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 . . .

Blogging -- First Impressions

I spend too many hours on the internet each day reading political news and blogs, and more often than not these blogs make my head want to explode.  For relief, my guilty pleasure is checking out what’s going on in the bizarre world of “celebrities” by reading Perez Hilton’s blog (http://perezhilton.com/), TMZ (http://www.tmz.com/), and X17 online (http://x17online.com/).  There’s something deeply gratifying about watching wealthy train wrecks implode – schadenfreude is good for the soul.

But I never got into reading personal blogs.  I don’t know why I never plunged into that pool before – maybe it’s because the thought of reading someone’s daily posts seemed boring to me, or maybe following someone’s life online seemed to me like the digital equivalent of stalking.  But my fears were unfounded. In last night’s class Elizabeth introduced us to the world of personal blogs and I was ecstatic to discover that not all blogs consist of doom and gloom.

Reading Heather Armstrong’s blog “A Simple Kind of Chaos” (http://www.dooce.com/) made me feel like I was talking with an old friend on the phone.  It is easy to relate to someone who brings out the garbage and recycling in a ratty old t-shirt and bed head only to be approached by new neighbors.  I had one of those moments myself when a friend visited me right after I had applied coloring to my hair.  He wanted to show me something in his car, so I had to go out to the driveway in my holiest t-shirt with my hair piled up on top of my head in a white, foamy froth.  Of course, every neighbor on my street was outside and saw me at my haggard best.

When Elizabeth told us about Karyn Bosnak’s foray into blogging I thought, here is a smart woman.  Sure, Karyn got herself into her own mess, but her solution to getting herself out of debt was ingenious.  (http://www.savekaryn-originalsite.com/).  The fact that she parlayed her crisis into a successful blog (http://prettyinthecity.blogspot.com/) is brilliant.

Elizabeth’s blog, “Motherhood is Not for Wimps” (http://damomma.com/) is another personal blog that piques my interest and makes me happy.  I mean, come on – who else in their right mind would think of throwing your kids off high platforms to shut them up!  Elizabeth’s snippets show the joys, frustrations, and everything in between, of motherhood.   She’s right – motherhood is NOT for wimps – it changes everything.

Our first class assignment is to contemplate what makes a blog successful.  For me, a blog must be well-written; a blogger who writes, “Today I went shopping.  After that I went to the hairdresser.  Came home and cooked dinner.  Watched the news and went to bed,” is not going to hold my interest.  You can read plenty of this blather on Facebook.

The best way to make a successful blog is exactly what Elizabeth spoke about in class: bloggers have to have something compelling to say.  This doesn’t mean that each post must contain earth-shattering revelations; bloggers must give something to the reader that is lacking in other “communities” on the internet.  The reader needs to be able to relate to what the bloggers are writing.  The blogs I’ve cited here make me feel like I’m not the only crazy person on this planet.  I thought it was interesting when Elizabeth told us that once people start blogging they typically end up revealing much more about their personal lives than they had planned.  Maybe this is why the most successful blogs flourish; personal blogs, whether funny or poignant, reveal the nature of humankind in all our mundane, fallible glory.

With their honest simplicity, successful personal blogs smash through the impersonal “us vs. them” mentality found in political blogs and provide a much-needed respite from the news of the world.  It’s the little everyday scenarios that make life interesting:  watching a child take their first steps, dogs chasing squirrels, poopie diapers – this is the stuff of life.