I can't say that this is a new trend, it's been her for a while now... at least it's not new in the online definition of new. Things happen fast here on the good old internet. But anyway - blogs where people post videos of themselves talking, explaining, narrating, huhing, emming...etc are popin' up like zits on prom night.
Why Video blog is cool for them:
- once you get a hang of it, it's less work - at least the boring typing work. Talking is easier than typing.
- you can build up your online personality, wohoo look at me!
- well whatever other good there is - I DONT CARE!
The point of this blog post that I hade to type the old fashioned way is why I HATE VIDEO blogs.
The point of most of the searches on web is gathering information. I am interested in something. I Google it. I scan the page quickly. Decide if its what I'm looking for or not. If it is I read what I need if it's not I move on.
Now if I come across a video blog none of this can be done :/. I cant quickly scan it, I can't even know what the hell info am I going to find in it. To make matters worse - video bloggers never get straight to the point. They try to be funny, the beat around the bush, they make a 10 minute video blog post that gives only one paragraph that could be read in 30 seconds of useful info.
They make my life more difficult.
I am past the stage of finding some online guru that I would want to follow and hang on to his every word. It's a waste of time and one of the things that prevent you from doing something yourself. Reading blogs, looking at video blogs.... get of your ass and do it.
Anyway...this was just one of the things I had to get of my mind and unleash onto this blog.
Oh, if someone likes video blogs, can you please explain to me why?
Showing posts with label blogger. Show all posts
Showing posts with label blogger. Show all posts
One More Thing I Like About Blogger
So far I have used two hostings for my sites. Actually I am still using them. One is Hostgator (oh, no, no affiliate refferal link lol) and the second one is resellerzoom. First I was with resellerzoom and it was just great. you can host as many sites as you want, no problem. You have your own cpanel, WHM, every site has its own cpanel... when I think of it it's even a bit to many options for me. I mean, I just want to put up a small info site.
Anyway, resellerzoom is turning into a crap hosting. It's cheap but helf the time it works like a dead horse. I used Internet Speed Monitor on my sites a couple of times and the results suck! They suck big time.
I have to install Wordpress super cache on all my wordpress sites just to get them to open. This is also why I think wordpress sucks. It is the slowest and most resource consuming CMS I know. I host Joomla and a couple of smaller CMS sites on the same hosting and at least they open up. Wordpress keeps giving my MySLQ error. Anyway, why don't I move to another hosting?
I AM LAZY :). 80% of my sites work fine since they are not on wordpress and it's just too much work to move everything.
But I did move some wordpress sites to Hostgator and it's 100% better that resellerzoom. Sites work lightning fast. I again checked them with Internet Speed Monitor and the difference is quite obvious.
Yeah. About the Blogger.
It's fast. Faster that resellerzoom and sometimes also faster that hostgator. And it's free. and no cpanel hassle, no hosting problems etc...
long live Blogger. :)
New blogs on the block
LOL, are those New Kids On The Block still around? Yeah, I'm that old that I remember them. Right, enough about that. And more about a few new blogs. Why would you want to start a new blog? More blog is always better that less blogs. If you want to do some bussines online, why would you only have one? I mean, setting up a new blog takes like..well, it depends where and how you set it up..not that much time and definitely not that much money. If you do it on Blogger it's free.
If you get your own hosting and domain it costs a few bucks but it is a REALLY SMALL INVESTMENT if you consider that this very blog can also be an online bussiness. Well not this one, the hypothetical new blog.
If you want to earn something online than you need to get as much unique quality content online as possible. Build yourself a newtwork of blogs, sites, lenses, accounts, hubs, directories, forums... whatever. And next time you will want to promote something you will be miles ahead of the ordinary on blog guy.
Now to the two new blogs. The first one is about FOOD! Yeah, I love a good meal and I kind of like to cook, but I do not like to cook for very long time since this is time I would rather spend doing something else. So I created a blog about recipes that are simple, quick and easy to make - a Quick and Easy recipes blog. This means recipes that are not made out of some exotic plant or animal that only lives on Christmas island in the Pacific and only one store in New York sell. These are also recipes that do not require you to use all of your pots and pans and have a mountain of dishes to do later. These are just the kind of recipes that I like. Yeah, simple, quick,easy...
And the next one is a technology blog. I like gadgets, I own gadget, so why wouldnt I share some of my experinences with them. I used this blog a lot for blogging about my Nokia N85 and I think I will probably take this to my new blog that I have called The Stupid Technology Reviews Blog. Why Stupid? Because the name without stupind was already taken LOL, and because if I screew something up I can say - hey this is a stupid technology blog, what did you expect? LOL. Right, what I would like to point out is the beautifull template this blog has. At least to me :). I love it that is clean and simple without any crap and I love the color combination. It's just soooo much better than this white & blue over here.
I might change all my other blogs to that template...I'll see.
Anyway, guy (no guys, guy as in singular) get of your ass and start a blog yourself. Reading about it won't make it happen.
How to insert/show HTML and other code in Blogger post?
Normaly if you copy-paste some code into the edit HTML or Compose window in your Creat post form in Blogger the code will render and show what it is supposed to show. But what if I want to show you the code, not the result of the code.
How do I insert HTML or PHP or Javascript code into a Blogger post?
I want something like the code in this poste where I wrote about the ugly and simple Blogger templates. The solution is simple.
- Copy the code into your NOTEPAD!
- Use Edit->Replace (or Ctrl+H) and in find all the < and replace them with & l t ; (delete the spaces between the characters, without spaces you would just see another < here)
- Use Edit->Replace (or Ctrl+H) and in find all the > and replace them with & g t ; (delete the spaces between the characters, without spaces you would just see another > here)
- Copy the code from NOTEPAD into the Blogger post
- And you are done
What have you done? The & l t ; is another way of telling the browser to shov a <.
Simple!
How to get a crappy ugly looking Blogger template like I have?
First let me explain why would you want to have an "ugly" looking template like this one :)? First of all, I don't really think this temaplte is fugly. It's simple, clean, without all the stupid bells and whistles that contribute NOTHING to the blog itself. All they do is distract. Booohooo, look at my shiny blog, at least it's beautiful if the content is not woth reading....
Minimal. Simple. Think Google. Why is Google so successful with their simple (ugly?) interface? Because it works!
Besides that - if you want your website to bring you some money using Adsense or whatever, there are two benefits of having an ugly clean template:
- people that are used to all the shiny blogs will come to your website and think that your content can not be very good and worth anything if the template is so spartan. So they will probably leave a bit faster that they otherwise would and they would preferably leave by clicking on one of your ads. And second...
- is distraciton. Every element of the screen is a possible distraction for the visitors eye. If you want your ads to stand out you want as little distractions as possible. No badges, no widgets, no link, no colors, no pictures, no twitter crap, no blog catalog, no who is online, no who is following who and who is whos friend and how am I feeling at the moment, no favourite songs, bands, movies and other lists, no favorite books, celebrities...none of that crap. You want good content, simple navigation through your site and that's it.
So how to get an ugly simple minimalistic template on Blogger?
The minimal template is a good start. Select minimal template. Then enter your dashboard -> layout and fonts and colors and play with your colors. All you want are the following colors: black for the text, blue for the links and white for everything else. Then enter page elements and throw away all the unnecessary Gadgets/Widgets/page elements...whatever.
And you are done. Or you can just have the same template as me nad just copy this:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd">
<html expr:dir='data:blog.languageDirection' xmlns='http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml' xmlns:b='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/b' xmlns:data='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/data' xmlns:expr='http://www.google.com/2005/gml/expr'>
<head>
<b:include data='blog' name='all-head-content'/>
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>
<title><data:blog.pageName/> - <data:blog.title/></title>
<b:else/>
<title><data:blog.pageTitle/></title>
</b:if>
<b:skin><![CDATA[/*
-----------------------------------------------
Blogger Template Style
Name: Minima
Designer: Douglas Bowman
URL: www.stopdesign.com
Date: 26 Feb 2004
Updated by: Blogger Team
----------------------------------------------- */
/* Variable definitions
====================
<Variable name="bgcolor" description="Page Background Color"
type="color" default="#fff" value="#ffffff">
<Variable name="textcolor" description="Text Color"
type="color" default="#333" value="#333333">
<Variable name="linkcolor" description="Link Color"
type="color" default="#58a" value="#0066CC">
<Variable name="pagetitlecolor" description="Blog Title Color"
type="color" default="#666" value="#0066CC">
<Variable name="descriptioncolor" description="Blog Description Color"
type="color" default="#999" value="#333333">
<Variable name="titlecolor" description="Post Title Color"
type="color" default="#c60" value="#0066CC">
<Variable name="bordercolor" description="Border Color"
type="color" default="#ccc" value="#ffffff">
<Variable name="sidebarcolor" description="Sidebar Title Color"
type="color" default="#999" value="#0066CC">
<Variable name="sidebartextcolor" description="Sidebar Text Color"
type="color" default="#666" value="#333333">
<Variable name="visitedlinkcolor" description="Visited Link Color"
type="color" default="#999" value="#0066CC">
<Variable name="bodyfont" description="Text Font"
type="font" default="normal normal 100% Georgia, Serif" value="normal normal 120% Verdana, sans-serif">
<Variable name="headerfont" description="Sidebar Title Font"
type="font"
default="normal normal 78% 'Trebuchet MS',Trebuchet,Arial,Verdana,Sans-serif" value="normal normal 70% Verdana, sans-serif">
<Variable name="pagetitlefont" description="Blog Title Font"
type="font"
default="normal normal 200% Georgia, Serif" value="normal bold 266% Verdana, sans-serif">
<Variable name="descriptionfont" description="Blog Description Font"
type="font"
default="normal normal 78% 'Trebuchet MS', Trebuchet, Arial, Verdana, Sans-serif" value="normal bold 78% Georgia, Times, serif">
<Variable name="postfooterfont" description="Post Footer Font"
type="font"
default="normal normal 78% 'Trebuchet MS', Trebuchet, Arial, Verdana, Sans-serif" value="normal normal 69% 'Trebuchet MS', Trebuchet, Arial, Verdana, Sans-serif">
<Variable name="startSide" description="Side where text starts in blog language"
type="automatic" default="left" value="left">
<Variable name="endSide" description="Side where text ends in blog language"
type="automatic" default="right" value="right">
*/
/* Use this with templates/template-twocol.html */
body {
background:$bgcolor;
margin:0;
color:$textcolor;
font:x-small Georgia Serif;
font-size/* */:/**/small;
font-size: /**/small;
text-align: center;
}
a:link {
color:$linkcolor;
text-decoration:none;
}
a:visited {
color:$visitedlinkcolor;
text-decoration:none;
}
a:hover {
color:$titlecolor;
text-decoration:underline;
}
a img {
border-width:0;
}
/* Header
-----------------------------------------------
*/
#header-wrapper {
width:800px;
margin:0 auto 10px;
border:1px solid $bordercolor;
}
#header-inner {
background-position: center;
margin-left: auto;
margin-right: auto;
}
#header {
margin: 5px;
border: 1px solid $bordercolor;
text-align: center;
color:$pagetitlecolor;
}
#header h1 {
margin:5px 5px 0;
padding:15px 20px .25em;
line-height:1.2em;
text-transform:uppercase;
letter-spacing:.2em;
font: $pagetitlefont;
}
#header a {
color:$pagetitlecolor;
text-decoration:none;
}
#header a:hover {
color:$pagetitlecolor;
}
#header .description {
margin:0 5px 5px;
padding:0 20px 15px;
max-width:700px;
text-transform:uppercase;
letter-spacing:.2em;
line-height: 1.4em;
font: $descriptionfont;
color: $descriptioncolor;
}
#header img {
margin-$startSide: auto;
margin-$endSide: auto;
}
/* Outer-Wrapper
----------------------------------------------- */
#outer-wrapper {
width: 800px;
margin:0 auto;
padding:10px;
text-align:$startSide;
font: $bodyfont;
}
#main-wrapper {
width: 550px;
float: $startSide;
word-wrap: break-word; /* fix for long text breaking sidebar float in IE */
overflow: hidden; /* fix for long non-text content breaking IE sidebar float */
}
#sidebar-wrapper {
width: 220px;
float: $endSide;
word-wrap: break-word; /* fix for long text breaking sidebar float in IE */
overflow: hidden; /* fix for long non-text content breaking IE sidebar float */
}
/* Headings
----------------------------------------------- */
h2 {
margin:1.5em 0 .75em;
font:$headerfont;
line-height: 1.4em;
text-transform:uppercase;
letter-spacing:.2em;
color:$sidebarcolor;
}
/* Posts
-----------------------------------------------
*/
h2.date-header {
margin:1.5em 0 .5em;
}
.post {
margin:.5em 0 1.5em;
border-bottom:1px dotted $bordercolor;
padding-bottom:1.5em;
}
.post h3 {
margin:.25em 0 0;
padding:0 0 4px;
font-size:160%;
font-weight:normal;
line-height:1.4em;
color:$titlecolor;
}
.post h3 a, .post h3 a:visited, .post h3 strong {
display:block;
text-decoration:none;
color:$titlecolor;
font-weight:normal;
}
.post h3 strong, .post h3 a:hover {
color:$textcolor;
}
.post p {
margin:0 0 .75em;
line-height:1.6em;
}
.post-footer {
margin: .75em 0;
color:$sidebarcolor;
text-transform:uppercase;
letter-spacing:.1em;
font: $postfooterfont;
line-height: 1.4em;
}
.comment-link {
margin-$startSide:.6em;
}
.post img {
padding:4px;
border:1px solid $bordercolor;
}
.post blockquote {
margin:1em 20px;
}
.post blockquote p {
margin:.75em 0;
}
/* Comments
----------------------------------------------- */
#comments h4 {
margin:1em 0;
font-weight: bold;
line-height: 1.4em;
text-transform:uppercase;
letter-spacing:.2em;
color: $sidebarcolor;
}
#comments-block {
margin:1em 0 1.5em;
line-height:1.6em;
}
#comments-block .comment-author {
margin:.5em 0;
}
#comments-block .comment-body {
margin:.25em 0 0;
}
#comments-block .comment-footer {
margin:-.25em 0 2em;
line-height: 1.4em;
text-transform:uppercase;
letter-spacing:.1em;
}
#comments-block .comment-body p {
margin:0 0 .75em;
}
.deleted-comment {
font-style:italic;
color:gray;
}
#blog-pager-newer-link {
float: $startSide;
}
#blog-pager-older-link {
float: $endSide;
}
#blog-pager {
text-align: center;
}
.feed-links {
clear: both;
line-height: 2.5em;
}
/* Sidebar Content
----------------------------------------------- */
.sidebar {
color: $sidebartextcolor;
line-height: 1.5em;
}
.sidebar ul {
list-style:none;
margin:0 0 0;
padding:0 0 0;
}
.sidebar li {
margin:0;
padding-top:0;
padding-$endSide:0;
padding-bottom:.25em;
padding-$startSide:15px;
text-indent:-15px;
line-height:1.5em;
}
.sidebar .widget, .main .widget {
border-bottom:1px dotted $bordercolor;
margin:0 0 1.5em;
padding:0 0 1.5em;
}
.main .Blog {
border-bottom-width: 0;
}
/* Profile
----------------------------------------------- */
.profile-img {
float: $startSide;
margin-top: 0;
margin-$endSide: 5px;
margin-bottom: 5px;
margin-$startSide: 0;
padding: 4px;
border: 1px solid $bordercolor;
}
.profile-data {
margin:0;
text-transform:uppercase;
letter-spacing:.1em;
font: $postfooterfont;
color: $sidebarcolor;
font-weight: bold;
line-height: 1.6em;
}
.profile-datablock {
margin:.5em 0 .5em;
}
.profile-textblock {
margin: 0.5em 0;
line-height: 1.6em;
}
.profile-link {
font: $postfooterfont;
text-transform: uppercase;
letter-spacing: .1em;
}
/* Footer
----------------------------------------------- */
#footer {
width:800px;
clear:both;
margin:0 auto;
padding-top:15px;
line-height: 1.6em;
text-transform:uppercase;
letter-spacing:.1em;
text-align: center;
}
]]></b:skin>
</head>
You see that this ends with /head tag? Enter your Blogger Dashboard / Layout / Edit HTML and delete everything from the top to the /head tag and replace it with the code above.
Voila! You have something that some people might describe as an ugly Blogger blog.
But I call is simple is beautifull.
Till next time...
Why use Blogger for a new blog?
The big "smart(ass :))" majority of people will have the same answer to the following question:
Blogger review, why use it:
Q:"Should I use Blogger to start a new blog or website?"
A:"No, if you are serrious about your site get a hosting, buy your own domain and install Wordpress. Blogger is for spammers and you can never make a decent site with it ect..."
Crap.
First let me explain why you really would not want to have your blog/website on Blogger and they why you would want to:).
Blogger review, why not use it:
- you want to sell your website sometime in the future, you will not be able to sell your Blogger blog. This is correct, kind off, but it can be fixed if you plan ahead - get a new Google account that you will only use for one Blogger blog and you will be able to sell it together with your account.
- branding, it's kind of no cool to brand URL that says mashed-up-blog.blogspot.com LOL
Blogger review, why use it:
- having your own hosting and domain is cool but it is also a waste of time. Because with Blogger blog you eliminate all sorts of problems. Problems like:
- hosting bill
- other hosting problems, like server being down, your site getting hacked, bandwidth problems, space problems, unresponsive support problems... you do not have to do any of these. All will be taken care off by Blogger.
- spript problems. I don't really like Wordpress that much, read my cons on Wordpress in the review. Anyway, most of the websites probably run on some sort of CMS script. This again means a waste of time for:
- installing the script
- configuring the script
- upgradeing the script and making sure its up to date so your website doesn't get hacked
- etc.. it work, work, work.
As I said. If you have one website you have lots of time to run it, to do maintenance etc.. it's cool, it's fun, it's a hooby, it's why you do this in the first place. If you have 20 websites this will soon become a pain in the ass.
All you have to do with Blogger is login and write. Everything else is taken care of. And if you tink you are worse off SEO wise because you are using a blogspot blog - you are not.
How To Put The Blogspot Post Title Before The Blog Title?
If you want your blog to be more SEO friendly than try this trick. It is important what stands first in the title field. The title field determines what will be visible on the top let corner of your browser and what will be visible in the search engine results. Words that are closer to the beginnig are considered more important and also - if your title is very long it can be clipped at the end. This can happen pretty fast if your blog name is long and is always in the first place. So how to change that, how to put the post title first and blog titles second on Blogger / Blogspot?
Open your template HTML and find the first line of code (the first title...), then replace it with what is written under it:
And save and you are done! Now your blog post title will come before the blog title.
Open your template HTML and find the first line of code (the first title...), then replace it with what is written under it:
And save and you are done! Now your blog post title will come before the blog title.Blogger Comments Setup
I just decided that I will open comments on this blog. I know this is some info that you, the only reader that came to this sorry excuse of a page could not live without. But I need more blogposts so that this blog has some blogposts and that it does not look like an empty blog without blogposts.... You know, more content is always better.
So how to enable comments on Blogger? It's so easy even a monkey can do it (I'm crossing my fingers, I hope I succeed so I don't turn out to be less than a monkey... no offense all the monkeys out there).
To setup the comments in Blogger just go to blogger control panel, click on settings and then on comments. And if you are not a monkey things should be pretty obvious. Now for my personal monkey test - can you see comments under this post. If not then send me a banana... please.
So how to enable comments on Blogger? It's so easy even a monkey can do it (I'm crossing my fingers, I hope I succeed so I don't turn out to be less than a monkey... no offense all the monkeys out there).
To setup the comments in Blogger just go to blogger control panel, click on settings and then on comments. And if you are not a monkey things should be pretty obvious. Now for my personal monkey test - can you see comments under this post. If not then send me a banana... please.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)