You’ve seen these words online, but what exactly are they? How do you get them? And more importantly, are they effective tools for attracting people to your blog? Tracy Graves, a guest lecturer in the Blogging class I am taking at Harvard Extension School, answered these questions and attempted to take the mystery out of blogging. In this post I will utilize some of these tools to enhance my blog. Take a deep breath – here we go . . .
NAVIGATION: Tracy told us that successful blogs always have a clear system of navigation. To address this, I changed the color of my NAVBAR on my blog to blue so that it’s more noticeable. (It’s at the very top of this page.)
TAGS: Tags are extremely important because they are the flags that Google looks for. Blogger calls tags LABELS, and after searching Blogger help I figured out how to insert them into your post. It’s simple – when you’re writing or editing a post, there is a box at the bottom of the “compose” window that says “labels.” All you have to do is enter the terms you want Google to pick up. I edited my post titled “This Bird Has Flown” and added the labels: "motherhood," “empty nest,” “going to college” and “growing up." These now appear at the bottom of my post. I will use labels in all of my future posts.
WIDGETS: As an artist I know that one of the most important concepts when you are in creation mode is that you have to know enough to stop when you’re done. I like websites that are clean, without a lot of distracting gizmos flashing at me. So it is with some hesitancy on my part that I have added widgets to my blog.
Widgets are plug-ins – self-contained pieces of functionality. Again, Blogger uses different terminology and calls widgets GADGETS. I searched Blogger’s gadget menu and added the following gadgets to my blog:
- A list of courses I’m taking this semester, with links to the course websites
- A list of blogs I follow
- Funny Things to Ponder
- True Blood pictures (because having to wait till next summer for the new season is torture!)
I will look at these gadgets later to decide whether I really want to keep them or not. Again, I find them distracting from the main focus of my blog, which is my writing.
RSS: I see these little orange logos everywhere on the internet. RSS (which stands for “Really Simple Syndication”) is a way to subscribe to blogs, news feeds, etc. To add an RSS feed in Blogger you click on “Add a gadget,” and choose “Feed” from the list of gadgets. This brings up a window where you paste the URL for the feed you want to insert. I’ve added an RSS to the New York Times on my blog.
STATISTICS: During class I learned about using statistics to keep track of who is viewing my blog. Blogger has a statistics tool and when I checked it out I found that there isn’t much data since I’ve just started this blog. Hopefully, this will develop over time. I did, however, set the stats page so that it will not track my own pageviews.
One other important item I learned in class this week is that when you blog you really have two audiences: the regular reader and the newbie. Therefore, you have to be aware of both of these readers in every post.
I can see that this is just the beginning level of blogging and there is still much to learn. Baby steps . . .
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