Blogging Tips

After I met with these two lovely bloggers, who admitted they didn’t know how to use (or care to use for that matter) many blogging tools, it spurred a post in my mind. I guess there were so many things about blogging that I thought everyone knew about….apparently not.

So here are some blogging tips I have found useful.

1. Make your email address public on your Blogger profile (Sara, this is directed at you ;)

You do this by going into your Blogger Dashboard, click “Edit Profile”

That will bring you to a screen that looks like this.

Go ahead and check the little box that says “Show my email address” is checked. It will say right next to it what email address it has for you (see arrow). and make sure your email address is correct. If you want to change the email you have, scroll down to the “Identity” section an do so, and make sure to click save profile at the bottom!

I have all comments that are written on my blog emailed to me, so when someone comments, and they have their email public on their profile, I can simply hit reply, and reply to their comment!

There are so many of my regular readers and commenters that do not have their email public….I implore you to do so! I would love to be able to go back to each and every one of your blogs and leave a comment, but time is sparse around here. I think by default Blogger does not share your email so you must go in and change it yourself.

2. If you are using a PC, use Windows Live Writer

Windows Live Writer is one the best things I have yet to discover….ever. I love it. You can do so much more from it than you can if you are just writing your posts in Blogger.

You can include, pictures, photo albums, tables, maps, tags, videos, and you can add tons of really cool plug ins. Like emoticons, or you can set it up to tweet right after you publish a blog post for you!

But by far my favorite is the options you have with your photos, in example

 

You can leave your picture plain, make it look like photo paper, round the corners, frame them, and so, so much more. You can crop, adjust, add special effects like black and white or sepia and more. See how my pictures say manicmother.com? You can do that too! Best thing since sliced bread.

3. Linking pictures

Although you can also do this in Windows Live Writer for your posts. You can’t use Writer to do any blog layout design. See how in my right sidebar I have pictures, like the cupcake one that says “What’s in the Oven”, click on it…it will take you somewhere. Magic right? Nope, here is how you do it.

- Upload your picture to a Web photo sharing site, I use Photobucket for this purpose. Resize it if you need to, you can do so in Photobucket.

- Go into your Blogger Dashboard and click on Layout, then choose to Add a Gadget, and choose the HTML/Javascript gadget.

- Copy the following HTML code

<center><a href="http://www.manicmother.com/2009/07/summertime-lemon-cupcakes.html"><img border="0" src="http://i704.photobucket.com/albums/ww47/manicmother/lemonncupcakes_edited-1-1.jpg"/></a></center>

-And paste it into the box.

It should look like this. You will be replacing my info with yours.

- The first link provided is the link to the post I want the picture to link to (fill in with your link).

For the second link click on your picture in Photobucket copy the code that says “Direct Link”, and place your photo link in the second link spot.. Make sure  the HTML  is exact or it won’t work. And there you have it, you should now have a picture that links to a post.

Troubleshooting: Make sure all of the quotation marks are still there, and that there aren’t too many. The HTML has to stay exactly the same, or it won’t work. Also make sure you have replaced my links with yours.