I’ve been updating my blog every now and then during this year as you regular visitors might have noticed. A new header image for example. Reading inspiring blogs about marketing, writing, entrepreneurial stuff and how to style your blog smarter I’ve been encouraged to look into the nerd business of blogging a bit more. I am becoming more and more of a Wordpres Nerd. And wow, I’m having so much fun – when it works like I want it too of course. When it doesn’t I get frustrated, disappointed and mad!
Subscribe to comments
I read the article Top 5 essential WordPress plugins by David Airey (and other pots on similar subjects) before Christmas I decided to implement the ones I liked here. First one is subscribe to comments, a plugin that added a little box that you see when you write a comment. If you tick it you will get the an e-mail when someone adds another comment after you. This is good for everyone who is curious – but a great feature if you have a question for me that you want to have answered. I can then answer it in my own comments instead of e-mailing the answer to you. In this way others will get to read the answer too, a bit of discussion can be held and best of all, I don’t have to spend all day going through comments to send individual e-mails! Love this! Though the admin page doesn’t work, I don’t know why!?
Today I also made my own comments look different – in pink of course – so you can find them easier if you’re reading back on comments on older posts! Isn’t that neat? I did that by installing Higlight comments plugin. Fun little plugin that is really useful!
Similar posts
I’ve also added a list of links after each post. The list contains five links that have something in common with the post that you’re reading (hopefully). It was David who recommended the plugin Similar Posts and it’s easy to use and I think it’s very interesting to see what posts show up in the Similar posts list below each post! It uses tags and because I haven’t tagged my posts at all before, it will not work very well for older posts (I started blogging back in 2004!) but as I write new posts I will make sure to add tags that will make sense! The reason I wanted this list in my blog is that you can now “look back” in the archive a bit more. There is a lot of nice photos and ideas that I’ve added during my years of blogging – but the structure of a blog only shows you the most recent posts and sometimes there are even more fun a couple of months back. I hope it will encourage people to click around and investigate a bit more! So you that when I post a new amigurumi it will be easy for you to find previous ones that I have made! Smart, right?
In the sidebar
I took a lot of stuff away from the sidebar at the right of my blog, I don’t remember where I read about how cluttered the sidebar gets and that we all need to look through it. Though you can read this article about decluttering your blog; Unclutter your blog.
Is the links working, is it showing what you want it to do? Today I added recent posts plugin to my sidebar, also to get my visitors to stay and click around a bit more. Since I’ve been looking into this I have noticed my way of writing headlines. It does very seldom tell what the post is really about, so I’m going to change that. Though I like a bit of poetry and I’d rather have a beautiful headline to a post than a boring descriptive one! Right now I’ve set this plugin to show 35 links to the most recent posts that I have written! Wow, I love this feature. Much more fun than a list with dates or a calendar, right? I took the too long list of categories, but you can still find all the categories that I post in on my blog archive! And if you’re looking for something that you know I’ve written about you can also search for it, personally I wouldn’t find anything around here without that. I use it to search for links that I know I have blogged about for example.
Why I’d like to make people click around and stay on my blog and not only get inspired by the latest post is because I’ve set up ads with Adsense as you can see below the top menu. I haven’t received any comments about it which I consider a good thing, maybe then you my darling regular users haven’t been bothered by it? Yes, I hope it will generate money for me to buy more yarn, fabric and buttons so that I can continue to inspire with new projects here… but I don’t know if it will ever do that. I figure it’s worth a try, because I enjoy blogging a lot and I don’t have any income right now! So if you read this post go click around here and you’ll get very good blog karma!
Not working at all
Installed All in One SEO Pack (SEO is short for Automatic Search Engine Optimization!) and read this article with 7 tips, but that was useless because one I enabled it all my content became invisible and I’m not techie enough to fix something like that.
I wish I had a WordPress Helper by my side sometimes, someone like the Blog tech guy perhaps. Maybe he could tell me why I never got the flickr post bar or the flickr photo album to work? I like that I can use my flickr photos and just store them in one place, but I would like it very much if I could fetch them to my blog more easily than I do by going to each photo and copying the code there!
And tell me why I can’t find the API key for my blog so that I can use Akismet? I would sure love some help with all the spam I get to delete everyday!
Resources for bloggers
If all this is mumbojumbo but you’re curious about it, visit Become a blogger where you can watch videos about how to do all this stuff and more. I watched a video about pluging and how to install them! It’s a nice way to learn and very easy to follow. You can only use plugins like these if you have a blog on your own domain (like www.ihanna.nu) where you have ftp access to your blog files.
I like to read Caroline Middlebrook’s blog and Yaro’s Enrepreneurs Journey right now. I signed up to get Yaris book Blue print that I think was interesting and I have downloaded Caroline’s free e-book called How to Develop Money-Making Niche Sites with WordPress which is what I’d like to try! And even though I can’t afford to buy to buy a theme for my website, I really liked this post about premium WordPress themes, the images gives you a picture of what such site could look like! More free e-books at Nine Yards and more fun at Copyblogger, Doshdosh and Steve Pavlina to mention a few smart people.
My to do list:
I might want to try comment luv plugin? Some love for people who comment is something I would like to give! :-) I might build a sneeze page or two, I need to rewrite the about page
What do you think? Let me know if you have any tips, advice, information or questions!
Can you tell I’ve been working a bit overtime on the net lately? And there is a lot more I want to do, fix, change and write about. I’m a geek, I know! But now it’s late and Smilla is asleep in my lap. It looks so nice, I’m going to join her, curl up a bit and visit in dream-land.
Goodnight and sweet dreams!
Wow those are great leads, iHanna! Thank you thank you for sharing blog help love with us!
To get an API Key for Aksimet you must create an account at wordpress.com there you find yr key at the “My account” page. This is what I now the only way to get an API.
Jisses va l?skigt det ?r att skriva p? eng. Men kanske fler undrar s? jag t?nkte att det ?r dax att ?va lite. ;-)
Ha det b?st!
I was just coming here to tell you that to get an API Key, you have to sign up for an account at wordpress.com. You can delete the blog and just keep the login for the key only.
Also, for responding to comments in your own comments, I use a plugin called Comment Email Responder (see here: http://www.u-g-h.com/index.php/wordpress-plugins/wordpress-plugin-comment-email-responder/). It’s really easy to set up, and lets you reply to a comment in your own comments, while also automatically emailing whatever you say to the person you’re replying to. (Hope that made sense!)
Hi,
just enjoyed your blog, your wonderful pictures ( I’m a Nikonfan too) and your blogger tips!
Thx
*waving*
Betty
thanks for the blogging tips, i was just thinking last night about updating my blog template as i’m getting a bit bored of how it looks now. blogger templates are quite limited though, unless you want to pay for a specially done one, so i’ve set up a ‘dummy’ blog, which i use to play around with colours and layout, which i’ll just delete when i’m finished with.
great advice and links! Thanks so much! I love to do things that make more traffic to my blog. Who likes to blog if no one is going to read it?? Thanks again!
Inspiring to read! I’m going to clean up my blog right away!
And I had noticed the adsense bar but they are so discreet so it doesn’t matter.
Very nice changes, I like them. Thanks for the links – I’ve been wanting to add a subscribe to comments one plug-in.
I think your side looks very good. Here’s a link to a website you might be interested in:
http://www.astorybooklife.com/how-to/paper-beads/
How to make beads out of paper. I think it’s a brilliant idea, especially if money for new stuff is short.
Thanks for sharing all this research, Hanna! I think I’ll try out some of those plugins too.
Chock-full of tips, Hanna- thanks! But I have to say I do not much like the long, unrelieved gray with text. It does not draw me in or encourage me to look. Maybe some images interspersed would help.
I love this photo!!
Your new camera sounds exciting…I’ve been dreaming of my own camera for a while so I’ll be looking into this one! {just found you through dunesza} :O)
The photo is magical, there is an atmosphere and I find myself wondering what is happenning both inside and outside this house.
Once again the info contained in your post is so comprehensive and useful. Thanks Hanna.
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