Dear Cathy & Claire ‘I have just started going out with a boy much older than me…’ No - sorry. I have just started blogging and find myself increasingly worrying about blogging etiquette. For example, I just read an interesting article about Oracle by Jeff Moss and wrote a followup on my blog. I felt my article was too long to be posted as a comment on Jeff’s blog. So what do I do ?...
A kind lady called Sarah encountered my blog, was horrified by what she saw, and and proffered this suggestion for tweaking the standard blogger template to add the readability of long articles by adding the heading to the footer section. Eventually, I managed to successfully apply the changes (she left a spurious space character to ensure you have a little work to do) so I hope you enjoy the changes as much as I do....
So, you have set up the blog, got loads of interesting ideas for articles, robots and spiders are crawling everywhere, Adsense is configured and has already produced a massive return of 0.27USD and you are all set to go. One last problem, what are you actually going to call this blog ? What’s in a name ? Well quite a lot actually. I usually like to read the title and extended description of any blogs I encounter....
Absolutely anything can be a suitable subject for a blog entry; a Website of interest, OpenSource software, breaking news, a personal anecdote, a witty comment from a colleague, politics, a joke, a holiday, Microsoft, music, gadgets, your teams latest victory, anything. Just because someone else (an esteemed blogger or maybe even a professional journalist) has written an article on the same subject, don’t necessarily let that put you off. Lots of people are searching blogs for a personal view and not that of a journalist....
Doug Burns recently was kind enough to refer to my little, embryonic blog. I had been lurking around the Oracle blogs for a while and had commented on a posting on Doug’s blog about his wife’s positive reaction to the recently launched Teleport service (TV and video on demand) Now this wasn’t purely a trite comment is a desperate attempt to get someone other than the Technorati bot over to my blog....
Take some time to think of ideas and develop content for the blog. I tend to jot down lots of different ideas for possible brilliant, informative articles for the blog. However, most get discarded as when I subsequently re-read them, I discover that they don’t even make sense or interest me. Some ideas are developed and refined over a longer period while other blog entries are more spontaneous. As you are composing the article, review the text carefully as you go....
Don’t. Build it and they will come (probably). Try and focus on the style and content of the blog. Try to keep updating the blog on a regular basis. Make it easy for people to subscribe to the blog by creating an RSS feed - Feedburner is a popular, free choice. If you have succeeded in getting people to visit the blog and, better, maybe even subscribe to it, try to keep new material coming otherwise the blog will surely wither and die together with the interest of the your audience....
I was just looking at my Web site and spontaneously decided to end its sad, sorry life. Static content unchanged in years with dead links with little of interest to anyone. Part blog, part bookmarks, part experiment in HTML. Now consigned to the Internet archives.
I just created an RSS feed for my blog using Feedburner. It was actually quite interesting to see how my blog was presented in different RSS readers (Thunderbird, Google Reader and Bloglines) where the textual content is the same but may be presented in many different ways and styles. I once lost quite a long, rambling blog entry due to some finger trouble in the blogger editor so subscribing to the RSS feed will be a quick and easy way to backup the blog....
Creating this blog was an experiment and, somewhat to my surprise, I quite like the concept. So I have decided to host my blog on my Web space over at blueyonder. This isn’t because I think Telewest’s hosting service is any more reliable than blogger (never had any issues at all with blogger) but so I can peruse the Web server logs and referrer statistics that Blueyonder kindly gather for me....