The main goal of this blog is to help people bridge the gap between their “real” life and their “online” life. Some people have a rich online life that is limited to email and browsing, but think they absolutely cannot have a website of their own, that they don’t know where to start, and so forth.
The beauty of this 31-day challenge promoted by Problogger’s Darren Rowse is that it helps you, step by step, improve your blog (but a lot of the advice is valuable also for other kinds of websites) with specific tasks. The only thing you need to bear in mind is that for this challenge to be truly helpful, you must already have a blog or website. This challenge is for those who are not absolute beginners, but are not yet fully fledged professionals. The in-betweens. I fall into this category, so it is the ideal challenge for me. I have a few followers, I have some subscribers, I have a newsletter that is slowly growing, and I am set up for advertising and affiliate sales. I just have to find new ways of letting people know that I exist and giving them good content they can enjoy and perhaps learn something from.
In this post I am going to give you a rundown of the daily tasks so far in the challenge, with a brief description of each, but I will pay special attention to those tasks that I think are the most useful (though not always the easiest). Here goes:

• Day 4 – Analyze a Top Blog in Your Niche – the biggest difficulty here is not the analysis, but finding blogs in your category. The best places to look are: Google Blog Search and Technorati. Both of these services gather the top blogs in many categories and allow you to search the categories. This task is interesting because you have to really think about who you are as a blogger, whom you are talking to, your audience, what you are trying to achieve. For this blog, it would seem easy enough: tech tips for the computer-challenged. Guess what, I can’t find a top blog that really does what I am trying to do here. There are a lot of how-to blogs but not many that are trying to help people who think the web is too hard or has passed them by marry their offline skills with their online potential. Once you find the blogs, you look at various different things they are doing and make note of the ones you think would help you the most. Then you plan on adopting them, and then you start doing it.
• Day 5 – Email a Blog Reader – A great way to build your readership and develop loyal readers and subscribers is to interact directly with them. If you have a few comments already on your blog, email someone who left a comment in person and connect with them by expanding on the topic of the comment. You can also leave comments on their blogs, and respond to their comment in your own comment section. All this will help build community.
• Day 6 – 27 Must Read Tips and Tutorials for Bloggers – This title is self-explanatory. Head on over to Problogger and give a few of the great articles gathered here a gander. You will learn a lot!
• Day 7 – Write a Link Post – The task for day 7 is exactly what I am doing with this very post. This touches upon a theme that I consider to be of vital importance when doing anything online. The virtual community is different from “real life” communities in many ways, but there are far more similarities between the two than there are differences. The same rules of courtesy, generosity, kindness, reciprocity and just plain common sense apply in both worlds. And some commonplace truths are even more true online than off. Chief among these is: the more you give, the more you get (or any other variation on the “what goes around comes around” theme). I hope that this blog will become a place where people come when they want advice about how to do things online, where they feel they can ask questions and get answers. So why would I point you in the direction of Problogger, a site that does many of the things I want to do so much better, has been around for so much longer, has so much more rich and valuable content than I have, etc? Because Problogger is the best site for those who want to learn about blogging professionally. And that is only one of the things I want to help people do. One of the chief functions of this blog is exactly this, to point people in the right directions. If you look for a blog on blogging on Google, you will find thousands of blogs that say they do what Problogger does. How are you supposed to know which one to choose as your go-to resource? That’s what I am here for. I comb and scour the web and I ferret out the best sites, and then I tell you about them and point you in the right direction. This way, people come to me to get directions, and they get directions to the best resources. Everybody wins. I get readers, Problogger and other top sites get readers, and our readers get the best advices, the best resources there are. So when you are building a site, don’t feel competitive towards other bloggers or website owners. There is room for all of us. The important thing is to feel that you have something unique, something of your own to contribute. If that is the case, there is no need to compete. You will find your audience. But you will find it much faster, more easily, and it will be more fun if you build a community and communicate with other bloggers.
• Day 8 – Interlink Your Old Blog Posts – If you have written posts that are in some way related, it’s a good idea to link them together. People will stay longer on your blog, going from one article to another, and it will have the added benefit of raising your rank in Google. Links coming from other sites to yours are the most useful, but internal links also count. Occasionally I refer to a previous post in one of my articles, and link to it, but the ongoing way I have created internal links is to create Series of articles (in this blog I have a Series page, and this Challenge is the second series I have started, but in my other blog, turtle^haus, I have many article series). I also use the plugin that automatically suggests related posts at the end of each article. If the article is part of a series, it will recommend other articles of the series, but sometimes it will also recommend others.
• Day 9 – Join a Forum and Start Participating – This is a tough one for me, but it could be one of your strongest tools to building a large fan base for your blog. It’s not easy to find forums that are “right up your alley” and even when you do, they are not always easy to navigate and use. In addition, they are very time consuming. The good thing about forums, if you have the stamina to get a handle on using them, is that every time you post a comment, answer someone’s question, etc., you are adding a link to your own blog coming from outside (the best for generating traffic and raising your ranking) and you are also creating a community. If what you say is useful to people, they will click on your links and read your blog, and many of them will become loyal readers. Don’t underestimate the power of forums, because they could be the places where your potential readers are already gathering online.
• Day 10 – Set up ‘Alerts’ to Monitor What is Happening in Your Niche – This is a topic I have on my editorial calendar to talk about; in particular Google Alerts. The task here is to set up some online alerts that will deliver to your email inbox the links to what other people are saying online about topics you are interested in, need to know about, are relevant to your blog. It’s quick and easy. Two most important benefits: stay on top of breaking news so you can build and maintain your reputation as an expert in your field, and get ideas for posts when you are running dry. Several types of alerts are outlined here, all very useful.
• Day 11 – Come up with 10 Post Ideas – This is a great task for anyone wanting to create online content (or even offline content, for that matter). Take a few posts you have written and brainstorm about how the same topics could be expanded. It doesn’t take long and it’s surprisingly easy. The best part is that this way you develop content that has a direction, rather than a random assemblage of unrelated posts.
• Day 12 – Develop an Editorial Calendar for Your Blog – This is something I’ve done myself, and have also written about. This could be one of your most important tools. You can use a spreadsheet or paper (like I do) but you assign a post per day or per writing day (not everyone posts every day). Use the posts you brainstormed about in the previous task, and as you write new ideas will come to you. This takes a lot of the fear out of blogging, because you already know you have material to write about.
• Day 13 – Take a Trip to the ‘Mall’ and Improve Your Blog – This is an exercise in observation. If you watch people’s behavior in a shopping mall, you will get lots of ideas on how they behave online as well. A few examples of things learned: People often do what other people are doing, bestseller lists work, people like to be acknowledged but not overwhelmed.
• Day 14 – Update a Key Page on Your Blog – This is useful and important to remember. Some key pages to update are the About page and the Contact page on your blog. If you don’t have them, create them now, and periodically go and update them. It will improve your traffic and your relationship with your readers.
• Day 15 – Find a Blog Buddy – Many new bloggers try to forge relationships with top-tier bloggers, knowing that even one link from one of those can lead to a huge surge in traffic. We must remember, however, that it’s better to have a slow and steady growth than a few peaks with very deep valleys in between. Having a blogging buddy means that each can help build the popularity of the other’s blog. My buddy is Mario Kluser of Mario LIVE! and he and I very often link to each other’s posts, comment on each other’s posts, Digg, Stumble and favorite on Technorati each other’s posts. By doing this we help each other gain in popularity and visibility. We also encourage and motivate each other. If you don’t have a buddy, head over to the 31-DBBB forums and you’re bound to find someone!
• Day 16 – Solve a Problem – 7 Ways to Identify Reader Problems – This is the perfect type of task for a blog like this one, whose goal is exactly that, to solve readers’ problems. I have the “Ask Egg Bird” feature in this blog, and when a reader asks me a question I write a post or in some cases a series of posts to show that reader how to solve the problem. The fact is that if one person has that problem, chances are a lot of other people have it too. If you have readers who ask questions, great. If not, there are tools and methods of seeing what kind of searches bring people to your blog.
• Day 17 – Watch a First-Time Reader Use Your Blog – Find a friend or colleague who has never seen your blog, offer them coffee and sit them down in front of your blog. Observe how they navigate, what they look at, where they linger, etc. Then ask them questions about their experience. This is invaluable, and should be done periodically.
• Day 18 – Create a Sneeze Page for Your Blog – A sneeze page is a page that links to posts buried deep in your archives. Over time the many posts in the archives are buried deeper and deeper, and blogs are designed in such a way that a new reader only sees the most recent posts. By creating a page that links back to many good past posts, you will not lose the value of that content, and it’s very good for Search Engine Optimization (SEO) as well. My Series pages are meant to function as sneeze pages. As I go along, every time I create a series I am guaranteeing a longer life for the posts that are part of it. The Series page directs readers to all the articles I’ve ever written as part of a series.
• Day 19 – Write an Opinion Post on Your Blog – If you just stick to reporting things, even if they are relevant to your niche or field, you will inevitably end up blending into the crowd. When you express your opinion about the things you write about you are showing that you care about your topic and you are acting as an arbiter of taste or opinion to your readers. If you have an opinion you will stand out.
• Day 20 – Leave Comments on Other Blogs – The first and most constant piece of advice to new bloggers on how to build traffic to your site: Leave Comments. You will keep up with others in your niche, develop relationships with other bloggers, leaving links to your own site, and making yourself known around the internet. Be thoughtful, contribute, add value.
• Day 21 – Breathe Life Into an Old Post – If you have a post that did not perform well in your statistics, it may have been written in a rush, or perhaps the material is dated. There may be many reasons… update it, edit it, refresh the writing, improve on the title, go into more depth… your blog and your brand will benefit.

This post may turn out to be one of the most important I’ve written. There are two main reasons for this:

1. Those looking for a guide to the 31-Day Challenge will be able to find it here, one-stop shopping, and they will be able to decide for themselves which of the ideas to try to apply to their own sites;
2. The beauty of this challenge is that the 31 days are purely indicative. All of these tips and strategies are to be employed over and over again, over time, as your blog ages and grows. So this resource is as much for me as it is for my readers. I will be able to come back to it at any time and apply whatever strikes my fancy that day.

For all those attempting the challenge, good luck!

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Hello there, dear readers! Today I’m going to be a little ambitious and introduce some new things to the blog. As you can see from the title of this post, I think everyone should have a blog. Now, what do I mean by that? Everyone? Literally every person on earth? Of course not. Here are the people who I think should have a blog:

• Those who like to tell stories, hear stories, read, write, act, narrate, dance, sculpt, paint, collage stories;
• Those who have a message they would like to share with the world;
• Those who have a problem and think that many others have the same problem, and want to share coping mechanisms, tips, strategies and possible solutions;
• Those who have a solution to a problem and want to share that knowledge with others;
• Those who have a passion, hobby, craft, skill and want to teach others and share with others;
• Those who have something to sell and want to enhance the sales process with context, stories, images, videos.

Does that mean everyone in the world? Not quite, but you see that almost everyone fits into one of these categories. The real point here is that a blog will help you talk to a lot of people without having to actually talk to each and every one of them individually.

Blogs also serve another purpose, which in my opinion is sufficient in and of itself to make it worth having a blog for almost anyone. Having a blog allows you to experiment with many different things: writing, reading, research, communication, artwork, photography, videography, interviews (as an interviewer and interviewee), reviews, teaching, answering questions, communicating effectively with others.

Being a blogger makes you a better person. A blog helps you figure out what you want to do, who you want to be, how you want to interact with others. I find it very interesting to notice how much thought I put into how I speak of other people, for instance. This has made me more sensitive to others in “real life” interactions as well.

Do you want to start a blog? Have you ever thought about it? If you would like to know more about starting and maintaining a blog, ask away. I will point you in the right direction. There are tons of great resources out there and I would be more than happy to tell you all about them. So comment, ask, interact.  Have a great weekend!

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This morning bright and early, Nancy from Connecticut wrote,

I’m still trying to figure out how to put pictures on…I’m technologically challenged!!

So I volunteered to come to the rescue, and here I am!! Let’s dive right in, shall we? I know one should never assume anything when teaching someone how to do something, but I am going to assume, Nancy, that you know how to transfer photos from your camera to your computer (she is an avid photographer and I’m pretty sure she knows how to do this). So, you have the photos on your computer in a file called “My Pictures” or something like that. I am also going to assume that you know how to find them when you want to attach them to an email and send them to a friend or relative. Given these premises, here is how to upload photos to Facebook:

1. Go to Facebook.com and log in with your username and password. You will find yourself on your “Home” tab. If you look at the top left-hand corner of the screen, where your profile picture is, you will see that under the photo there is a menu of options. Here’s what it looks like on my profile and I’m sure yours is very similar.
2. Click on the word “Photos” and it will take you to the next step, where you actually upload the photos. Here is what you will see:

Once you click on “Upload a Photo” you will be taken to the following screen:

Once here, click on “Browse” and it will take you to a screen where you will see the contents of your own computer and you will be able to click around until you find a folder with photos in it. Something like this:

All you have to do here is double-click on the photo you want to add, this screen will close, while the name of the file representing the photo in your computer will appear in the little window next to the “Browse” button. If you click on “Share” the window will close and on your Wall, the public interface of your Facebook profile that all your friends can see, the photo will appear. I uploaded photos for the first time in the past twenty minutes so I could make this article for you, Nancy, so here is what the first photo I uploaded to my Wall looks like:

Now, knowing you, sometimes you might take a funny or lovely picture and just want to share it right away, but at other times you might want to create an album to share, of photos that all “go together.” So go back to step 1 and click on the word “Photos” under your profile picture, and you will see this:

Here, of course, you will click on “Create an Album”, and you will be taken to the following screen:

Write a name for the Album, then the Location where the photos were taken, and then click on the little black arrow to the right of the Privacy tab and choose who can see this album. By default they set it at everyone, which does not meen the whole world, only your friends. If you want to limit this album to only a few of your closest friends, then the window with all your friends will open up and you will click on the ones to include. Click the Share button and you will be taken to the screen where you actually upload the photos themselves, which looks like this:

The tab that is blue is the one that you are in, so here you are in the “Add Photos” tab. Just do what you did for the single photo and you can upload up to 5 photos at the same time. Once you’ve done that click on Upload Photos, at the bottom of the window, and you will have the first five photos of the album. If you want to organize them, just click on the “Organize” tab and you can simply drag the photos around until you are satisfied with the order. If you want to change the info on the album, click on Edit Info and you can rename it and change other things. If you decide that after all those pictures are just too embarrassing, you can delete the whole album by clicking on the “Delete” tab. It will ask you to confirm, so you will have a chance to change your mind.

Once you have an album, all you will have to do is click on the album at any time and you will see above the first picture, which is the “cover” of the album, that there is the option to add more photos. The steps will be just like the ones you have just been through, so I’m sure it won’t be a problem for you to do that.

Please write a comment to this post so I know how you did. If you want to print this article out, just highlight the whole thing and paste it into a Word document and then print it, this way you will be able to have it next to you. I wrote another post in which I recommend that everyone who is technologically challenged have two monitors, this way they can have the post with the instructions on one side and the one where they’re following the instructions on the other. I have two monitors and I can’t imagine going back to one.

Have fun uploading your pictures to Facebook, Nancy, and please let me know if this was useful to you!!!

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The other day I was reading a post on one of my favorite blogs, Problogger, in which Darren Rowse talked about an experience he had when he was younger, at a self-development retreat. The participants were asked to write their own obituary, imagining that they had lived an entire lifetime, and in the obit they were to write down how they wished to be remembered. Then Darren described how what people think of you is what they say when you are not there, and suggested that we bloggers do a similar exercise. Reflect on what we would like others to say about our blog.

This is really just a roundabout way of asking: refocus, take a step back, are you on track, are you still on the path you set out to walk along? WHAT IS YOUR BLOG REALLY ABOUT?

So I thought long and hard, and I realized that what Tech*Tips was really about was helping people learn how to use the Web, the computer, but not just as an end in itself. We all have skills, we all know how to do something, and most of us know how to do more than one thing. But right now many of us, in spite of our skills, are either unemployed or underemployed.

My goal with this blog is to help people use the magnifying power of the Web to put them on the map. Combine your “real life” skills with some online tools and be heard, be seen, be FOUND by people who need you and are looking for what you do.

Hence the move to Life plus Web.

Thanks for following me this far and welcome to all the newcomers. I trust we will go far together!

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My friend Mario from Heerlen in the Netherlands asked me this question:

I know that the meta tag “nofollow” tells a search robot not to follow a link and prevents outgoing link juice to other sites. I also know that the tag “index” means that a page must be indexed by the robot. What’s a little confusing are the different combinations and the fact that you can seemingly use them separately for posts, comments and/or pages. There must be a way to explain these combinations in plain English so that it is once and for all understandable for everyone. Here they are:
index, follow
noindex, follow
index, nofollow
noindex, nofollow
What are the different consequences?

This is an excellent question, and I myself find it difficult to wade through all the documentation on the web that explains the uses of these different tags and their combinations. In my research I have found some very useful concrete examples that have given me some insight into the matter. I will try to lay it all out in English as plain as I can manage.
The situation is more complex than I first thought, because there are other tags to consider besides follow and index.
Google invented the nofollow tag as a measure to contain link spam. When this tag is used by itself, it tells the Googlebot that the link in question will not change the page rank of the website the link leads to. If the nofollow tag is used alone, the search engine will still physically follow the link, in order to index the website it leads to, but the link will not raise the rank of the site. A link spammer is someone who adds comments indiscriminately to all sorts of sites in order to induce search engines to count the links leading back to his websites and therefore raise his  rankings (which in layman’s terms means that when someone is searching for sites similar to theirs, theirs comes up higher on the page of the search results). If you know the links are useless for raising your rank, there is little point in spamming.
So, let us try to look at the consequences of each combination of tags and try to look at some practical examples.

First, here is what these tags look like, and where to put them. They must be located in the <head> portion of the html code of the page in question.

Index, Follow

<meta name=”robots” content=”index, follow”>

This is the default setting, so you never see this tag. In other words, if you do nothing, the Googlebot will index the page and follow the links it contains to go and index the pages they lead to.

Noindex, Follow

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex, follow”>

An excellent example of when to use this meta tag is for a contact form page. There are many pages in the site that link to this page, but the page does not have valuable content. It is a useful page for readers of the site but only as a contact form, not for the purpose of reading and absorbing interesting information. But because many pages in the site link to this page, it has a lot of “link juice” and looks like it should rank highly. Therefore we can decide to NOT index this page, but to still allow the Googlebot to follow the outgoing links from this page to other pages.

Index, Nofollow

<meta name=”robots” content=”index, nofollow”>

A perfect example of when to use this meta tag is when the pages that the current page links to have time-sensitive content. I found one article in a Google blog that used a very good example. Let’s say that the page in which this tag appears talks about celebrities. In this page there are links to stories that are “breaking news.” After a few hours the breaking news is replaced by new breaking news, and the “old” breaking news stories are put into a longer lasting articles section of the site. With the “index, nofollow” tag we obtain the perfect result. The celebrities page is indexed and the Googlebot does NOT follow the links to the breaking news which will soon be replaced.

Noindex, Nofollow

<meta name=”robots” content”noindex, nofollow”>

Another reason not to index or follow certain pages and links is when there is duplicative content in a site, which is something that at times is unavoidable. If possible it is always best to keep the indexing and ranking of our sites as clean as possible and to try to avoid duplication of content showing up with separate rankings. So, if there are pages that duplicate the content of other pages, with links to yet other duplicative pages, we can use “noindex, nofollow” and avoid adding unnecessarily to their ranking. Other examples I found for “noindex, no follow” are “About” pages, which often have artificially high rankings because many other pages link to them, and “login” pages, which also get a lot of “link juice.”

I hope this answers your question, Mario! And if you would like to add anything, clarify, or add something to your question, feel free to do so in the comments!

See you next time!

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So, now you have added Feedburner to your site. Feedburner is keeping track and counting the subscribers to your blog or site. Where do you go to check these numbers, also called “stats” (short for statistics)? It’s very simple and quite satisfying. Here goes.

Go to http://www.feedburner.com

If you are already logged in to your Google account the site will recognize you and you will see something like this:

Feedburner welcome screen

Your Stats

If you were not initially logged into your Google account. All you have to do is click on Sign in, enter your username and password and sign in. So, now you are looking at your number of subscribers. That’s already great and exciting. But what does it mean? Both the name of your website and the number are links. If you click on the name of the site, you see this:

Number of subscribers and reach

The number of subscribers is the total number of people who subscribe to your blog, and this will include RSS feeds and email (if you offer email subscription on the blog, which not all people do). The “reach” is the number of readers who have “taken action,” which means viewed or clicked on an individual item (post) in your blog on that day.

***Note***

The reach can include also people who are not subscribers, they are just visiting and are reading or have read one or more of your posts. So the combination of your subscribers and your reach gives you information that is more rich than the number of subscribers alone.

Below the numbers is another link that says “See more about your subscribers.” If you click on that, you will be taken to a screen with the complete breakdown. It will have a piechart that shows where your subscribers came from (Yahoo, Google, etc.) and there is a chart which breaks down the numbers between the various search engines and email subscribers. It is a large screen and you can scroll down and see all the numbers for yourselves, so I won’t make a screenshot of it, but I’m sure if you’ve come this far you will be able to understand the final screen easily.

***Note***

I highly recommend that you subscribe to your own blogs, both via RSS and email (if your blog offers email subscription) because this way every time you post a new article you will be sure that everything is working properly by receiving your own feed in your feed reader and/or your email inbox. Everyone subscribes to their own blog for this purpose, so don’t feel like you’re cheating or anything .

I hope this answers your question, Kloe, and that it helps anyone who has installed Feedburner on their site and is not sure how to check the stats.

See you next time, and don’t forget, if there is something you want to know, just click on the “Ask Egg Bird” button and fire away!

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I am very excited to post the first answer to an Ask Egg Bird question. Kloe from the lovely blog kloeamongtheturks has asked me the following question (really it’s two or three bundled into one, but we’ll do our best here, ok?):

I would like to know if Feedburner can be used by Blogspot blogs. As the creator of a long-standing blog, I have no idea how many people read Kloe (I’ve actually been scared to know…)
Also, what’s your opinion of Blogspot? Should I be concerned that I don’t own my site? (I don’t need to make money from my blog.)

So, let’s address these questions in order and find out the best way to answer. I must first say that I had some private email exchanges with Kloe because there are step-by-step guides on the Feedburner site that tell you how to put Feedburner on your site, but Kloe had trouble following the steps. And I must say I don’t blame her. I’m fairly savvy and I had to go through the steps a couple of times before I completely understood them myself. I think I’ve got it down now, though, so here goes.


First of all, what is Feedburner? In plain English, Feedburner is a service (now owned by Google) that manages the RSS feeds for people’s websites and blogs. You don’t HAVE to have Feedburner to generate RSS feeds. All blogs and websites with content that is renewed regularly, like newspaper sites or magazines and so on, automatically generate RSS feeds. If you pay attention, you will notice that in the far right-hand corner of the url bar (the address bar) at the top of your screen, when you go to a website, there will be a small orange RSS button right there, and if you click on it, you get the feed. So why have Feedburner at all? Why do you need it? The answer is: TO TRACK YOUR STATISTICS, and, ANALYZE YOUR TRAFFIC. In simple terms this means you will be able to see:

• how many subscribers you have (and Feedburner will count both RSS and email subscribers)
• where subscribers came from
• how many visitors came (not subscribers, new visitors)
• how long each visitor stayed
• and many other things of this nature.

The benefits of being able to track and measure the quantity and quality of the traffic your blog or website is getting are immeasurable. When you see that one particular page or series of articles is popular, you know that you should write more like them. Being able to see your statistics will help you improve your site in many ways. Let’s leave it at that for now and tackle the practical solution to the question at hand.

When we say “get Feedburner on our site” we mean use Feedburner as a filter through which our RSS feeds pass to get counted and measured. That’s all it means. You know when you see those people standing at the beginning of a bridge or something with that little counter in their hand, and every time a car goes by the press the clicker? Well, that’s what Feedburner is: it’s that person with the clicker in their hand. So the feeds go through Feedburner and they get counted. Now let’s move on to the actual “getting” of Feedburner on our site.

First, go to the Feedburner site at: http://www.feedburner.com/fb/a/home and click on the button toward the top left of the screen that says “Blogs.” This will take you to the first page where you have to do something. Scroll to the bottom of the page and you will see this:

Type in your blog address

Do not click on the box that asks you if you are a podcaster, because you are not, so this does not apply to you. And then click on NEXT. You will be taken to a screen where you simply have to choose between Atom feeds and RSS feeds. Atom is simply another format. We will choose RSS, as you can see below:

Choose RSS feeds

Once you have chosen, simply click on NEXT. You will be taken to a screen that shows you your new Feedburner feed address. This is important, please copy and paste this address separately from what you are doing on the screen. If you have two monitors, great, just paste it into any Word or Notebook file on the other screen. You can also just write it on a piece of paper. Let me make another little note. You see the red arrow that points at the FEED TITLE? Well, that is what the world will see as the name of your feed in their Google Reader or whatever other feed reader they use, so write it the way you want people to see it, with the right use of capitalization and all that.

See your Feedburner feed address

Once you have copied the feed address, the one I highlighted in yellow, you can click on ACTIVATE FEED. Now, I am not going to click on this button because I don’t want to activate your feed for you, since I don’t have access to the administrator page of your blog. I will switch to a fake test blog that I started this afternoon and continue the process on that blog.

So once you activate the feed, you will be taken to a page where you are asked to set up a Google account. I know that Kloe already has one, so it will be easy for her. Incidentally, Google owns both Feedburner and Blogger (her blogging platform), so they will all “play well together.” Nice to know, right?

Here is what will happen next. When you click on ACTIVATE you will be asked to open an account or, if you have one, to sign in. If you are not Kloe and you don’t have a Google account, you can create one. If you don’t know how, just read the post on how to creat a Google account right here on Tech*Tips. If you are Kloe, then sign in, and you will be taken to the Feedburner page that displays all your feeds. Since this is your first one, it will only have Kloe Among the Turks. But it will look just like this:

Your New Feed

A small RSS gray button on the left, the name you chose in blue and the number of subscribers you have. Of course it is zero at first because we have just started.

Now comes a very important step! Feedburner will measure all the new subscriptions you get from this moment forward, but you want it also to go back and get all the subscribers you already have. To do that you have to access your administrator page, where you write new posts, and plop that string of text that I had you write down in a certain box. Let’s do that now with eggbirdtest and then you will know how to do it in your own blog. So here goes:

Open your administrator page, and click on the tab that says SETTINGS and then on the one that says SITE FEED. You will see the following screen: [IT IS VERY IMPORTANT THAT YOU PAY ATTENTION TO THIS STEP]

Remember the FEED ADDRESS that I told you to write down separately? Well, you have to paste it or type it into the window with all the arrows, the POST FEED REDIRECT URL. Read the paragraph I highlighted. This is where Feedburner catches all the feeds that are already going out to your loyal readers, the ones who, like me, have been following you from the beginning, and makes them cross the famous bridge so the little man with the clicker can count them too.

Also, in the upper portion of the screen, where you see ALLOW BLOG FEEDS and the little box currently is set to FULL, it’s up to you. If you want the entire article you post to be in the feed reader of the recipients, then leave it set to Full, otherwise change it to SHORT. That will cut off the feed after about 255 characters. Your posts are generally short, so I would stick with Full, but the advantage of using Short is that people who want to read the rest click on the “more” or “continue reading” that appears at the end of the short post and are taken directly to your site, where they will read other posts and look around. In the case of a commercial website this is advantageous. But in any case, if your goal is to be read, you want people to visit the site itself and not limit themselves to reading the feeds.

I hope this answers the first question, of how to actually “get” Feedburner. And now for the other two:

1. What do I think of Blogger? Well, I think that for a free site Blogger is fine. It belongs to Google and so does Feedburner so they will work very well together. I had a very successful blog on Blogger a couple of years ago and I found it very easy to use. Now it has been enhanced in many ways, I see, and it seems to work even better.

2. Am I afraid that you might lose your content? Well, not really. Your site is not violent or full of sexually explicit content or politically inflammatory rants or anything that could offend anybody, really, so I can’t imagine that Google would ever have any reason to suddenly drop the site altogether. Also, I know that you back up your content, and that is the key thing. If ever something “technical” should happen to the blog, you can simply reinstate it from your backup. As for not “owning” the site, here’s the deal: EVERYTHING YOU WRITE ONLINE IS YOURS. In other words, the copyright of your original images and artwork, even the photos you take of other artists’ work, is yours and no one can take it away. What you don’t own is the actual DOMAIN. the xxx.xxx.xxx.com/kloeamongtheturks part of it. The shell of the house that your content lives in. In other words, Blogger is like a hotel that lets you stay there for free. But if they ask you to leave, you take all your belongings with you.

Kloe dear, I hope this answers all your questions. And for all you other readers, please add your comments and ask any questions you wish to ask. You can ask in the comments, you can click on the Ask Egg Bird button, or you can click on the Contact tab of the site. And if you have a website or blog of your own, then run off and “get” Feedburner on it, right away!

Related posts:

1. How to Check your Stats in Feedburner In this post I demonstrate how to check on the...
2. Ask Egg Bird: follow, nofollow, index, noindex In this post I answer the question "what are the...
3. Ask Egg Bird: a New Feature! In this post I introduce a new feature: Ask Egg...

One of the biggest problems we have when reading content on the Web is coming across words we’ve never heard of, in “computerese,” or the ubiquitous acronyms that leave us scratching our heads and tempt us to go back to the newspaper and give up on the computer altogether.
What is an interface? What does API mean? Or RSS, for that matter… It never ends. Well, once again, Google comes to the rescue. As most of you will know, the internet is full of resources that hold the answers to almost any question. The trouble is finding them. And then, which ones do we trust? A lot of people say Wikipedia cannot be trusted because it’s written by “regular Joes” just like them (as time goes on more checks and balances are implemented and for basic knowledge I find Wikipedia to be reliable, but that’s a conversation for another day). Well, here is how Google can help us.
If Google or iGoogle are not already your homepage (WHAT? Not already your homepage?!?!?! I disown you!), then type in the url bar at the top of your screen “google.com” (there’s another acronym: What is a url? Let’s find out). Once you are on the Google page, in the search box, type the following (we will use the search for the definition of the acronym “url” as our example):

define:url

It’s as simple as that. All lower case, no spaces. The word “define” followed by a colon followed by whatever you want to find the meaning of.

So let’s see what the results are:

The first definition is interesting because it does not contain the acronym, but rather explains in plain English what url means, simply “the address of a web page on the world wide web.” If you look at the other definitions I highlighted, you will see that most of them define url as “Uniform Resource Locator,” and one of them as “Universal Resource Locator.” If you look at the green underlined link below each definition, you will see where the definition comes from, and if you click on the green links you will be taken to the websites themselves and will be able to decide whether or not you trust the source.
What makes this method of discovering unknown meanings so great and powerful is the fact that you will see many, many definitions of the same thing, and even if some of them are a bit technical, there are bound to be at least a few in language that is easy to understand. Also, if many agree on the same definition, you can be pretty sure that it is correct.

Also, if you read the links in blue running along the top of the definitions you will see short phrases that include “url,” which if clicked on will lead you to the meanings of those phrases. And if you scroll down to the bottom of the screen you will find more blue links that offer all the definitions you have on your screen in a variety of other languages. Chinese, Dutch, Italian, Spanish and so on. Don’t you love the internet?
So there you have it, a quick, easy and reliable tool that will give you the meaning of everything!
Enjoy, use abundantly, and I’ll see you next time!

No related posts.

In this post I am going to give you a general overview of Google Reader so you can appreciate how useful it is and how much time it can save you. Once you have signed up for one or two blogs you will see how much fun it is, and pretty soon you will have many feeds in your reader. The beauty of it is that there is no pressure to read them. Just like reading the newspaper, you can skim the titles and click on the ones that jump out at you, and focus on those. So let’s get right to the video and see what Google Reader is all about. Enjoy!

Features of Google Reader

This concludes our series on RSS feeds. I hope you enjoyed it and are already filling your very own Google Reader with the feeds from your favorite blogs. Don’t forget to subscribe to Tech*Tips 4 dodos!

Related posts:

1. RSS: what it is, how and why you should get it. This is the first post in a series that will...
2. How to Customize Your iGoogle Homepage In this post you will learn how to customize the...

Now that we have created an iGoogle page, we will make it our homepage and we will also customize it fully. Let’s not forget why we embarked on this adventure in the first place. We want to be able to receive updates (feeds) from websites and blogs that we like. We could subscribe to the blogs we like via email, but as I have mentioned that would not be a good idea. Blog posts (as each article is called) however interesting they may be, are not addressed specifically to us as individuals. Think of a blog as an online magazine. If you subscribe to two or three magazines, imagine what it would be like if all those articles appeared individually in your email inbox. You would have a hundred emails a day and only a handful of them would actually be addressed to you from a family member, friend or business contact. Highly impractical, don’t you think?
By adding a widget to our iGoogle page called Google Reader, with one simple click of the mouse we can direct any blog or website to send updates to our homepage, leaving our inbox out of the equation. Pretty great, right? So, here’s the video on just how to do that. Enjoy!

Customize Your iGoogle Page

In the last post of the series we are going to explore the features of Google Reader. See you then!

Related posts:

1. RSS: what it is, how and why you should get it. This is the first post in a series that will...
2. How to Create an iGoogle Page In this post we learn how to verify our email...
3. An Overview of Google Reader In this post we look at Google Reader's main features...