The Real Blogger Status

Some new blog owners put a lot of effort into designing a shiny template with lots of features, but omit blog content - or spend time carefully tuning their blogs. Eventually, they will add content, to the blog. Later, they may discover reality. This looks like crap! or Why do I have no readers? Different blogs, with differing content, may look better using different templates. And some sections of the dashboard should be left alone.

The popularity of Google+ continues to grow. Some blog owners would like to have a Blogger blog publish to a Google+ Page, instead of their personal Google+ stream. This is not difficult. You first make a new Google account, to own the Google+ Page. Everything that follows is normal Blogger blog management. Don't overlook the details of blog management , though.

One very useful FeedBurner service is the Email Distribution feature. Email Distribution is virtually a turnkey subscription management . Email Distribution has one limitation, which not everybody understands, however. FeedBurner delivers any new posts once daily, based on a chosen distribution time. Depending upon what distribution time you choose, for any FeedBurner Feed, you can have anywhere from 0 hours, to 24 hours - of delay, between publishing a post, and having that post distributed by email.

If you publish a public Blogger blog, and have a FaceBook and / or Twitter account, then you have an audience for your blog updates, waiting to read your blog posts. Any Blogger feed (which eliminates private blogs ) can automatically post, to FaceBook and / or Twitter.

As a web master (aka blog master), besides adding posts and enhancing the template, you have a third activity - connecting your web site (blog) to other web sites and blogs. In many cases, you'll simply send the owners of the other web site (blog) a request to link to your blog. For links to large and very active web sites, you'll use an online wizard. To prove ownership of your web site, instead of sending email, you'll add a file of specific name, or maybe specific content, into the web site. You can't add a file to your blog, though. With a Blogger blog, you have no control over files and folders - all that you do is publish posts.

A year ago, we noted a security change to BlogSend, which left many blog owners with severely deprecated ability to publicise blog updates , when using a private Google Group. At that time, the recommended workaround was to add "no-reply@blogger.com" as a Google Group member. Today, we see that the ability to add Google Group members directly is no longer offered. It appears now that the use of private Google Groups, for distribution of Blogger blog updates, is not an option.

Ever since Google+ was released, blog owners have been asking how to post blog updates to Google+. Previously, there was only the possibility of publishing from Google+ to our blogs - and that option was not well designed . Last week, Blogger released this option , in Draft Blogger. Today we’re excited to announce the first way you will be able to leverage Google+ -- by making it possible to replace your Blogger profile with your Google+ profile. In addition to giving your readers a more robust and familiar sense of who you are, your social connections will see your posts in their Google search results with an annotation that you've shared the post.

If you publish both a FeedBurner blog feed and a Twitter feed, and you have people Following your Twitter feed, then you have a ready audience for your blog updates. At your option, FeedBurner now publishes directly to Twitter. All that you need to do is to allow Twitter to access your FeedBurner feed - from your blog, or from any other feed that you publish.

As a web master (blog master), besides adding posts and enhancing the template, you have a third activity which is almost as time consuming. You will be constantly connecting your web site (blog) to other web sites and blogs. In many cases, you'll simply send the owners of the other web site (blog) a request to link to your blog. For links to some web sites, you'll not use email, you'll use an online wizard. To prove ownership of your web site, instead of sending email, you'll add a file of specific name, or maybe specific content, into the web site. You can't add a file to your blog, though, with blogs you have no control over files and folders - all that you do is publish posts.

Similar to Google Webmaster Tools , we have a tool which helps us develop and maintain our relationship between our blogs and the Yahoo search engine spiders. Yahoo Site Explorer helps us develop a sitemap to initially make our blogs more visible to the Yahoo search engines, it provides us with tools to measure our visibility, and it provides us with helpful hints on how to improve our visibility. You can use Yahoo Site Explorer for any active URL that you administer. If your blog is published to BlogSpot, you use the "xxxxxxx.blogspot.com" URL; if the blog is published to a custom domain or externally using FTP, you use the primary URL for the domain. Using Yahoo Site Explorer for any web site requires that you are the administrator of the web site. Like Google, Yahoo doesn't want anybody who's not the administrator, of any web site, accessing search engine diagnostics for that web site. The meta tag provided in the verification process is a token, and it must mat...

To further answer the regularly asked question "How do I let my friends know when my blog is updated?", we have FeedBurner. Properly setup, a FeedBurner feed will provide a neat subscription form for your blog, and help you maintain your subscription list, for any publicly accessible blog which publishes a feed.

This blog is about blogging, and I suspect that a few of you have subscribed to one or more of the feeds that are provided here . I use a number of feeds, too, in this blog - look in the sidebar. You can, alternatively, subscribe to a topic related feed from this blog . Maybe my blog, alone, will be authoritative for some readers. Some folks may like to combine my feed with other web sites, for more a more balanced and versatile content. For that, we can use a feed aggregator, like FeedBurner or FeedDigest , and burn a feed of our own. When we burn a feed, we can (subject to options provided by the aggregator, and what's provided in the content) include such details as: Which web sites or feeds we want to read. Whether to include author, date, title, and / or web site of the original article. What specific subjects to include. Once the feed is burned, we can then decide what format we wish to use, when including the information on our blog. Depending upon the feed aggregator,...

As a web master (blog master), besides adding posts and enhancing the template, you have a third activity which is almost as time consuming. You will be constantly connecting your web site (blog) to other web sites and blogs. In many cases, you'll simply send the owners of the other web site (blog) a request to link to your blog. For links to some web sites, you'll not use email, you'll use an online wizard. To prove ownership of your web site, instead of sending email, you'll add a file of specific name, or maybe specific content, into the web site. You can't add a file to your blog, though - with blogs, you have no control over files and folders - all that you do is publish posts.

Custom feed services, like FeedBurner, give you much more than a native Blogger blog feed. You can aggregate content and pull in material from other blogs and web sites, you can provide more user friendly formatting, and you can even track the number of readers who subscribe to a FeedBurner custom feed. Your Blogger blog even supports your use of a custom feed. If you setup the Post Feed Redirect option , all links in the blog that would reference the native blog post feed are replaced by the custom feed. Your blog readers, when they click on a link that says Click here to subscribe to my feed! automatically subscribe to the custom feed. This is good for your readers, and for you. Unfortunately, use of the feed redirect option isn't a good idea for everybody, immediately. If you're using a Google Sitemap , to make it easier for the search engines to index your blog, and bring you more readers, you'll need to use the native blog feed. With the blog redirecting all blog ...

When you setup a Custom Domain, the migration process for Blogger access to the blog is transparent. The setup wizard provides encouraging advice We won't leave your readers behind! http://myblog.blogspot.com will redirect to your custom domain. Not all non Google services will update the blog URL properly, when you publish to a custom domain.

When you setup a Blogger blog, and use a properly configured feed , the combinations of comments, labels, and posts feeds can do wonders for making your blog more accessible and maintainable. You have a number of feeds, with URLs based upon the URL of the blog, to work with. For more possibilities, you can use a custom feed , provided by an aggregation service like FeedBurner or FeedDigest. When you use a custom feed, you can even redirect references, within the blog, to the custom feed, so you don't have to manually reconfigure things like post footer feed links.

Most, but not all, blog owners eagerly anticipate the arrival, upon their blog, by the search engine spiders. The spiders come to index your blog, when the search engines recognise your blog's existence in the Blogosphere. For those blog owners who don't want their blogs indexed, Blogger provides the settings, in Settings - Basic - Privacy , "Add your blog to our listings?" (for internal Blogger spiders, and Blogger links) and "Let search engines find your blog?" (for external spiders).

Typically, a blog is for you to share - with your friends, or with one special friend. It doesn't have to be though, and sometimes you want nobody else to read it. The most secure blog is one that doesn't exist. Short of that, you can have one where nobody has permissions to read it. In some cases, you publish a blog to generate a feed. You want people (specific people) to read the feed, but you don't want the world at large to know about the blog. When you do that, there are two settings, in Settings - Basic, which will interest you. Add your blog to our listings? - If you select "No" your blog will not appear in the Blogger home page, Blogger Play, the "Next Blog" link, and similar places, but it will still be available on the Internet. Let search engines find your blog? - If you select "No", everyone can still view your blog but search engines will be instructed not to crawl it. If you want to have a feed, you cannot make the blog priv...

Besides letting your readers view your blog , promptly and regularly yet at their convenience, and letting your readers view the contents of other blogs and web sites while viewing your blog, there's a third use for blog feeds. Let your readers see a digest, or index, of your latest posts. Look in the sidebar, near the bottom - for the two sections "The Real Blogger Status - Comments", and "The Real Blogger Status - Posts". Those are two Blogger Feed widgets, which display the comments feed, and the posts feed, for this blog, respectively. Then, look at the very bottom of this blog. There you'll see a digested copy of the latest posts, using a custom feed from FeedDigest . Compare the Real Blogger Status posts feed in the sidebar, and the equivalent feed at the bottom, and you'll find a few differences. Both FeedBurner and FeedDigest offer a few useful options that help you make a feed of your blog, showing what you like. The Blogger widget has its ...

The newsfeeds provided on your blog, when you activate them, are a great way for you to encourage your readers to read your blog frequently - at their convenience, rather than yours - and reliably view each of your newest posts. Once you activate the feeds , your blog will have a small line at the bottom of the page (in main page view) Subscribe to: Posts (Atom) or at the bottom of the post (in post view) Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom) Hopefully, you see the difference there. In main page view, you get the All Posts feed subscription for the blog, and in post view you get the Comments feed subscription for that post. None of that offers the full range of possible feeds, and any of the possibilities may interest any given reader. To advertise my blog feeds, I have an additional post describing those feeds , and I have a colourful (OK, orange) icon which advertises that post. Look at the top of the sidebar, just below the Followers badge . See the orange "XML" but...