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Follow through on comments

Table of contents for Mom Blogging Advice

Have you noticed the “U Comment, I Follow” badges on many blogs? Even if you’re on Blogger, you can join the “Dofollow” movement.

What’s “Dofollow”? It’s a reaction to the automatic code that most blogging platforms attach to comment links (both the names of your commenters and any links they include in their comments). This code, rel=”nofollow”, was created to tell search engines that you don’t really trust this link, so they shouldn’t take this link as a “vote” for or endorsement of it.

Why should you remove “nofollow”? It’s like a nice little gift to give your commenters (and possibly an incentive for people to comment on your blog!). Here on MamaBlogga, our current policy is to remove the “nofollow” tags from your name link in the comments after you’ve made ten comments (handled via plugin). You can share the link love, too!

How to Remove Nofollow
You can remove the nofollow tag pretty easily. In fact, if you’re on WordPress, there’s an abundance of plugins that will do this for you quite painlessly (Andy Beard has an “ultimate” list of these). Other programs require a little bit of programming work, but it’s well worth it.

Moveable Type/TypePad
Moveable Type-based platforms are a little more tricky. In addition to adding a “nofollow,” they also implement a redirect. For example, instead of a link going straight to “MamaBlogga.com” it goes first to “http://www.typepad.com/t/comments?__mode=red&user_id=715412&id=72558418” (I made the numbers up) and then to “MamaBlogga.com.” Once again, this isn’t very nice as far as search engines go. For removing the nofollow and this redirect on Moveable Type, see Now is a Long Time Too. For TypePad, see ConverStations.

Blogger
For Blogger, go to Layout>Edit HTML. Check the little “Expand Widgets Templates” box. Scroll down to the comments section (it would probably be useful to paste your code into Notepad and use the Find function). Find this code: <a expr:href=’data:comment.authorUrl’ rel=’nofollow’> . Delete the “rel=’nofollow'” portion and save your layout.

Update: this will remove the nofollow from comments when viewed on a single post, but not when viewed in a popup or separate window from Blogger. For example, when you view a single post on Miscellaneous Adventures of an Aussie Mum, the “nofolllow” is removed from the comments. However, if you view the same comments in a separate page or popup window, the nofollow is still there. Those second windows are on a Blogger domain, and as far as I know, there’s nothing you can do about it. 🙁

(If you’re on the old Blogger template, this is found under Template>Edit HTML. The code to replace is <a href=”>$BlogBacklinkURL$>” rel=”nofollow”><$BlogBacklinkTitle$></a> you can’t remove nofollow from commenters .)

When making a comment on a Blogger/BlogSpot blog
Blogger will still use a similar redirect scheme to TypePad, only the link leads to something like “http://www.blogger.com/profile/16523599384736451872.” However, as a commenter, you can get around this. If the blog allows, you’ll have three options on the comments: your blogger profile, Other and Anonymous. Your blogger profile is the default, but it creates a link to your blogger profile, and not your blog. However, if you select Other, you can enter whatever name and URL that you like.

Be sure to stay tuned next week for another helpful blogging tip and an exciting MamaBlogga announcement!

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Blog headers & favicons

Table of contents for Mom Blogging Advice

Ready to make your blog unique? This may look like intense coding, but it’s really not that hard.

Favicons
Favicons are the little pictures that show up next to your blog’s name on the address bar. Look where it says “http://www.mamablogga.com”—see the tiny picture of Hayden? So cute.

Here’s another example (the little pink 5, the MP, the Gmail logo):
Where are your favicons?

Favicons also show up in bookmarks, which helps visitors remember your site better:
Where are your favicons? in bookmarks

I know you want one now—and you’re not alone. In fact, some of my favorite blogs are without favicons. So I made some for them:

scribbit: scribbitfavicon; An Island Life: islandlifefavicon; 5 Minutes for Mom: 5minfavicon
(If there’s one there for you, feel free to take it!)

(To make your own, create a square image and reduce it down to 16 x 16. Michelle at scribbit mentions a site that will create a favicon for you. You may want to save it as favicon.ico; read on to find out why.)

Now what? Well, if you’re your own hosting, just look through your files and find ‘favicon.ico.’ (If you’re on Bluehost (aff), for example, it’s under the www folder.) Upload your own favicon.ico and overwrite the file.

If you’re not hosting your blog yourself (i.e. you’re on wordpress.com, typepad.com or blogspot.com), don’t despair! You can get rid of the W/speech bubble/B. Upload your picture to your blog (you can use an old post that you don’t mind sticking an image in, or you can simply use a draft—the post doesn’t have to be published). Copy the location of the image. (In Blogger, it’s something like http://bp2.blogger.com/<crazy strings of letters & numbers>/favicon.ico . Replace the example.com URL in the code below with the URL of your picture:

<link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://example.com/favicon.ico" />
<link rel="icon" href="http://example.com/favicon.ico" />

In Blogger, go to Template > Edit HTML. After the opening <head> tag, paste the above code (with your picture’s URL). Save and check it out! In WordPress & TypePad, if you can edit your <head> tags, do the same there.

Can’t find the right place? Here’s a screen shot to help. The first arrow shows the favicon code; the second shows the place for the next part.
Branding headers in Blogger

Branded Headers
Add a tagline or phrase to describe your blog in your headers: mine is “mom’s search for meaning,” scribbit’s is “A Blog About Motherhood in Alaska” (Michelle mentioned this in January).

In WordPress, there’s a plugin to help with this, though even I had trouble getting it to work for a while (now it works great). When editing your headers in Blogger, WordPress or TypePad, leave what’s already there and add something right before the </title> tag. This phrase will appear on every page on your site (and some of your friends might start using it in their links back to your blog).

Not only can this have some effect on your search engine rankings, but (more importantly in my opinion) it also helps your visitors figure out what your site is about. I know I’m very used to looking at my site; I know exactly what it’s about and how it works and how to use the navigation. However, if a visitor comes to my site for the first time, I want him/her to be able to figure out what my site is all about very quickly.

Any questions/clarifications/cries for help? Leave them in the comments and you might win a prize!

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What’s RSS?

Table of contents for Mom Blogging Advice

RSS is an important acronym in the blogosphere. It’s usually interpreted as Really Simple Syndication, so we’ll start with the really simple and work our way up. I think we have something for even the most seasoned blogger here.

Basic
First, an excellent explanation of the easiest way to keep up with dozens (hundreds!) of blogs from Common Craft:

Also under “basics,” your blog generates an RSS feed automatically (unless you’ve disabled this feature).

Novice
FeedBurner “burns” your blog feed for you, making it easy for your readers to subscribe in any feed reader. If you click on the green “Subscribe” button in the sidebar, you’ll be taken to a page to choose your feed reader.

FeedBurner can also add a lot of cool features to your feed. You can add information at the end of messages in a feed reader like copyrights, number of comments, social bookmarking stuff—there are more than 100 “FeedFlares.” FeedBurner can also track visitors to your site and show you how many subscribers you have.

Intermediate
Many people use only partial feeds for their sites, sending only excerpts or summaries to their readers. There are a few reasons for this; among them is the legitimate concern about unscrupulous people republishing your blog with zero effort—and making money off your hard wraught writing.

However, the benefits of full feeds outweigh the risks. [UPDATE: the full story on full feeds] Also note that many people publish excerpt feeds believing that more people will visit their site to read their full posts—but FeedBurner CEO Rick Klau says they’ve seen no evidence to support that. See Partial Feeds Don’t Draw Visitors at Marketing Pilgrim for more on the subject.

In Blogger, you can switch from excerpts to full feeds by going to Settings > Site Feed. From the pull down menu, select “Full.” (If you’re in Advanced Mode, the second and third options are at your discretion.)

bloggerfullfeedsss.jpg

In WordPress, select Options > Reading.

wpfullfeedsss1.png

Under “Syndication Feeds,” for the option “For each article, show,” select “Full text.”

wpfullfeedsss2.png

See Semantically driven for details on how to switch to full feeds in TypePad.

Advanced
Make sure your readers find your FeedBurner feed (instead of the default, less user-friendly feed Blogger, WordPress or Typepad creates). You may have to code it into your site. For example, in Blogger, go to Template > Edit HTML. In your code, find the line:

<b:include data=’blog’ name=’all-head-content’/>

Delete it and replace it with the following (after you’ve customized it):

<meta content=’text/html; charset=UTF-8′ http-equiv=’Content-Type’/>
<meta content=’true’ name=’MSSmartTagsPreventParsing’/>
<meta content=’blogger’ name=’generator’/>
<link href=’http://feeds.feedburner.com/YOUR FEEDBURNER FEED NAME HERE’ rel=’alternate’ title=’YOUR BLOG NAME HERE RSS Feed’ type=’application/rss+xml’/>

Blogger now offers integration with FeedBurner. Here are the instructions on integrating your FeedBurner feed with your Blogger blog. TypePad also features this capability.

WordPress has a handy FeedBurner feed replacement plugin to do that heavy coding for you.

Total pro
If you’re comfortable in Apache, consider Daniel’s strategy for making sure that your subscribers are using the correct feed even if you leave FeedBurner (from Daily Blog Tips). (To tell the truth, I can only vaguely understand this one.)

Also, look at another post from Marketing Pilgrim (and no, this one’s not by me, it’s by Jeremy Luebke) on why you should not use click tracking on FeedBurner (read on the comments to see how to fix that).

Anybody out there quite proficient in MT/Typepad? I started on Blogger and had to learn WordPress for work before I made the switch to WordPress here on MamaBlogga. If anyone can give some pointers on the same issues on TypePad, it would be appreciated!

UPDATE: A big thank you to Jen once again at Semantically driven for explaining how to set your feed to full posts on Typepad. She had got screenshots and everything. Man, I should’ve thought of that. I’ll have to fix this. Screenshots added. Thank you, Jen!!

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Why I love WordPress

Yes, I may miss Blogger, but I’m glad I made the switch to WordPress. And I’ll tell you why.

  1. Customizable. You can make WordPress do just about anything, it seems, by simply finding and uploading the right plugin. Like today, I wanted a plugin to selectively remove the “nofollow” on commenters’ links (coming soon). I Googled “selectively remove nofollow links wordpress” and found a big list of plugins to do just that in a few different ways.
  2. I feel professional, probably partially because this is the platform I blog with for work.
  3. It’s pretty easy to use, though there is a bit of a learning curve.
  4. I feel cool when I get to fiddle with things in the back end. Half the time I’m working on my site, I’ve got WordPress and my file manager or FTP open, uploading plugins and tweaking files.
  5. It’s a complete content management system. No comments on that one… Sorry.
  6. All sorts of cool built-in features like password protecting posts and trackbacks (couldn’t do that with Blogger!) and lots of stuff.

Of course, WordPress isn’t for everyone. If you want to, you can stay with Blogger. I give you permission.

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Why I miss Blogger

After a week here in WordPress and my own domain, I have to admit that there are some things I miss about Blogger. I don’t regret switching to WordPress, but there were a couple things that I liked or even preferred about Blogger.

  1. And a big #1: Label posts without opening them. Labeling posts is roughly equivalent to putting them in categories or tagging them. In Blogger, you just check a box next to the post title on your post editing page and label them (like you might in GMail). Yeah.
  2. I felt cool using Greasemonkey to ‘pimp’ my Blogger. It was actually the initial reason I downloaded Greasemonkey for Firefox. Sure, WordPress has ‘plugins,’ but I feel like so much less of a haX0r.
  3. Set up another blog in like no minutes. Yeah, this is probably why there are so many splogs on blogspot, but it’s fun. I set up five different blogs, with different topics, on one account.
  4. It’s easier to tweak your template. I’m really scared of ruining my perfect php files on WordPress. With Blogger, I was relatively confident in tweaking the CSS and HTML. Sometimes I ruined things; then I hit ‘clear changes.’
  5. It’s easy in general. Everything is simpler in Blogger. It’s a simpler platform. WordPress is a ‘professional’ platform.
  6. It’s totally free. Okay, so WordPress itself is free, and if I were hosted on WordPress.com, that would be just as free. But hosting my own site is not free. I’m okay with that, though, since I have a job now.

So, after seven days, there are a few things I miss about Blogger, but I’m definitely not done customizing my WordPress yet with some more cool plugins.

Remember, you can stay with Blogger if you want, but here’s how to switch to WordPress if you’d prefer.

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The Ultimate Guide to Migrating from Blogger to WordPress

Table of contents for Migrating your blog

Check out the most recent guide to migrating from Blogger to WordPress, from November 2008 August 2009 February 2012.

UPDATED 13 July 07 (step 6)

I assume that you want to move from yourblog.blogspot.com to www.yourblog.com. Otherwise, I say, don’t bother. There’s no benefit to moving from yourblog.blogspot.com to yourblog.wordpress.com unless you really want to use WordPress. I recommend, if you like your Blogger template (especially if you’ve heavily customized it), using Blogger’s capability to publish to your own custom domain (WordPress’s similar feature is a paid add-on). If you want to, you can stay with Blogger. The blogging police won’t come and get you.

But if you’re sure you want to switch, then here’s what you do.

1. Get a domain. Don’t own a domain? I recommend www.GoDaddy.com for domain registration; I use them mostly because I’d heard of them before. Their prices are okay. I recommend three things here:

  • Get private domain registration. No junk mail, no strangers getting your address from your whois info.
  • If available, get yourblog.com , yourblog.net and yourblog.org. Sometimes GoDaddy offers a deal where you can get free private registration when you register 3 domains. (Then redirect .org and .net to the .com using account management. Select 301 redirects.)
  • Search for “GoDaddy coupon.” Click on the first result and use whichever coupon will save you the most money (calculate out the % to see which one that is if you have to).

2. Get hosting. I recommend Bluehost.com; they came highly recommended and are a pretty good deal. Also, they’re one of WordPress’s recommended hosts and feature a very simple install for WordPress.

3. Install WordPress. With Bluehost, just login to your control panel, click on Fantastico under Addons/Plugins, select WordPress on the left, click New Installation on the right. Fill in the forms and you’re done. If your host doesn’t have a similar install, you’ll have to install manually. It shouldn’t be too hard;

4. Login to your WordPress (might take a little time for the installation to “take”). Select “Options” then “Permalinks.” Select “Custom” and type this line in the box:

/%year%/%monthnum%/%postname%.html

5. Import your blog from Blogger. You absolutely MUST use the Blogger RSS Import plugin. If this link doesn’t work, try again later. Follow its directions. It loves you. One day it will be included in WordPress. This brings all your posts and comments over.

UPDATE, 16 May 07: That day is today. This import function is included in WordPress 2.2. The other steps here are still important, though, to maintain your permalinks.

6. Delete the Blogger RSS Import plugin from your website. COMPLETELY.

UPDATE, 13 July 07: Now, Blogger enables you to transfer your subscribers seamlessly as well. If you haven’t already, sign up for a FeedBurner account. Then, login to Blogger and go to Settings > Site Feed. In the Post Feed Redirect URL box, enter your new FeedBurner address. This will redirect your subscribers, but you’ll want to be sure to integrate your FeedBurner feed with your new WordPress blog. (FeedSmith, owned by FeedBurner, is a plugin that does just that!)

7. Still in Blogger, select Settings for the blog you want to transfer. Select Publishing. Click the top link, “Custom domain.” Type in your new domain, www.yourblog.com. Save. Now all your links will transfer automatically to your own domain, all your posts are on WordPress and you’re ready to blog on wit’ yo’ bad self.

Afternote. Clean up: You might have to import your images to WordPress as well. If they suddenly stop showing up on WordPress, then you need to import them. If you don’t have very many (I think I have 80-90 and I’ll end up doing this by hand because I’m afraid of the warnings on established plugins), you can easily “recode” your pictures. Login to your WordPress in one tab/window and login at http://picasaweb.google.com/ in another. In Picasa, click on the album for your blog. Select the photo you’re replacing in WordPress. On the right side, click on “Link to this Post” and copy the first link they give you. In WordPress, edit the appropriate post, looking at the code tab, and replace the link that follows the code <img src= with the link you just copied from Picasa. I think that will continue to work.

Also, unfortunately, your Technorati links will not move with your blog. HOWEVER, links themselves are redirected.

Disclosure: the GoDaddy and Bluehost links are affiliate links.

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