RSS, WIDGETS, AND TAGS -- OH MY

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 . . .