Wednesday 18 November 2009

Blogging: dummies' guide anyone?

There's a few things I'm not happy about with my blog. I'd like to learn more about page design. My blogroll doesn't update fast enough. Commentors have copy paste issues if I forget to click back to Edit HTML from Compose mode after I post. I have no automatic flagging of new comments, so if someone comments on an old post I won't see it except by luck. Etc.

What I'd like to do is read through a good beginner's site or book.

Does anyone have any recommendations?

5 comments:

  1. Blogspot is a great place to get started with your blogging, however, Wordpress offers the blogger so much more in control and maintenance for your site. Head over to podlogs.com and move your blog there. It will allow you to take advantage of all the features of Wordpress, be part of an established an dedicated EVE blogging resource.

    Just a thought.

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  2. Before someone jumps is and says "blah blah blah Wordpress blah blah", I'll just point out that Blogspot blogs can do all that stuff pretty easily once you learn the platform. =)

    Some specific comments:

    "I'd like to learn more about page design. "

    What aspects? Look & feel or something else? There are a lot of sites out there offering free templates that look nothing like Blogger's defaults and just work.

    "My blogroll doesn't update fast enough."

    What are you using to manage it? Personally I just use a list and add blogs that I like periodically. Are you integrating with Google reader or something?

    "Commentors have copy paste issues if I forget to click back to Edit HTML from Compose mode after I post. "

    That's odd - I always post in Compose mode.... I think it may have more to do with the settings you've enabled for comments.

    "I have no automatic flagging of new comments, so if someone comments on an old post I won't see it except by luck."

    You can set Blogger to email you when new comments arrive.

    On the topic of commenting policy, I recommend: No Captcha, only force approval on comments older than X days (I think mine is 14 days), inline comments (like you have here).

    I'm happy to help in anyway I can.

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  3. Hah! I was too wordy - the Wordpress patrol beat me to posting. To reiterate: Wordpress is nice, but it's not the godsend its advocates make it out to be.... at least not without paying for the service.

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  4. Thanks guys.

    I think I'm happy to keep my blog here for now. I'm not specifically an Eve blog.

    I think in general I'd just like to know more. I've been looking at some authors's sites (Joe Abercrombie and CJ Cherryh) and I was impressed how much they customised their blogs there. And of course there are some great MMO blogs in terms of blog design.

    I might try the public library and see if I can find what I'm looking for there. Basically I just want to know more, I won't necessarily know what it is I want to know until I read about it.

    The blogroll problem seems to be connected to the link I use. For example if there is feed.mmoblog.com it seems to update a lot quicker than simple mmoblog.com, the url of the main page. But I want to link to the main page not a feed reader rehash.

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  5. I'm using Wordpress, but I don't like the limitations. Trouble is, that's going to be the case with any free service. If I wanted to pay for it, I could get more control. (For instance, I'd love to have full CSS control, so I could really spiffy up the place, but it's just not worth the cost, especially when the blog itself isn't making any money.)

    One thing you could try is looking at the source code on blogs you like. Most webpages let you see their HTML, and if the sites you like aren't using remote CSS for layout, you can reverse engineer their look.

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