Monday 12 May 2008

My Blogging Learning Curve Status

Gosh, this blogging business can be jolly time-consuming.

A helpful comment from Emily Veinglory on my last post alerted me to a problem reading my blog in Internet Explorer 7. As I usually use Firefox, I hadn’t been aware of it before.

Well, I knew I had downloaded IE7 recently, but I couldn’t find it on my system. Then I found it was just because I hadn’t set up my access to it. That accomplished, I could see what the problem was. It looked like some javascript had slipped into the text between sentences and paragraphs.

Anyway, I spent an hour or so, editing all my posts to put it right. Luckily I’m a relatively new blogger here so I only had 28 posts to trawl through. It’ll be interesting to see how this one appears when I post it, as my practice is to draft in Word and then copy in the text and tidy it up.

Next I get an email from Smorty rejecting my blog because it isn’t Google indexed. I had given up on Blogsvertise because I still hadn’t been offered a task, and decided to register with Smorty. When I investigated I rather preferred some of the Smorty features actually. However, it’s the same old story. And I obviously still have a great deal to learn about blogging.

I googled “get google indexed” and found some easy advice, which was just to download the Google toolbar. So I went through that process twice. Once for IE7 and once for Firefox. Now the toolbar tells me that there is no ranking information available for my page. So I guess that is just the start of what I need to do.

And now I find that my entrecard is not recognised in IE7, where I keep being given the option to get one. But I can still do my dropping in Firefox.

It’s a funny old world.

6 comments:

veinglory said...

Hi there. I personally wouldn't bother with the google search bar. Google will find you eventually if you have new comments and some cross links. I can sure be slow about it sometimes.

I have been blogging for a few years but only revently tried actively promoting my blogs and I am finding the whole thing to be a pain in the ***, frankly. I think my main advatange is the blogs themselves have a been around a while so they rank 3 and above from being active that long.

But blog ad services and directories are doing my head in. i think entrecard is the only thing that has worked for me at all exceopt for a few new Zealand specific directories.

Unknown said...

Thanks Emily. There's an awful lot of conflicting advice out there. The next two things I want to find out how to do are: get some words on my new entrecard widget; and change my blog skin to something more enticing.

What fun.

Anonymous said...

I started with a plain blogger template and then as I got to know my way around I played with the colours and the layout. If you look at the customise (though it's probably customize) tab, you will see a lot of options you can change. To start off with, I just played and didn't save the changes. You can see the results by clicking on Preview.

Alternatively there are hordes of free templates available.

For your Entrecard words you can use various simple graphics programs, even Paint should do it. I use Irfanview (free download) to do most of what I need, but my new Entrecard was designed for me from scratch by Globally Rational at a cost of a 250 credits (I think).

Unknown said...

Thanks A for your very helpful comments.

veinglory said...

You blog is already ahead of the game by being quick loading and not ugly. All I would suggest is one nice, optimised picture to give it more identity--it will help people remember the blog and what it is about.

Unknown said...

Thanks again, Emily. I'm now searching for the right pic to try out.

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