Blogging - Part 8

Your blogger blog template search ends here!

Antonio Lupetti an Engineer, Pro Blogger, Mac user, Musician, Web Addicted from ROME – ITALY has released a wonderful blogger template. Actually he is a master of that template, as he himself use the template on his blog. That means, he has tested it, used it so long that he has almost cleared all the bugs in it.

I had always loved his blog template and hesitated to ask for the source code(to modify, without violating the copy rights). But to my surprise and Antonio Lupetti’s goodness, he has finally released his template source code to the public.

woork-blogspot-template-released-to-public

He has actually released the HTML version rather than XML source code, because HTML is more common than XML and we can easily modify the HTML codes using many software.
Just copy and paste the HTML codes and it will work. Many people think that, they must use only XML in blogger templates, but that’s not true, you can also use valid HTML codes.

The template looks so professional. The template supports easy integration of third-party advertisements (both AdSense or any other ad network and custom 125×125 banners), the best part for people trying to make more money is — you can integrate ads within post(look at the individual post page),Twitter, Job board, Flickr pictures, delicious bookmarks, and you may also embed RSS feeds via the FeedBurner service. And more importantly, I love the comment section of the template. It looks great. But the fact that, blogger platform doesn’t allow for user friendly commenting, we need to migrate to some other page to comment. Hope its done for spam controlling purpose!

And I think this theme works with old Blogspot users also, who haven’t migrated from the Classic HTML template yet, because this is a HTML source code, and theoretically it must work. I haven’t tried it practically, and I am waiting for someone to clear this doubt.

I was very excited to write a post about customizing the template, but Antonio Lupetti himself has done the job and he has explained the customization part of the template from Top to Bottom. Its great article and a must read if you are a blogspot user.
He explains- Adding Blog Logo, Adding tab on the navigation bar, Search field, Customizing Home Page, Your name below each post title, Adding sections on the sidebar, About me section, Recent Post*, Categories on the sidebar, etc. If you have any problem with the template, you can always contact Antonio Lupetti or do a Google Search(if its a general blogger problem).
Happy Blogging 🙂

Add Refinements/Labels to your Custom Search Engine

Log into CSE and click on Control panel –> Refinements –> Add refinement.

Refinements are labels that you apply to websites. They appear as a list of links above search results, offering users a way to narrow their search. When a user clicks a refinement label, the sites that you have labeled are given priority in the results. In addition to labeling sites, you can also specify additional words that are added to users’ queries when they click a label, providing even more targeted results.

Google maintains a list of existing refinement labels. If you create a label with the same name as one of these, or with the same name as a label in another search engine that you or someone who is collaborating with you has created, users will also have the benefit of seeing relevant sites from these sources in their search results also.

Here refinements acts like the key word help for finding the relevant articles in our blog.

Add Custom Search Engine to your wordpress blog easily

Replace your default wordpress theme search engine with Google Custom Search Engine.
There are 3 option’s to show the result page:-

If you want to have results within your own site, then you need to create another page similar to your blog pages(to make it look more professional), and add the codes from Adsense account. This requires one to have some knowledge about html and some other basic Internet programming knowledge.
If you are using a magazine style theme and if you are showing additional advertisements on the sidebar, then remove it from your result page. Because its an violation of adsense policy.

There is another easy option, which doesn’t require any programming knowledge.
1. Open results on Google in the same window.
2. Open results on Google in a new window.

Now you decide about opening results page in new window or in the same window(Its considered user friendly, if all links open in same window, so we recommend selecting the 1st option. i.e., Open Results in the same window.)

Goto your Adsense account or Google Custom Search Engine page and get the codes to paste in your wordpress blog.

Now login to your wordpress and click on the “Design” tab –> Click on “Theme Editor”. Now search for “searchform.php” or similar file and click on it.
Now look for <div class="search"> </div> tags and delete everything inbetween them and paste the CSE codes from your adsense or Google CSE account and save it.

For Example:- Look at my Custom Search Engine[Top right corner — near navigation bar] and search for any keyword and see the result page.

If you are good at HTML and PHP, you can integrate the CSE into your own site and you can make the results to be shown in your own site. This looks even more professional.
But having any type of Custom Search Engine is better than not having one, so follow any method and integrate CSE to your blog.

Know This Before Using Google Custom Search Engine

There are many advantages of adding Google Custom Search Engine to your wordpress blog.
Some are listed below..
1. People are used to search in Google.com and they will not find it difficult to do the same in your blog.
2. You can monetize the search results using Google Ads. [Optional]
3. Ability to give options for users, to search only our blog or the entire web.
4. We can know exactly what people are searching in our blog using the search engine.
5. Looks more professional. SERP can be hosted on our own site or Google.
6. Easy to integrate and use.
7. More features. We can include Refinements/Labels at the top of the result page.
8. Highly Customizable. We can customize the look and feel of the result page. We can put our logo instead of Google logo and link it back to our main site/blog. Font colour and the placement of ads can be controlled by ourselves.
9. We can control the type of ads appearing on our search result page, by including Search engine keywords, Site description etc. The ads will match to the keyword of search as well as to the keywords that we have included. We can even block competitors advertisements.
10. Can include the results from multiple sites/blogs.

Caution:-
We have seen many bloggers using CSE(Custom Search Engine) and their SERP(Search Engine Result Page) is violating the Adsense policy, by showing additional ads on the SERP.
Here is what Google has to say about it..

Can I show ads on AdSense for search results pages in my own site?

We ask that you don’t place any additional ads on pages with framed search results. However, you’re welcome to place an AdSense for search box on the page so your users can continue to search if they haven’t found what they’re looking for.

Now without wasting much of time, Create a CSE and put it on to your blog, if you haven’t done yet.
There are two ways to do this.
1. Login to your adsense account and goto “AdSense Setup” tab and click on “AdSense for Search”. Further instruction are self explanatory.
2. Goto Google Custom Search Engine and click on “Create a Custom Search Engine”.

The advantage of using the 2nd option is, we get “Advance setup features” and more customization options. So we recommend using CSE.

To connect your Custom Search Engine account with Google AdSense, visit the Make money tab in your search engine’s control panel.

Fill in the form with the email address that you use with your AdSense account, your zip code, and the last 5 digits of your phone number. Google will use this information to connect your Custom Search Engine account to your AdSense account and you can start making money immediately.

Now you make money by monetizing the search result page and your readers will be comfortable searching what they are looking for. So its a win-win situation 🙂

Feeling Good Can Enhance Your Performance

Like many of you, I am also very much interested in blogging and I feel good while I am blogging or working for my blog. It gives me a kind of joy, even when I am working overtime or late nights.
All these years while I was undergraduate, I use to feel too bad while I had to write assignments(Homework’s). I use to hurryup and finish the works off, so that I can be free afterwards. But those things never helped me, as I never really understood what I was writing.

Day before yesterday as I was writing one of my first assignments in PG(Post Graduation — MCA[Master of Computer Application]), I just wanted to finish it off, and start blogging. But mean while I thought, let me try to enjoy writing the assignment and try to feel good, like I do when I am blogging. Guess what, I really started getting interest in my assignment writing work!
I just practiced this feeling good exercise for two days and now I am completely loving my assignments and trying to understand and write – Now its no more a burden.

Some times when I never got any idea for blogging, I use to feel bad and frustrated and at that time I was never able to comeup with any new article ideas. It was only after a deep relaxing sleep or some jolly long walks, I use to get some ideas for blogging. But when I started to fall in love with blogging completely and started feeling good, ideas for blogging started coming easily and now I don’t get frustrated even when there is no idea to write any thing, I just feel good and after a while some idea pops up in my mind.
blogging-late-night
To start feeling good in the beginning will be a bit of forceful thing – you need to remember some thing which makes you feel good, like remember the flower that you love, garden, your pet animal, baby etc. Practice this for some time and you will start feeling good automatically while doing any work, and this will surly enhance your performance in any of the fields.

And one more thing is, we need to stop underestimating ourselves. Underestimating ourselves will surly be a great hindrance in our progress.

Blogging Made Easy by "Windows Live Writer" – A Small Review

This is my first post in Technotip.org about Windows Live Writer(WLW) and I am now writing this article using “WLW” itself. I have previously used it to write articles for my blogger blog.

Why we thought about an alternate editor, when we have a simple and good editors(Visual & HTML) in WordPress ?

As always, we wanted some more features to write articles and we use to face some problem while using default WordPress editors.

Problems that we had faced in default WordPress editor:

1. We had problem with adding and aligning the images. Each time we added a image to our article, consumed lot of time.

2. Sometimes when we open the old posts and save it again, we noticed that some irrelevant “Category” got added to it automatically from our “Categories” list.(Hope this is a typical problem only with us!)

3. Loading time….(I agree that, loading time has been improved a lot with new versions of WordPress, but WLW loads superfast as it is an Desktop application.

4. Problem inserting “tables” :- There is no option to insert a table in WordPress editors. This surprises me!

We need to have “insert table” feature that will be of use many times. We know that, using tables may slow down the page loading time, and its good to use CSS/DIV to get the tables, but everybody using WordPress are not programmers or geek’s to do that. And many blogger’s don’t have patience and time to do it.

5. Each time we see the preview of the article it even loads the advertisements. This will make our own impressions on those advertisements. Those impressions will be OK, if they are less in number, but I don’t want any advertisers to pay me for my own impressions on my own blog.

6. We had problem with italicizing the words. When we press the Italicize button, the selected word would be in Bold!

We use to insert <i> </i> tags in html mode to get the results.

7. And the <code> </code> was not working!

(Hope many problems listed above are topically problems only faced by us. Because we have never seen anybody else reporting these problems).

Actually I like the new WordPress editors for many reasons, but the above mentioned points make me to use WLW.

Actually, I write articles in WLW and then save it directly to my WordPress draft and then again modify it there if necessary.

Why we like “Windows Live Writer” ?

This is the actual reason to write this article..

1. Many features, and many tools/plugins to make blogging much more easy.

2. Offline blogging. This will really help a lot. Just try this for 1 week and you will know the power and impact of offline blogging.

No distraction from Chatting buddies, emails etc. In the beginning I got irritated, as there was no Internet connection, but now I am getting used to it and my articles are now more focused. And actually I have installed “WLW” in my laptop and I can now start blogging from almost any place I love.

And more importantly, I can now keep blogging, even when there is problem with my “ISP”(Internet Service Provider), and I can publish the posts by taking my laptop to my friends home, who are using someother ISP.

3. Lot of options to play with images I insert into my articles now. We can revert the image in one click, we can contrast, sharpen etc.

4. Faster loading..Saves lot of time, over time.

5. Publish to most major blog services: Including Windows Live Spaces, SharePoint, WordPress, Blogger and many others.

6. Insert photos and videos, maps, tags and lots of other cool content, all in a snap. Powerful editing features include tables, spell checker, and quick hyperlinks.

7. We can write for multiple blogs using the same “WLW” :

Just add another weblog account and you can start writing for both blogs.

8. All the other options which is present in WordPress are also present in “WLW”.

There are many advantages of using Windows Live Writer and We recommend everybody to give it a try. Mac users can try Ecto. And for people who want to use simple and neat interface can try blogdesk.

Whatever you use and try, but don’t forget to give a try to “Windows Live Writer“, it has been improved a lot over time, and its latest release will really impress you, by the way it works.

Here are some screen shots of installing “WLW”:-

Select the software you want to install from the list and sit back and do whatever you want to do. Internet connection needed!

After installing “WLW”, click on the shortcut and configuration window opens- See Below screenshot, to configure your weblog account.

Weblog Homepage URL: Put your blogs homepage. Ex:- http://technotip.org

And in the username and Password section, type the username and password of your account(Windows Live Spaces, SharePoint, WordPress, Blogger or any other, that you use as your blogging platform.)

After successful installation and configuring, you can just test the power of “Windows Live Writer”.

WLW is a must use tool for bloggers using blogspot.com(bloger.com). Blogger(Blogspot) editor seems to be too bad(my personal opinion), using WLW helped get rid of all silly problems and now blogging has become more friendly.

What’s your opinion about “WLW” ? Which editor do you use ? Do you still use the default WordPress/blogger editors ?

9Rules – Round 7 results are out

Many bloggers who had applied to 9rules had been waiting at 9rules blog, refreshing the pages to see the final result announcement. 9Rules have finally released the much awaited results, and as we gone through the accepted sites, we feel that, all these sites really deserve to be on the board of 9rules. So well done 9rules.

For those unaware of 9rules, it is a collection of independent blogs with a focus on networking and love for design & knowledge sharing.Thanks to — Paul Scrivens, Mike Rundle, and Tyme White, Who Runs 9rules

We had also applied to 9rules, but our blog is too young(2 months) to get into 9rules community. Anyway, we will apply to it when our blog is atleast 6 months old(its also a kind of requirement to apply to 9rules). I have had chat with some of the lucky guys who had been accepted into 9rules in previous rounds and they revealed me that their blog get around 100 to 300 visits from 9rules…..that’s not at all bad, additional traffic for no extra work is always good.

Good thing about 9rules is, they only accept sites after individually checking them out. This ensures that, whoever have subscribed to 9rules will get only interesting things to read. So 9rules subscribers will never get pissed off and there will surly be constant increase in the subscribers list and thus the accepted sites get more traffic whenever there is an interesting article published. So 9rules creates totally a Win-Win situation. Technotip.org really likes the concept and is in full support to 9rules.

Technotip.org will be eagerly waiting to get into 9rule community soon.

Ok…here’s the list of sites which got accepted in the 7th round of 9rules…CONGRATS!!!!

If anybody is leftout from the above list, then please inform us.

Finally what we can say is- “9Rules, you really Rule”.

Code to redirect basic html page

We have seen many plugins and 301 redirection … bla bla bla in wordpress and many other blogging platforms, to redirect the users automatically from a webpage to another webpage or from one domain to another.

Ex:- You have shifted an article to different page and now you want your visitors to automatically get redirected to the new page, instead of showing the link “click here to Enter” etc and expecting your visitors to click that link and read the article.

But many people using basic html face problem using the redirection. They need to manually create a link to navigate to different pages..this can be avoided by using these simple codes

<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”0; URL=http://www.google.com/”>

This code should be placed between head tag. And replace http://www.google.com/ to whatever URL you want your visitors to be redirected.

Another method is to use this code…

<script language=”javascript” type=”text/javascript”>window.location=”http://www.google.com/”;</script>

Here also replace http://www.google.com/ to whatever URL you want your visitors to be redirected.

Using such redirection may not be SEO friendly, but use it when its very much needed.

But people using WordPress, blogger etc, please do not use this type of redirection. There are many SEO friendly redirection methods that you can incorporate and save your Search engine juice.