Blogger Techniques: 2009

Generate Favicon for your Blog

Favicons are small icons shown next to site names in URL bar of web browsers. You can customize the favicon of your blog by selecting an image from your computer or web.

Genfavicon is a free and very good site to generate favicons. To generate a favicon for your blog, go to this site and upload your desired image from your computer or web. Select the uploaded image and use mouse to drag or resize it. Select the size 16 x 16 and click on capture and preview. If satisfied with generated preview, download favicon image to your computer.

Follow this easy tutorial to add favicon to your blog.

Bing Webmaster Center

Bing (formerly Live Search, Windows Live Search and MSN Search) is a web search engine by Microsoft. Bing allows webmasters to manage the web crawling status of their own websites through Bing Webmaster Center. Use the webmaster tools to troubleshoot the crawling and indexing of your blog, submit sitemaps and view statistics about your blogs.

To use webmaster tools, go to Bing Webmaster Center and sign in to use the tools. Click on Add a site and submit your blog URL with site map address. Example:

Web address: http://myblog.blogspot.com/

Sitemap address: http://myblog.blospot.com/atom.xml or http://myblog.blogspot.com/rss.xml

Provide webmaster email if you want and click on Submit button. They need to verify that you are true owner of submitted site. Copy given meta tag and paste it into head section of your blog by going to Dashboard > Layout > Edit HTML. Meta tag should be like <meta name="msvalidate.01" content="238F066602818D0FA23E2B1D371E076A" /> and put it somewhere after <head>. Save the template and return to site list in Bing webmaster tools. Click on your blog in site list to see statistics if it is already indexed by Bing. If there is no data available then you have to wait for a few days till MSNBot (the Bing web crawler) scans and indexes contents of your blog.

How to submit blog to Google Blog Search?

Google Blog Search beta is a blog search engine from Google with a continuously-updated search index. Results include all blogs, not just those published through Blogger. Results can be viewed and filtered by date and time. Try searching your blog in Google Blog Search. If your blog is not indexed then submit your blog by clicking here. Enter your blog’s web address or feed and hit ‘Submit Blog’ button. You are done. Your blog will be indexed soon by Google Blog Search.

How to remove / hide Navbar?

Navbar

Some people really don't like the Navbar. Removing it is easy. To remove or hide Navbar, Go to Dashboard > Layout > Edit HTML. Edit the template. Put the following code above /* Variable definitions.

#navbar-iframe {
   display: none !important;
}

Save the template. Refresh page of your blog and see Navbar is gone. It is recommended to always create a backup before editing template. See tutorial video below to remove navigation bar.

How to add tags in blog using Windows Live Writer?

Windows Live Writer is a free, downloadable program that works with most popular blogging services, including Blogger. Use Writer to create and format blog posts with rich content, such as maps, tables, hyperlinks, tags (Keywords that can be assigned to a blog post to indicate which category or categories it belongs to. Writer allows tags to be added to blog posts from various social bookmarking websites. When the blog post is published, the tag is hyperlinked to the social bookmarking website, and automatically triggers a search for items with the same tag.) , and categories.

On the right panel of Windows Live Writer, click on Tags (as shown in screenshot). A new window would open. Choose your tag platform like Technorati or LiveJournal or customize your own. Enter comma separated tags. You can place these tags above or below the post.

click image to enlarge

And don’t forget to set ‘categories’ at the bottom of Windows Live Writer. ‘categories’ on Windows Live Writer and ‘Labels’ on Blogger are the same things.

How to send pings to different servers using windows live writer?

Windows live writer has a cool feature of sending pings to various web directories. Whenever you will publish a new post, windows live writer will send ping to your provided list of servers. Hence they would know about your new contents.

To use this feature go to tools menu of windows live writer. Click on options > Ping Servers. Enable this feature and enter the URLs of ping servers. Following is a list of ping server which i found from a site.

http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://services.newsgator.com/ngws/xmlrpcping.aspx
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://ping.feedburner.com/
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2     
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/     
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2
http://xmlrpc.bloggernetz.de/RPC2
http://bblog.com/ping.php
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://api.my.yahoo.co.jp/RPC2
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
http://rpc.reader.livedoor.com/ping
http://ping.wordblog.de/
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://blogsearch.google.at/ping/RPC2
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://blogsearch.google.de/ping/RPC2
http://ping.namaan.net/rpc
http://rpc.technorati.jp/rpc/ping
http://zhuaxia.com/rpc/server.php
http://www.bloglines.com/ping
http://rpc.bloggerei.de/ping/

After entering above URLs click on Apply and OK. Its set now to ping. See a screenshot below:

How to find your blog in search engines?

New blogs are indexed automatically by most of search engines. You can try manually submitting your blog to various search engines. See here how to submit blog to search engines.

Be patient because web crawlers take some time to index your site. Sometimes you think your blog is listed in search engines (may be at page number 157 in results) but you can’t find it. To check if your site is listed or not, try typing following in search engines.

site:URL of blog
cache:URL of blog
info:URL of blog
related:URL of blog

For example type site:http://yourblog.blogspot.com and see all results about your blog in search engine if it is indexed.

How to shorten Blogger URL for free?

To shorten the long Blogger URL, one way is to buy a domain name. It costs about $10/year. The other option is to use a free domain name like .tk and .co.nr. Your blog name would be like www.yourblog.tk or www.yourblog.co.nr.

There is another way to shorten Blogger URL. Some sites offer free redirecting to your blog with a short site name. Below are some of them. Try them and use them. Its free.

TinyURL.com

Tiny.cc

and even more shorter

bit.ly

How to check Page Rank of your blog?

Here is a useful site to check your blog’s Page Rank. There is no need to install any toolbar or software or other messy things. Just type your blog’s URL press ‘GO’. You will get following details of your blog or site:

Number of Indexed pages (Google, Yahoo, Live)
Ranking
Backlinks
Syndication
Social Bookmarks
Validations (XHTML, CSS, RSS)
Domain
Diagnosis

Check Page Rank Now and see what you need more to get famous in bloggers world.

Windows Live Writer

Windows Live Writer is a software for your PC to create and manage your blogs in online and offline mode. Its really cool program for almost all popular blog services. You would find it really helpful specially if you are not good with HTML or coding. Add easily hyperlinks, pictures, photo albums, videos, tables, maps, tags and many more with simple clicks to your blog.

I recommend this program for your blog. To download and installing instructions, go to Windows Live Writer page.

photos

What are new features in Blogger in draft?

According to blogger

We’ve recently added two new features to the post editor on Blogger in draft: autosave and automatic date and time.

Autosave is a feature we’ve had for a while on the old post editor, and it does what you’d expect: automatically save your draft posts when you pause in your typing. We’ve brought the same convenience and safety to the new post editor.

With automatic date and time, your posts will now be timestamped with the date and time that they’re published, not the date and time when you first opened the post editor (as has been the case). You can of course still explicitly set the date and time by opening Post Options and switching to Scheduled at instead. Once a post is published, it will keep its date by default, even if you go back even if you go back to edit the post and re-publish.

— Pete

How to monetize your blog?

Many bloggers want to find ways to generate an income from their blogs.

Advertising:
Advertising is a good way to earn money from your blog.
Have you Google Adsense Account? If not, go and create it. After creating it, wait for Google's response. They will send you a confirmation e-mail. Now you can get money through your blog. From your Blogger Dashboard, go to Layout> Monetize.
You can also sign up with other sites. Put their adds on your blog and get reward. Following is the list of some common advertising programs.
Google Adsense
Amazon Associates
eBay affiliates
Pay-Per-Post

Donation:
If you are a good writer, you deserve donations. Don't be shy. At the bottom or side of your blog, use a line such as "If you like this blog, why not buy me a cup of coffee?" and add a PayPal button.

How to analyze your blog?

You must be interested to the questions like 'how many people visited my blog? what was their location? how they found it? what were their operating systems and browsers? etc etc".
Google Analytics provides all answers to such questions. Use Google Analytics in your blog to get the answers of such questions.
Its easy. Sign up with Google Analytics and add your blog there. They will give you a code and you have to put this code into your blog. To begin using Analytics to track visitors to your blog, follow these steps:

1. Log in to your Blogger account.
2. Select the blog you'd like to track, then click 'Settings' from the Manage options.
3. Edit your template
* Classic Template Users select the "Template" tab.
* Layouts Users select the "Layout" tab.
4. Select the 'Edit HTML' tab.
5. Scroll to the bottom of the code.
6. Find the '</body>' tag, which usually appears towards the end of the code in the template.
7. Paste the Analytics tracking code just above the </body> tag.
8. Click 'Save Template.'
9. Click 'Republish' to update your live site.

You have to wait for 24 hours to see results about your blog.

Submit your blog to search engines

There are several ways to give your blog a traffic boost.
One of them is to submit your blog's URL to most popular search engines. Check if your blog is not already submitted then submit it. People will find you blog eventually by searching a specific topic or key words.

Follow the links below to submit your blog's URL to some of the web's most popular search engines:

Google

Yahoo!

Bing

Technorati

Let the people of the world know that you have a blog!

How to add custom icon to your blog?

You can change the website icon of your blog. Its simple and easy.

Favicon

1. Create an image

Create an image of size 16 x 16 px, in format .png, .gif or .ico using your favorite image editor program.

2. Upload your image to web

Now upload your image file to any image hosting website. I recommend Photobucket for this purpose. Copy your image URL. It should be like http://i718.photobucket.com/albums/abc/xyz/favicon.ico

3. Edit HTML of your Blog

Go to Blogger Dashboard > Layout > Edit HTML and put the following code between </b:skin> and </head> tags in your Blogger template. Replace ‘your-image-file-url.ico’ with your image file URL in following code and save template.

<link href='http://your-image-file-url.ico' rel='shortcut icon' type='image/x-icon'/>

That's all. If your favicon doesn’t appear on browse, clear the browser cache.

Related Posts :

Generate Favicon for your blog

How to add Blogger sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools?

Adding your Blogger’s sitemap to Google Webmaster Tools is a good way to let the Google know more about pages on your blog. To add sitemap go to Google Webmaster Tools and follow these steps:

On the Dashboard, click the site for which you want to add a Sitemap. If your blog isn't listed, make sure you've added it to your account and verified it.
Click Sitemaps.
Click Add a Sitemap.
Select Add general Sitemap.
In the text box, type either atom.xml or rss.xml. For example, if you add the Atom feed as a Sitemap, the full URL will be http://yourblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml.

How to add an extra page element?

You can add extra page elements / gadget places easily by modifying the blogger template. To do this go to Dashboard > Layout > Edit HTML. Find (Ctrl+F) showaddelement. Change showaddelement='no' to showaddelement='yes'. Change maxwidgets='1' to maxwidgets='2’ or maxwidgets='3’. Save template and now you got extra ‘Add a Gadget’ page elements.

See modified template example below.