Wordpress vs. Blogger

I recently asked the community of bloggers over at the Digital Point forums for their opinions on two of the leading free blogging platforms available, WordPress and Blogger. I currently use Blogger for this blog, but have heard so many good things about WordPress that I decided to find out more. And to my surprise, as a long-time Blogger user, WordPress came out way ahead in my informal poll. Here are some of the reasons provided by WordPress fans:

• WordPress offers more control over blog layout and publication settings, and there is a larger selection of user-developed features such as blog themes and plugins for WordPress than there is for Blogger.

• If you host a WordPress blog on your own domain and server, it's easy to implement Google AdSense to generate revenue from your blog. You can do this either by adding AdSense code directly to the blog template (same as you do in Blogger) or by using a special AdSense plugin.

• There is a large community of WordPress users developing custom blog themes, plugins, and other features, as well as providing support to newbie bloggers.

• SEO advantages: it's far easier to optimize a WordPress blog for search engines than it is for a Blogger site. Search optimization involves fine-tuning your blog's URLs, page titles, descriptions, headers, tags, and other key metadata to ensure it achieves a high ranking for relevant terms in search engine results. One responder noted that they'd created their blog using WordPress and never did any search optimizing on their own - but thanks to WordPress's built-in optimization features, the blog was getting over 500 hits from search engines per day within 6 months. Pretty impressive.
  
  
• One SEO feature that especially interested me is the ability to customize your permalink URLs. With Blogger, you're pretty much stuck with long, convoluted, date-stamped URLs for each post. But WordPress lets you configure these permalink URLs however you want, cutting out a lot of the extra baggage that can hurt your post's search rankings and frankly just looks weird.

• I also got the general sense that WordPress is regarded as a more professional blogging platform, and that because of its many different themes and display options, it's much easier to give your blog those little professional-looking touches than it is with Blogger.

Based on all the feedback I've received on the advantages of WordPress, I'll definitely have to give some serious thought to switching blog platforms - though I've got so much published on Blogger already it would be quite a project, but maybe worthwhile in the long run.

Got your own opinions on WordPress and Blogger? Feel free to post 'em in the comments below!

Encourage the Right Kind of Comments

While you're filtering comment spam with word verification and moderation tools, you should also be encouraging readers to post relevant, constructive comments on your blog. The right kind of blog comments are valuable in a number of ways:

• Each new comment increases the chance of another comment, as other visitors read and react to it. Ideally you'll end up with a full-blown discussion on your hands, with your comments section ending up longer than the original post!


• Readers find comments interesting and will keep coming back to your blog to read them. Thus, they make your blog more "sticky", in the parlance of web design.


• You readers may know more about a particular topic than you do, so you're likely to learn a thing or two from their comments. You may even get an idea for a future blog post from comments left in a previous one.


• The more good, on-topic content you blog has, the more search engines will like it. This makes relevant comments a highly cost-effective (aka, free) search optimization tool. All those new keywords and phrases help improve your search rankings and get your blog listed for more search queries.

A simple way to encourage relevant comments is to include a brief invitation at the end of each blog post. Something like, "Got experiences about topic ____ you'd like to share? Feel free to post them in the comments below!"

You can also write blog posts specifically designed to attract comments - use a provocative question as the title, or make an opinionated statement that readers just can't stop themselves from commenting on.

So...got any ideas about blog comments you'd like to share? Feel free to post them in the comments below! :-)

Promote Your Blog Via Syndication Services

One way to increase your blog's exposure is via syndication services that will make your posts available to other websites to republish. If a high-profile website decides to feature your content, you'll get a prominent byline with a link back to your blog, which can potentially generate significant amounts of traffic and increase your online readership.

The best-known blog syndication service is probably BlogBurst, which boasts such notable publishers as USA Today, Gannett, Reuters, and The Houston Chronicle among its clients. By joining BlogBurst, you'll agree to make your blog's content freely available for these publishers to include on their websites, in return for that byline and link back to your blog. If your blog joins the ranks of BlogBurst's top performers, you'll be eligible for their cash rewards program as well, with payouts ranging from $50 to $1500 for the most widely syndicated blogs.

Another syndication service worth considering is Feedzilla, which operates on a slightly different model from BlogBurst. For syndication fees ranging from $9.95/month to $199.95/month, publishers can pay to receive access to Feedzilla's content "widgets". They can then install these widgets on their sites to display news feeds from up to 150 content providers. Like BlogBurst, Feedzilla enables bloggers to tap into a network of major publishers to increase their visibility. Publishers currently using Feedzilla to display blog and news feeds on their sites include BBC, About.com, The Sun, Reuters, and News Corporation. By joining Feedzilla you also get a chance to earn a share of revenues from advertising they display in those content widgets - in addition to any you earn from the extra traffic they send your way.

The third and final syndication service I'll cover today is Moreover's Webfeed Wizard. Like Feedzilla, the Wizard is an interface for publishers to add feeds of the latest blog content to their own sites. The benefit to the blogger, as with the other syndication services, is increased visibility and traffic back to their blog from links embedded in the syndicated content. Moreover offers a couple other services for bloggers worth checking out as well: their Custom Content Aggregation Services and XML Conversion Services, both featured on the same page.

Key terms: RSS, R.S.S., content, sindication, sindicate, distirbution, trafic, blog-burst, feed zilla, morover, more-over, web-feed

What Should I Blog About? Part 1: Possible Topics for a Personal Blog

If you've been blogging for long there's a good chance you've encountered that periodic curse of authors through the ages: writer's block. Or in this case, blogger's block. You may just find yourself sitting there, perhaps at this very moment, staring at the screen wondering what there could possibly be to write about and marvelling at how you've managed to type all those words so far. What were you thinking? Must've been a fluke, having all those ideas and opinions to express.

Fear not! You're not alone - it's happened to countless writers before, and generally with a happy ending. OK, maybe with the exception of Hemingway. And Virginia Woolf. Possibly a few others. Anyway, moving right along...in this post I'll look at some strategies for breaking through blogger's blog when writing you personal blog. In a future one, I'll be reviewing similar strategies for professional blogs about a particular industry or trade.

Writing a blog is a lot like having a conversation, with the added benefit of not having to worry about anyone interrupt you - well, except yourself. And as with most conversations, there are sometimes lulls in the discussion before it heads off in a new direction. Remember the last time you had one of those lulls while talking to someone? How did it end? Did you come up with a new topic out of the blue, or did the other person? Or perhaps you both just shrugged your shoulders and just walked away. Well, this is one of those moments in your ongoing conversation with your blog.

Perhaps your blog can help break the lull and come up with that new topic for you. Go back through your past posts and see if there are any opportunities to elaborate on an earlier topic, or jump back on a train of thought where it left off. Maybe you posed an open-ended question that this the perfect opportunity to answer. Or presented one side of an argument and can now play devil's advocate by presenting the other side. Have a debate with yourself - a blog is one of the few places you can do so without being looked at strangely.

If that doesn't work, review your own recent personal experiences, positive and negative, and see where those take you. These could include

An encounter with a person, place, or thing you intensely dislike. Rant in excruciating detail about exactly why it was so unpleasant. Be humorous, if possible. Humor is the blogger's greatest ally. After caffeine, of course.

An encounter with a person, place, or thing you absolutely adore and can't live without. Explain just why they are the absolute bestest in the world. But don't get too schmaltzy or self-indulgent. That's tedious. If it's a person and they're cute, don't hesitate to post a photo to illustrate your point.

Your last vacation, if you took one. Include the highlights, the lowlights, things you'd recommend to fellow travelers, and if it didn't go well, a diatribe about things you hated. You can get a lot of mileage out of things you hate. Why do you think there are so many blogs?

Alternatively, explain why you haven't been able to take a vacation in years. Or decades. Of course, if it's work related, it's a good idea not to name any names - but that doesn't mean you can't go into some interesting detail. To be extra safe, say it happened to a friend of yours: "This guy I know who works in Boston at a company that shall remain nameless hasn't taken a vacation in 15 years - here's why it sucks to be him. His boss expects him to provide sponge baths not just on weekdays, but..." Etcetera.

The last movie you saw, musical artist/hack you listened to, book you read, video game you played, trashy supermarket magazine you thumbed through, celebrity you ogled, software you installed, appliance you used, and so on. You must have an opinion about at least one of those events. Include photos whenever relevant.

Speaking of photos, they're worth a lot of words. How many, I forget...but a lot. So when in doubt, post a some photos. They're fun to look at, take up lots of space, and can make your blog seem fascinating without a lot of effort on your part. You can read more on the subject in my post about photo blogs.

Still hitting the cursed wall of blogger's block? Maybe this just isn't the right time to be writing a blog post. If you have a gut feeling that this is the situation, the best thing you can do is accept that fact, however annoying, take a deep breath, get up from your computer, and go do something else for a while. Take a walk. Get some coffee. Play with the dog. Attempt to play with the cat. Take a shower. Mow the lawn. Go make out in the park. Occupy your time doing whatever it is you do when you're not sitting in front of this screen, and don't think about your blog for at least an hour. And maybe in that time you'll have seen, heard, smelled, or done something worth blogging about.

Key terms: writers block, writer's block, brainstorming, ideas, creativity, expression, no clue what the hell to write about

Pinging and Why Everyone's Doing It

If you've blogged for any length of time, like an hour, you've probably come across the term "ping" somewhere out there in the blogosphere by now, or else right in your own blog dashboard. For instance, Blogger gives you the option in the Settings > Publishing tab to send pings to Weblogs.com, which tracks updates to blogs on a near real-time basis.

But I'm already getting ahead of myself - what are these "pings" exactly? A ping is a digital signal (in XML-RPC format, if you care) that your blogging platform or another pinging piece of software can send out on your behalf each time your blog has been updated with new content. Pings are typically used by blog and RSS search and tracking services like search engines, news and RSS aggregators, and RSS feed generators and managers like FeedBurner. So they're a pretty hot commodity for services that want to make sure they're including the latest blog content as soon as it's been published. For example, following a ping, a blog search engine will know to send its crawlers through your blog to index your most recent post for its search results.

Pings also allow these blogophilic services (yes, I just made that term up) to allocate its resources wisely: if there's no ping, they'll assume there's no new content, and will send their crawlers to go index some fresh content instead rather than recrawl what's already in their database.

For you, the blogger, this makes pings a very good thing. Lots of sites out there are just waiting to receive them, eager to include your blog's content prominently in their search listings or RSS feeds. And pings are free to send and can either be sent automatically, or in mere seconds via a manual pinging service.

What's a manual pinging service? Well, one limitation of some automated pingers, like the built-in one in Blogger, is that it doesn't ping all the sites out there that are waiting to hear from you. So there's a need for services that can send multiple pings en masse to many ping-hungry sites at once. All you do is enter your blog's name and URL, select the sites you'd like to ping, and the pingers will do the rest. Here are three well-known ones for you to try:

Ping-O-Matic
PingOat
Blog Flux Ping Service

Let the pinging begin!

Key terms: ping, pinging, blogflux, blog flux, pingomatic, ping-o-matic, pingoat, pingout, ping oat, ping out, send pings

Turn Your Blog Into an Email Newsletter

I'm sure you've seen those sites with the newsletter sign-up form, inviting visitors to submit their email address and join their mailing list. If you're like me it probably seemed like a great idea, but you found the prospect of maintaining the mailing list, putting together a regular newsletter, and coordinating the mailings too complicated for your taste. And you're right, if you were trying to do all that yourself it could turn into quite a headache.

And yet it's still a great idea. After all, a blog is so much like a newsletter that it makes perfect sense to convert each post into a mini-email update. And there are undoubtedly some readers would prefer to read it in that format. Maybe they only find time to check their email in the course of their day, not surf the web. Or maybe they work someplace where their web access is extremely restricted. Or maybe they have no clue what an RSS feed is and don't really want to know. Or maybe they're just nostalgic for the old days of Usenet, when most important online communication came in via their inbox.

The good news is you can broadcast your blog via email pretty easily with a service called FeedBlitz. I found it while I was searching for sites to help promote blog RSS feeds, and it caught my attention immediately since I've always wondered if there was quick and painless way to distribute a blog via email. That's exactly what FeedBlitz does: they'll instantly convert your blog's RSS feed into an email and distribute it automatically to your subscription list.

Here's how it works:

You sign up for a FeedBlitz account, login and enter your RSS feed into their "New Feed" menu.

After you submit the form, they'll email you a sample email with all your recent blog posts. Double check it to make everything looks OK.

If it does, you can then log into your account and grab their HTML code that allows you to add an email subscription form to your blog. Paste this code into your blog template whereever you'd like it to appear, republish, take a minute to make sure everything's formatting correctly on your blog, and if it is, you're all set - you're now a newsletter publisher as well as a blogger!

Ready to get started? This complete intro to the FeedBlitz service tells you everything you'll need to know.

Start a Blogroll

Actually, before you start one let's define what a blogroll is. Basically, it's a list of blogs you link to from your own blog. Usually your blogroll would go in the sidebar of your blog, and would include links to blogs you read frequently, or wish you read frequently. It could also include blogs you've exchanged links with - they add your blog to their blogroll, and in return you link to them from yours. Exchanging links between blogrolls can be an easy way to begin generating traffic to your blog and building visibility in a community of like-minded bloggers.

If you like, you can also organize your blogroll in various ways. Alphabetically is the simplest and most obvious, but you can also create categories for the different types of blogs based on their subject matter, personal or professional focus, writing style and quality, frequency of updates, or any other criteria that will make your blogroll more useful, comprehensive, and comprehensible.

You can make updating, maintaining and enhancing your blogroll an easier process with a blogroll manager like Blogrolling.com. Their tool allows you to add new blogs to your blogroll by simply clicking a link in your web browser, a much quicker process than going into your blog template and manually adding new links. The Blogrolling tool also lets you categorize your blog list and keeps track of when each blog was last updated. If a blog's gone stale and hasn't been updated for years, you might want to replace it with a more current one.

If you add a new blog to your blogroll, it's always a good idea to let them know by emailing them or posting a comment on the blog. They'll appreciate hearing about the new link, and may even reciprocate by adding your blog to their blogroll. With each new connection you make, you're expanding your network of readers a little further. And it all starts with that first little link in your sidebar...

Key terms: blogroll, blog-roll, blogrole, blogrolling, blogroling, blog-rolling, blog-roling

Blog Your Novel

In the 19th Century Charles Dickens famously serialized novels including "The Pickwick Papers" and "Great Expectations" in monthly installments in newspapers and magazines. Today he'd undoubtedly be doing the same thing, but quite likely in blog form instead.

Blogging offers a cheap and easy way to serialize and publicize literary works online. Indeed, blogged literature has acquired its own web nickname - "blooks." Yes, blooks. Fun to say, isn't it?

So maybe you've got a novel you're working on, or one that's been sitting on the shelf or in your hard drive for a while. Maybe you're tired of making the rounds of potential publishers and literary agents and getting the same old brush-off, that politely worded rejection letter informing you your manuscript just isn't a good fit for their list at the moment. Until they change their tune you might as well upload the first few chapters to a blog, link it up in various blog directories, spend some time publicizing the RSS feed, and start reaching all those potential readers the publishers and agents apparently can't be bothered with.

With a blog, each chapter can fit neatly into its own post, and successive posts can be linked together so readers can find their way through the narrative as easily as turning a page. Readers can also offer their comments on each chapter, feedback that could prove valuable if you decide to revise your novel. You can even experiment with different ways of making all your hard work pay off. For instance:

Offer the complete manuscript as a PDF file available for purchase via PayPal. Readers who get caught up in the early "teaser" chapters of your serialized version may not feel like waiting around for you to blog the next ones. By making the complete text available, you're offering these impatient readers the instant gratification they demand. For a modest fee, of course.

How fancy you get with delivering the full digital manuscript is up to you: you could simply email it upon receiving payment, or if you're more tech-savvy, create a special download location on your blog that's only accessible to paying readers.

Alternatively, you can make your novel a subscription service, with just a few chapters available for free and the rest available to paying subscribers behind a log-in. Blogger, for example, allows you to make your blog available to only selected readers via its "Permissions" settings. Create one blog with your free, publicly available chapters, and then a second blog with your restricted, subscription-only chapters. When someone PayPals you a subscription fee, you can then grant them access to your private blog where they can read your novel in its entirety.

Or, after building up a substantial online audience for your blogged novel, or blook, you could then approach a publisher or agent with your traffic stats and ask if they'd like to represent a popular online literary property. By demonstrating your ability to attract a large readership, you can now make a much better case for the saleability of your manuscript.

These are just a few ideas to get you started...and if you're creative enough to write a novel, you're certainly creative enough to come up with even more ways to promote it online. Write on!

Key terms: novel, fiction, narrative, literary blog, litblog, literature weblog, blook, serialize, promotion, publicity, publication

Start a Photo Blog

Maybe you're tired of staring at text, text and more text on your blog all day. Then before typing yet another word you should consider starting up a photo blog. With the right blogging platform it's the easiest thing in the world, and a great way to share your photography with a larger audience. All you'll need to get started is a digital camera and the software to transfer images from the camera to your computer - which should come with just about any new digital model you buy these days. My camera's an old Canon PowerShot S200 Digital Elph and I use the Canon's ZoomBrowser software that came with it to import and edit the photos on my laptop. ZoomBrowser's fine for my purposes, but if you've got a high-end imaging suite like PhotoShop installed, you have even more options in terms of editing and enhancing your images.

One the key steps in preparing photos for a blog is to reduce their file size a little bit. Images coming straight from a digital camera can take up quite a lot of memory, many megabytes worth, which can make them slow to load in a web browser. There's no point in having a photo blog if it takes 10 minutes to open and no one waits around past the first two. By reducing the resolution of your photos you'll make the files a lot lighter and therefore faster to upload and view.

If your original photo files are in a memory-hogging format like TIFF, Bitmap, or PhotoShop's PSD, you'll also want to convert them to a web standard format like JPEG, which will reduce their file size even further. However, whatever you do, don't discard your original image! Make sure to "Save As" rather than save over the original photo, since you'll need that high-resolution version if you ever want to order photo prints or maybe even sell high-res images from your blog.

Once you've got a set of images you'd like to feature on a blog, any blogging platform worth its code will enable you to upload them with a few quick clicks. In Blogger, which I use, there's a little image icon in the toolbar of my blog edit page. When I click it, I get a form that looks like this:

In fact I just used this form to upload the image of this form. Mind boggling! By selecting the photo file you'd like to upload, the size you'd like it displayed in, and its orientation on the page, you can specify exactly how you'd like each photo presented. With Blogger, it's important to know that the photo will appear at the top of your blog post after you upload it. You can then cut and paste the image code to whereever you'd like it within your post.

Once you've got photos uploaded to your blog post, you can then add your own titles and comments using the standard text interface. You can also invite your blog readers to add their comments, or submit their own photos for display in your blog. This is where I get most of the photos for my own photo blog, The Yard Art Project. You could even run a photo contest to encourage submissions and generate buzz about your blog.

If you don't feel like setting up a blog but would still like to share your photos online, there's no shortage of free services that will let you do so. Yahoo's Flickr and Google's Picasa are two of the better-known ones. Both allow blog-like captions and comments from you and your friends that make photo sharing so fun.

So if you've been wondering how to share your photos online, that's just about all there is to it. Now you have no excuse for letting all those great photos languish unviewed in your camera!

Key terms: photo blog, photoblog, photo blogging, photo bloging, photo sharing, photo shareing, digital photography, dijital photos