Blog 101: blogger, technorati & blogrolling

Thursday, December 7, 2006

Setting up a blog - install, self-hosting, tags and links

Install notes for a remotely hosted blog, managed by Google’s blogger… beta.blogger.com:

Blogger.com is one of the most popular sites that offers free hosting OR allows you to host it on an web server of your choice (for example in a directory accessible via your web address…. And provides very reasonable service and support for NO charge, although premium paid services exist. As a measure of helping you gain a good understanding of the basic information required of you, as well as a get-started quicker personal guide to avoiding some of the little ‘gotcha’s’ in the file-to-path names, I provided this short outline of a full install, including reference to setting up secondary services … all tolled, about a few hours to setup and be publishing - This includes blogger.com, technorati.com and blogrolling.com:

1) First…. BLOGGER.COM

- ftp server: No 'ftp://' required and do not add trailing '/' sign
- blog url: start with 'http://', but do not end domain name (and opt. subdirectory) with a trailing
'/' sign
- ftp path: Do not start with a leading '/' sign, but it's ok to end with one
- blog filename: blogger.html or index.html
- days or posts to display on main page: suggest 7?
- multiple time formats, zones and languages supported
- comments by anyone, only registered users, only members of this blog
- comment moderation available by email notification and control panel approval; comment
notification email
- archiving now outdated as it's built into the architecture
- site feed url: start with 'http://', but do not end domain name (and opt. subdirectory) with a
trailing '/' sign
- site feed url: sugg. atom.xml
- site feed path: Do not start with a leading '/' sign, but it's ok to end with one
- Blog Posts, Comment and Per-Post Feeds to be either full, short or none
- Custom feed item footer
- BlogSend Address: email where blog is mailed whenever you publish
- mail-to-blogger address: realname.secretname%blogger.com --- Used to post by email,

o A VARIETY OF TEMPLATES: All with multi-post dated displays, indiv. pages, header,
and sidebar (description, aboutme, links, previous posts, archiving, Atom Opt-in
subscribe

- Customizable template with blogxml that looks like html but is case sensitive
- Insert customizations in their server side publishing template

==============

- Added:
- SEO updating to support
- meta dynamic title,
- meta description (from page),
- meta keywords

- Tags to support blogrolling (inter-linking of links sidebar)
- applied with div tag attributed class='blogrollmain

- Tags to footer to support Technorati functions:
- Search this blog, blogs that link here, view profile
- Add this blog to my Techorati favorites

2) Then onto Technorati.com (note: some activities had to go in sequence… create web site basics w/o template modification….. then go to technorati first and then blogrolling second… then back to blogger to add the stuff from Technorati and blogrolling, plus other SEO updates… and lastly back to the associated web site to put in links to the blog, and also RSS/Atom feeds…. Then begin… train build, respond, create, manage…traffic

- Signup free denoting:
-- first, last, username, email, password
-- Need to create ~ 20 startup keyword sets (most 1-2 words)
-- Code to insert on web page for lookup and favorites
-- Primarily code for technorati support added per-posting by any blog authors…. Or
those cleaning up afterwards

3) Blogrolling.com

- name, email, blogroll name and URL of your blog
- add a script, enclosed with a div tag of with parameter class='blogrollmain' and the
CSS supporting scripts for a number of nice styles

4) Web site links to blog and feeds

- Simple text link to blog web site
- Simple File links to reference Atom feed vs. RSS feed with/proper RSS icons
- Changes to web page header to support feed autodiscovery by major browsers:

- For Atom Autodiscovery
link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="feed title here" href="http://www.yourdomain.com/feedurl.xml"

- For RSS Autodiscovery
link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="feed title here" href="http://www.yourdomain.com/feedurl.rss"

5) Create new postings – compose, tags - publish to web site – Ping all search engines to pickup (avg. 5 min) Submit all feeds to feed, blog and other search engines and advertising services.

That's it... start posting...

technorati tags: blogs, technorati, blogrolling, SEO, marketing