so many different feed readers and aggregators available. Aggcompare.com is the Directory of RSS Aggregators, listing dozens of feed readers and aggregators with their features. It’s not pretty, but it’s an amazing list. The features list is huge for each feed aggregator and includes information on which browser it […]

Is Your Blog Ready for Web 3.0?

Web 3.0: When Web Sites Become Web Services by Read/Write/Web gives us more than a glimpse into the future of websites and blogs – Web 3.0 is being build here and now. Are you paying attention? Today’s Web has terabytes of information available to humans, but hidden from computers. It is a paradox that information […]