Blissful Life

Category: blogging tips

  • 10 Ways to Post on Blogger

    Looking for ways to make a post at blogger? I’m sure you never heard of at least one of these.

    1. From Blogger Dashboard  (the normal way) (bookmark the New Post link for added comfort)
    2. From Blogger in Draft Dashboard  (the extra way)
    3. From BlogThis! bookmarklet (the quick way to recommend web pages)
      To set up blog this bookmarklet, BlogThis!   <– drag this link to your browser’s Links bar 
    4. From iGoogle using the Blogger Posting Gadget
    5. From Gmail using the Blogger Posting Gadget
      Setting up this takes a bit longer.
      1. Go to Gmail Labs Settings 
      2. Enable “Add any gadget by URL”, the last option in the list.
      3. Save preferences
      4. Now find the Gadgets tab in settings.
      5. Enter the follwing URL in the “Add a gadget by its URL:” option
        http://www.blogger.com/gadgets/post.xml
      6. Now you will be able to see the gadget along with your chat and invite options.
    6. Through email posting.
      1. Go to blogger dashboard.
      2. Click on the mail icon to the left of your blog name.
      3. Replace ‘SecretWords’ with words, letters or any other secret code of your own.
      4. Remember the whole email id. (yourdomain.yoursecretwords@blogger.com)
      5. Send a mail to this email id; the subject will be the title and body the content of the blog post thus created.
      6. To further edit settings go to Settings | Email
        Tip: Put #end at the end of your mail to avoid unnecessary additions by your mail program.
    7. Through Blogger Mobile.
    8. Through Microsoft Office 2007.
      1. Run MS Word.
      2. Select New from Office Tab.
      3. Choose New Blog Post from Installed Templates.
    9. Through Ping.fm.
      1. Create an account at Ping.fm 
      2. Add your blog to ping.fm account
      3. Now you get some 14 alternative ways to update your blog through ping.fm.
      4. Use @bl prefix to post only to your blog 
    10. Through Scribefire firefox extension.

    Related
    How to make sure that you blog daily

    1. Who Must Start Blogging? – People Like Nishan

      Anyone can start a blog. But some people must start a blog. If you are any one of the following and haven’t started a blog yet, you should immediately start one, for the sake of the blogosphere.

      1. Travelers:
        If you travel. Be it anywhere. Your own city, foreign countries. Any time, any number of times. Be you young, be you old. Doesn’t matter whether you travel a lot or have just gone for one single summer trip this month. If you travel, you must blog. It is not for you, it is for others. Others who like to travel, who like places, who like to know cultures.
        So the next time you travel, make sure that you start a travel blog and post detailed stories about how you made the trip, how you felt, what you saw. And add a lot of pictures and stuffs.
      2. Professionals:
        Do you work? You should blog about the special moments you had while doing what you do. If you’re a doctor write about patients, and special cases, and miracles. If you’re a teacher blog about children. If you’re an engineer blog about your next assignment and how you’re going to do it.
      3. Innovators:
        Do you often get ideas that come out of nowhere and seem just fantastic? You are an innovator like in the IBM ad. If others don’t notice your ideas, then you should blog them because there could be people whom you don’t know desperately in need of those ideas. And if others do notice your ideas, then you should blog them too because there will be people who you don’t know who will benefit from those ideas.
      4. People who always finds something interesting (the born bloggers):
        People think there’s nothing else to talk but you find something else, always. You are the kind of blogger who just fills his blog with all types of interesting things ranging from sports to movies, politics to philosophy, anything and everything.
      5. Writers:
        You noticed a name in the title and didn’t understand what I meant? Nishan Ansari is the literary secretary of my school. He writes fantastic essays, poems, stories, book reviews, anything you can imagine of. But we must wait for the next edition of our school magazine to read him. Is this anywhere near fair? Such beautiful words must immediately reach readers. What he and others like him must do is this : immediately start a blog and let the creative juice flow. Don’t wait for others to pick you up or think that nobody will read you, when you have it in you, and you decide to do it, you will automatically ascend the stairs of popularity.

      Well this list is just a beginning. Anyone who feels like blogging must try it. Because blogging is awesome fun. And fifty years from now, when you’re looking back at your life, won’t you wanna say you got into blogging long back in the 2000’s?

      So you’ve agreed about it and trying a hand. Here are some basics. You are reading this and you know what a blog is. Blogs can be self-hosted like other websites, or hosted at free providers like google, wordpress, etc. Blogger.com is the blogging platform I’m using and I recommend it to you too. But wordpress is also a good try. Once you go to these sites, they are designed in such a way that any layman can start blogging. (It’s just the motivation part, which I’ve given)

      And when you start blogging and become successful bloggers (which I’m sure you will), don’t forget to link to me and get me some reputation and traffic. Wish you all the best in your blogging adventure.

      Don’t forget to check out my other posts about blogging.

    2. Creating an Offline Home Page

      Most people have google as their home page. And it’s cool if you are a guy who just makes a google search about that thing which he needs to buy, checks his emails once in a while, and checks scraps at orkut.
      But what if you are a person who has multiple blogs, twitter accounts, facebook, myspace and hi5 profiles; and you need to check your earnings at adsense or adbrite, the statistics of your blog at analytics, your broadband usage, your email account at hotmail, your unread feeds in google reader, the latest cricket scores, and your girlfriend’s scrapbook to see whom she is chatting with?
      And you don’t want to forget doing any of these?

      Do you know that I do all that without ever having to type a letter in the address bar, and not even an extra click in the Bookmarks folder.

      That is what an offline home page has done to me. It has worked as a to-do list as well as a bookmarks folder, at the same time helping me saving a lot of time ease-wise.

      Want to try one? Here’s help.

      The first step is knowing a bit of html.
      hyperlinks work with a simple html tag “<a>…</a>”. The page to which it is linked is shown by “href”. And the text which should be shown in blue is written in between the “<a>” and “</a>”.
      That is, if you want to link to Change, the html tag will be “<a href=”http://asdofindia.blogspot.com”>go to Change</a>
      and it will show up like this:
      go to Change
      Learn more about linking here, and practice linking here.

      Now, that is all the background information you need. (Actually you need not even that. But when it gets messy with underlines getting under every wrong word, you will actually need those.)

      Now, you need to create an HTML file with all the links you have. For this you can use Notepad, or MS Word or anything that suits the purpose.
      In Notepad, you will have to type out the html tags one by one and it will soon turn out to be a cumbersome task. So, it is better to use MS Word or such softwares that has features which allow easy linking.

      And to make things even simpler, you can use gmail or blogger too. If you are a blogger, create a new post (which you can discard later). Or in gmail, compose a new mail. Now copy those links you need. When copying take note of one thing you can actually select a linked text and press Ctrl + C and then paste it into your mail, post or MS Word document and the text will be pasted with the hyperlink remaining intact. That is, when you copy Change and paste it, it will automatically be linked.

      To make the best of this feature I am giving a few links applicable to anyone, which you can just copy and save time.

      Myspace Facebook Hi5 Blogger Orkut Twitter
      Google Yahoo! Torrentz
      Gmail Hotmail
      Flickr Youtube
      eBay Amazon
      Wikipedia Wikibooks
      adsense adbrite
      Cricinfo live cricket score
      Blank Page
      (Now, a part of that, I took from the start page of Green Browser, which is an excellent online alternative to this offline home page)

      Now, if you use orkut
      Orkut Scrapbook Communities
      Now don’t forget to add to that the scrapbooks of your dearest friends, or the forums of your favourite communities

      And if facebook,
      Facebook Profile Inbox

      If you have many blogs, add similar links to new post, edit posts, edit layout, view blog, etc.
      Similarly add links to all those pages you visit once a week at least.

      Now is the bit tricky part. If you used MS Word for creating this you can just save it and set it as your home page. But what if you used Gmail, or Blogger? Of course you can copy from them again and paste it to MS word and save it. But a far better alternative is to use the “Save Frame As…” option found in the file menu of Mozilla Firefox. (Oh, aren’t you using Firefox, then switch to it immediately). By saving the frame, you save only the text box in which you typed in the links. And thus you get exactly what you want.

      Now, don’t forget to add Change to your offline home page

      Related Posts:
      How to Make Sure That You Blog Daily or Regularly

    3. How to Make Sure That You Blog Daily or Regularly

      So, you’ve set up a blog. And you’ve had some nice posts, and a decent amount of followers. Everything is going nice except for one thing. Once in a while you forget about blogging. You are so immersed in twitter or facebook or orkut that you forget to check out new comments in your blog.
      You know you love to blog, but you forget to love. How do we start loving our blogs again, daily?

      The solution to this is setting up your browser or PC to help you blog easily. When you need to go to your blogger dashboard to create a new post, that is an extra step and you’re most probably not going to do that every time.

      So, let me introduce some tips that can make blogging easy for you.

      • Add the blogger gadget to your igoogle page, (and make it your home page). This simple gadget allows easy posting from your home page itself, and that too to any of your multiple blogs.
      • If you have an offline home page like me, add a link to the new post page of your blog.
      • If you’re using MS Office 2007, use the create blog post feature in it.
      • Use Ping.fm which allows you to post to your blog (and/or even twitter, facebook…) using your chat client. Actually Ping.fm is a tool that allows you to update your account in multiple websites like facebook and twitter simultaneously from a central hub. And when the chat feature is set up you can even send the status update to it as a chat blurb. But using @bl command you can use it to update only your blog. I use it to write my daily diary in my private blog.
      • Set up e-mail posting in your blog, using the mail to post feature.
      • Add the blogger posting gadget to your gmail account. This is done by enabling adding gadgets by URL in labs, and then giving the URL in the special tab that comes up in gmail settings.
      • Try scheduled posts. Go to blogger in draft, create a new post, just before clicking publish, change the post date and time in post options to scheduled at and give a future date and time. Now publish the post. Sit back and relax for your holidays. This is particularly useful if you’re the kind of a person who gets a lot of ideas on one day and gets nothing worth publishing on another day. Schedule as much posts as you can for the future when you feel like. Then just relax for a few days until you get fresh ideas. But for the readers, you will be publishing daily.

      That’s it from my side. What other ways do you have to make blogging a piece of cake?

    4. How to Increase the Number of People who Read your Blog

      There have been numerous articles based on this theme. But, let me discuss some points which have clicked for me.

      1. Tell your friends: If there are any people on earth who would be ready to read your blog at any day, any time whatever your topic is, those will be your friends. Tell out all your friends, that you’ve started something.
      2. Comment on others: There are fellow bloggers, who have more readers. Read their articles, comment intelligently. If others feel that your comment was wise, they will want to know about you.
      3. Profile: So you have people visiting your profile. How do you make them read your blog? Make your blogger profile the most attractive thing they will ever find from you. And also try to include direct links to your best posts in your profile itself. (See my profile)
      4. Socialize: Orkut, Facebook, Twitter… Why should they exist if they can’t promote your blog?
      5. Internal links: Have links to your own blog in your own blog. So, if a reader reads one of your posts, you should make him read 5 other similar posts too.
      6. Give and take: You follow others, they follow you. (Note:This haven’t worked for me yet)
      7. Organize: Whenever a user lands on your blog, make sure that he will get what he wants in a single click if possible.
      8. Bandwidth: Pictures, videos, flash, sounds… All seem fantastic. But think about your poor readers too.
      9. Layout: Have a layout that does not kill the eye.
      10. Quality content, regularly: Lastly, without quality content, you can never keep up. Also, the frequency is important. People prefer one post per day of medium quality posts than posts coming once in a blue moon. Also make sure that you make your reader an addict of your blog. Every day he gets one post, one day he doesn’t, he asks you.

    5. How to Make Blog Post Through Emails in Blogger, ie Send an Email and It Will Become a Blog Post, How

      Ever thought it would be a lot easier if you could make blog posts directly from your GMail or yahoo mail inbox. But it’s possible too. Blogger allows this option of having a unique email address to which you can send an email such that the subject of the mail becomes the title and the body becomes the blog post.
      To do this, you should create a Mail-to-Blogger address which you will use to send posts via email to your blog by going to Settings | Email

      The format of the email address is username.secretword@blogger.com .

      Here, the secret word is something that we can specify so that only we may send emails to the blog.

      Otherwise, you can also make your email public so that others can post to your blog. But, when doing this, make sure that the posts are not published immediately, because, in that case, this feature, like anything else, may be misused.

      Sometimes email programs append text to the bottom of each sent message; to make sure this cruft doesn’t get posted to your blog, put #end at the end of your post.

      If you don’t understand this, you can view the illustrated blogger help too

    6. For bloggers who are MS Office 2007 users

      Those of you who maintain a blog of your own will do be facing the difficulty of soaring to your blogger dashboard and then typing in the post very inconveniently to add a new post to your blog. Especially when you have too many small posts to make on many of your blogs, you will start hating blogs. But here is the ultimate solution (works only if MS Office 2007 is installed).

      Run MS Office Word 2007

      Select new from the office button

      From installed templates, choose New Blog Post (Hope it is there)

      If you are using the first time, it asks your blog server, username (use google username if you joined your blog server by google), password, blog name, etc.

      Now you can start blogging without a browser.