Clear Blue Dei

How many times have you gone to someone’s blog and read one of their posts and then wanted to see what else they had written about that topic? I know I do frequently and I’ll bet you do too. And I’m sure that people have come to your blog and thought, “I wonder what else they have written about [fill in the topic]?”.

Well, a way to organize your posts and help people see what else you might have written about the same topic is to use Categories (in WordPress) or Labels (in Google Blogger). These can also be referred to as tags (or folksonomies…). An example of this is, say you wanted to see any posts I’d written about Harry Potter. You can go to my categories and click on “Harry Potter” (notice that it gives the number of posts that are tagged Harry Potter after the tag - this is an optional setting in your categories widget). Then you would go to this page that only contains all my posts that are categorized as “Harry Potter”.

You will probably end up needing to go back and check your categories and clean them up periodically so they are useful to get all posts from a certain topic and to regroup those that only have 1 post in a category. And sometimes you might want to add a category and then add that category to the posts pertaining to it after you find you have written a few more posts about something.

If you look at this blog or my Blogger test blog Along the Path to 2.0, you can see that I have a huge list on the right of my blog of all my labels (for this blog, click the arrow on the right of my categories list to drop down the list). Especially in Blogger, it is important to file under broader categories so you don’t end up with a huge list that only contains 1 post like I did. That is not how categories/labels should be used. They should group a number of like posts, not just 1 post.

When I first stated my blog, I categorized everything by a whole bunch of specific keywords and so my earliest posts don’t have useful categories. As an example, I categorized some posts under “google” and “analytics” where I should have categorized them either as “google analytics” or “blog stats” or something that puts them in a category that would group them with other similar posts. Doing the keywords separately means that searching under ‘google’ would give all posts about anything I tagged ‘google” (could be google blogger, google analytics, the google search engine, the company, etc). Now that is fine for a category since it does allow someone to find everything I posted about anything related to google, but doesn’t help for finding those posts about getting or using blog statistics.

There really is an art to categorizing your posts and it is a process of refining and redoing them regularly. It helps if you start out on the right foot, knowing some of these things. I didn’t when I started and I now have sort of a mess and really need to go back an correct them. When you have a lot of posts, it is really a pain in the butt to do that though since it is very time-consuming and you have to do each post individually. So if you start with some good categories, you will save yourself a lot of time!

How to create categories/labels:

WordPress

When you write a post, you have the ability to add categories/labels to your post to help identify and categorize it. You can select and add categories to your WordPress blog in the categories box to the right of where you write your posts. This is the same whether using a wordpress.com hosted wordpress blog or a wordpress.org self-hosted blog.

Blogger:

In Google Blogger (Blogspot), there is a text box at the bottom of where you compose your post that says “Labels for this post:” and you enter the labels you want to use

Wordpress:

Then just make sure you have included a Categories widget (for Wordpress) on your sidebar so people can use it to search by category. The picture to the left is a picture of my sidebar 2 (right sidebar) for my blog. You can see that under the “Odiogo Subscribe Button” widget is my “Categories” widget. I have it configured so that it uses a drop-down box to display my categories. If I click on the little horizontal lines on the right of the widget, it brings up a box that lets me choose if I want a drop-down box or just a list (which can take up a lot of room on your sidebar if you have a lot of categories), and lets me give it a title and show the number of posts in each category. It also lets me choose to Show Hierarchy which to be honest, I don’t really know what that does. It doesn’t change anything when I check it.

If you are using the default sidebars for your template, it will most likely already have a categories widget. If not, and you want to add it, be aware that if you add anything to a default sidebar, it will remove all the other widgets so you will have add them as well.

Also, the template I am using displays the categories that each post is filed under right under the title of the post (see example). So someone could read this post about Picnik and if they were interested in more information about Picnik, they could click on the category “Picnik” at the top of my post and get a list of all the posts that are filed under “Picnik”. Different templates work differently, some have them at the bottom of the post and some don’t include them at all. It is something to look for when choosing a template if you want to have the categories for each post listed. Not everyone uses them, but when I am visiting a blog, if I read a post about an interesting subject and want to know more, I will click on the appropriate category in the post list. Of course, if that isn’t available, I will use the category list on the side to see what else they might have.

Blogger:

To add a category widget (which is called a Label Page Element) in Blogger, you go to template–>page elements and click on “Add a Page Element” and choose the Label page element. You can click on edit to edit it but there isn’t a lot you can do in Blogger, basically just list either alphabetically or by frequency.

And to show the labels for each post in Blogger, choose ‘edit’ in the Blog Posts box on that window and check the “labels” box.

Also, the template I am using (and near as I can tell, most of the templates in Google Blogger) displays the categories that each post is filed under right under the title of the post (see example). So someone could read this post about Las Vegas internet access and if they were interested in more information about Las Vegas, they could click on the category “las vegas” at the top of my post and get a list of all the posts that are filed under “las vegas”.

So as you write your posts, think about what category/label would be useful to search your blog for other similar posts and file your post under those categories. It will help other people find things on your blog. And don’t forget to try it out on other people’s blogs too!

~Susan Mellott

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In Blog Tip: Adding Pages to Enhance your Blog - Part 1 I talked about adding pages like “About Me” or “Our Location” (or whatever you want) to your blog. Now let’s look at adding sub-pages and a few widgets to enhance your Wordpress.org (self-hosted wordpress) blog.

But before that, Christopher was kind enough to leave a comment on Part 1 explaining how to simulate multiple link list widgets in Wordpress. I knew that there was only 1 link list widget (blogroll) in wordpress, but what I didn’t know was that if you give the links you add different categories, it will break the list down by that category so it functions as different groups of links. You can see this in action on this blog. I have a list of links called Blogroll and another list of links called Life. You cannot separate the lists, they appear one after the other, but you can get different groups of links. So if you were a company, you could have one group called “Our Locations” and another called “Our Distributors” (as examples). The heading of each group is based on the name you used for the category.

As Chris points out: Just go to the blogroll in the admin and select categories. Add a category for whatever topic you want like ‘books’ and add the new links to that category. They will show up as their own list. These instructions are actually for a wordpress.com hosted wordpress blog, but it is very similar if you have a self-hosted wordpress.org blog. Go to Admin—>Blogroll and add or edit a link. When you are on the page to set up the link, pick (or add) the category for the link from the list at the right and when you save it, it will show up with that category as the name of the list it is under. You can also do this if you have a wordpress.com blog, but only if you have already added the category previously. If not, you have to add the category through admin—>Blogroll—>Categories first. I don’t know why wordpress.com makes you do that extra step, but it does.

Anyway… On to sub-pages!

A sub-page is a page that has another page as its parent other than the main page. This is used to relate a set of pages to a particular page other than your main blog. As an example, you can see how I have set up an “Our Travel” page that appears in the list at the top of my blog. All pages that are sub-pages of other pages do not appear in the main heading of the blog. That lets my “Our Travel” be a completely different section of my blog and is similar to a website. In fact, this lets you almost use your blog as a website with more information than just your blog. You can keep lots more on your blog than just posts.

In Google Blogger, you cannot create pages, so obviously, you can’t create sub-pages either. But there are still things you can do to simulate sub-pages and/or use your blog for more than just a blog. One thing you can do is to create a back-dated post (see Part 1) as say, your “Locations” page that you put in your “Pages” link list in your sidebar. Then you can create several more posts with your different locations and then add links in the text of that post to each of your locations posts. You can get an idea of that by looking at my “Our Travel” page. I have added links on it to my sub-pages for 1996 and 1997. And on my 1996 sub-page, I added links to additional sub-pages for each of our travels in 1996. You can do the same thing in Blogger, by just substituting back-dated posts for sub-pages.

Another thing you could do is create a link list called “Locations” and then add links to each of the back-dated posts you have created for each location. Then you could add another link list for say, “Distributors” and add links to a post about each distributor (or a link to their site). Anyway, you get the idea. Pretty much the only thing you don’t get is the list of pages across the top of your blog like you do in Wordpress.

On to Wordpress: In Wordpress, you can create actual sub-pages that are attached to a page and that won’t show up in the tabs across the top of your blog (only pages that have the main page as a parent show up on the top). What this means is that you have to have a “Pages” widget in your sidebar in order to access these sub-pages (unless you link to them from within the text of your page, which I have also done in my Our Travels pages).

In most Wordpress themes (both wordpress.com and self-hosted wordpress), in the pages widget, it will show all your pages, with the sub-pages indented below each page they belong to. Unfortunately, this particular theme Prosumer 1.4 that I am using does not do that. All pages show at the same level in my Pages list. That really isn’t very nice and it is much nicer when they are appropriately indented. Hopefully they will fix it at some point. If you go to my All Things Web 2.0 wordpress.com blog, you can see how it looks indented. And here is a clip of the Pages sidebar widget from my wordpress.com blog.

Doesn’t that look a lot nicer than the one in this theme? I do like this theme though so I put up with some idiosyncrasies.

And for self-hosted Wordpress blogs, there are several plugins that you can use in place of your standard “Pages” widget. It is a little tricky to install a plugin on your self-hosted blog because you have to get the widget files from their site and then upload it to your own site where your blog is. If you aren’t familiar or comfortable with doing that, you can just use the regular “Pages” widget.

My favorite is the Flexi Pages widget by Srini G. It has several option for displaying that the regular Pages widget doesn’t have.

You can name the list whatever you want. And have a lot of different sort options such as by Page Title, Menu Order, Date Created, etc. You can also pick certain pages that you don’t want to show up in the list. You can have an entry on your page list to the home page (main blog) and call it whatever you like. The rest is pretty self-explanatory (except that the theme I’m using doesn’t indent the pages regardless of whether or not it is chosen).

The custom depth level means how many sub-pages of sub-pages down you want to show. Blank means all of them. You can see that I have entered -3. That is a little trick that is not really explained or mentioned that I found buried in the widget information. You can see how it works by clicking on my Flexipage widget to go to other pages. Here is what it does (from the info):

“Have the child pages, parent pages, sibling pages and top level pages displayed on a page while still leaving out the siblings of parent pages. This is not possible with older versions. Version 1.2 doesn’t include this as an ‘option’ though. You have to specify the ‘Custom depth’ as -3 to achieve this.”

Another Pages widget is the MultiPages Widget by Jerome LeCoq. It is more difficult to use because you have to know the ID of each page (which you can find by going to Admin–>Manage–>Pages and the ID is the number on the left of the title. It doesn’t really give you any extras over the flexipage widget either, except that you can have up to 9 of the multipage widgets. So unless you need more than 1 page list, the FlexiPage widget is the best and easiest of these two. Here is what the setup looks like for the MultiPage plugin:

And if you look at the very bottom of the Admin–>Presentation–>Widgets page, that is where you choose how many instances of the widget you want. NOTE: This is also where you choose how many of various other widgets you want also. I always forget where it is when I need to increase the number of a widget, like if I need more text widgets.

You can see how these different widgets/plugins work by looking at my left sidebar of my blog.

So try out some pages and increase the power of your blog!

~Susan Mellott

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Why would you want to add pages to your blog? Well, maybe you want to add an “About Me” page, or a “Books I’m Reading” page or a “Our Travels” page. Or maybe you are a business, like a library and you want to add an “Events” page or a “Location” page or “Help” or “Our Schedule” or any number of things.

If you add them to your blog, they get mixed in with everything else. If you try to add them to your sidebar, you don’t really have much room or many options. This way, you can have a list at the top of your blog and on your sidebar with “Events”, “Location”, “Schedule”, “About Us”, “Help”, etc. (NOTE: Blogger doesn’t support adding pages, but there are ways to simulate pages that I explain below).

WORDPRESS: The first page you might add to your blog and the most common, is the “About Me” page. I cannot remember now, but I think that wordpress might already have one added for you, although you need to go edit it to add your information. See instructions below for editing or adding a page.

To add a new page, such as “Books I am reading”, you would go to your wp-admin (dashboard) and choose “Manage” and then “Pages”. You will see a list of all the pages you have so far and here you can view, edit or delete them. You could choose to edit your “About Me” page to add content, or to change the title or whatever you would like to do. It is just like creating or editing a post.

Or you can choose “Create new Page” which will take you to a page that looks like the page you get when you want to write a new post. You can give the new page a title (such as “Books I am Reading”) and can write whatever you want to appear on that page. NOTE: You can also go to Write—->Pages to create a new page.

When you publish it, you will see at the top of your blog, a new tab that says “Books I am Reading”. If you click on that tab, you will see your new page. Each theme is a little different but pretty much all of them do this.

You can also add a widget to your sidebar that lists your pages. If you go to Presentation—->Widgets, you can drag and drop the Pages widget into your sidebar and it will give you a list of your pages in your sidebar.

NOTE: If you are using the default sidebar(s) with your blog, dropping a new widget on it will make your default sidebar go away so you will have to set it up yourself by dragging and dropping the widgets on it that you had before. This lets you customize your sidebars pretty easily, but if you don’t want to mess with it yet, don’t add the widget. Your pages will appear at the top of your theme anyway.

Check it out on this blog. You can see the pages listed across the top of my blog and the list of pages in the left sidebar of my blog. You can also see that there are more pages listed in the sidebar than at the top. That is because these are sub-pages that are under “Our Travels”. You can see how they are indented under their main page. In Part 2 of this article I will explain sub-pages and how to add them.

Another way to add pages that are not on your blog is to make a list of links under your Blogroll to those pages. This is one place where I don’t understand Wordpress. They don’t have a links widget where you can just add a list of links and name it “ACPL Branches” or “Other Library Sites” or whatever. You have the blogroll and that is it. You can, however, make a new page and call it Information or ACPL Branches, etc. and add the links there.

GOOGLE BLOGGER: Google Blogger doesn’t allow multiple pages, which really surprises me. I really did not realize that until I started writing about this. If you really want to have multiple pages (and especially sub-pages, which I will cover in my Part 2 of this article), you may want to consider moving to Wordpress.

Each blog engine has its advantages and disadvantages (see my 3-part review of blog engines) but if this is really important and this workaround doesn’t suit your needs, moving to Wordpress.com is an option. The nice thing about going from Blogger to Wordpress.com is that Wordpress.com has a nice Import feature that lets you easily move all your Blogger posts into your new Wordpress blog. Unfortunately, Blogger doesn’t have that for moving from Wordpress, although there are tools to let you do it.

Anyway, here is something you can do in Blogger to create ‘Pages’.

Go to Settings—->Archiving—–>Enable post pages—–>Yes—>Save. Then just create a post to create a new page. You can call it whatever you want. Backdate it so that it does not appear on the Main page. It will still be in your blog, but as the first post if you backdate it far enough. See the picture for where you change the date. It is in the lower right hand corner. The picture is a picture of the page post being created. Click on the picture to see it full-sized.

Now you need to get the permanent link for this post. If you go to Posting—->Edit Posts and select “Oldest” on the top right of the list of posts, you will see your new post as the first (oldest) post in your list. Click on View for that post and it will take you to the post. Now copy the URL (link) to that post (in the text box at the top of your browser). You will use it to paste into the page element you create below as the link to your ‘page’.

Now go to Template—->Page Element and add a Link List element to your sidebar. You can call it something like “Pages” and for the link, add the URL to the post you just created and name it whatever you want, like “About Me”. As you add page posts and links, you will get a list that looks similar to a Pages sidebar widget in Wordpress (although it will not list each page across the top like Wordpress).

One thing you will note if you use the Archives page element in your sidebar, is that it will show up there. I added my Google Blogger “About Me” post by just changing the year to 2001 instead of 2007. You will see in my archives list that I have 2001/November listed with my About Me post. If you pick some date for all your new ‘pages’ (like 1/1/2000), they will just all fall under that which is best. If you pick random dates then you will have a whole bunch of different dates show up in your Archive list.

If you look at my Google Blogger blog Along the Path to 2.0, you can see this in action. The first ‘page’ on my list is actually a blog post. The second ‘page’ on my page list is a link to a page on this (my Wordpress) blog. That is another way to add pages. As an example, if you have a blog and a website, you can link to information on a page on the website. If you already have an events or location or about page or home page you can link to it from your blog under your Pages list (or whatever you choose to call it, maybe Information or whatever makes sense).

In Part 2 of this article I will explain sub-pages and how to add and use them.

~Susan Mellott

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Sean Robinson, Head of IT at the Allen County Public Library and defender of Truth, Justice and the American Way, obliterates the bad guys (and a few innocent victims) in his pursuit of… something.

Brought to you by JibJab (Starring You!), I present: Unnecessary Force, starring Sean Robinson. Supporting roles by Nat Robinson as the Chief, Susan Mellott as Victim #1, Julian Casserley as Victim #2 and Dorothy Lubbes (my mom) as Victim #3. With a guest appearance by Rush Limbaugh.

Note: This requires an extremely high-speed connection. Watching it on my wireless connection at home, I lose rather large pieces of it. Just so you know.

Wordpress Note: When I embedded this in my post, I had to turn off the Visual Editor in WordPress (self-hosted) in order for it to display correctly. You can do that by going to Users, editing your user and unchecking the “Use Visual Editor” checkbox at the top left. You can re-check it after you have published your post, but be careful about re-editing your post with the Visual Editor on. This is the same issue that you run into when you try to embed a YouTube video in a self-hosted WordPress blog post.

JibJab Note: And in case you were wondering how to embed a JibJab Movie in your post, after you have created the movie in JibJab, click on the word “Embed” to the right of the movie, under Publish. It will create the code for you which you then copy in its entirety and paste into your post where you want it to appear. (Turning off the Visual Editor first if you are using a self-hosted Wordpress blog, i.e. one that isn’t through wordpress.com)

Enjoy!

~Susan Mellott

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Well, I didn’t check my sources and I am pretty embarrassed by that. On my last post called From 1954 Popular Mechanics - Scientists Illustrate What a Home Computer Will Look Like I used a picture that I got from an email and I took it for face value without verifying the source.

Sara left me a comment and a link to Snope’s Hoaxes, Viruses and Urban Legends page about this picture and caption. It turns out that this is not from 1954 Popular Mechanics, nor is it what the RAND scientists envision the home computer to look like in the year 2004. Here is what Snope’s has to say about the photo:

“Although the photograph displayed could represent what some people in the early 1950s contemplated a “home computer” might look like (based on the technology of the day), it isn’t, as the accompanying text claims, a RAND Corporation illustration from 1954 of a prototype “home computer.” The picture is actually an entry submitted to a Fark.com image modification competition, taken from an original photo of a submarine maneuvering room console found on U.S. Navy web site, converted to grayscale, and modified to replace a modern display panel and TV screen with pictures of a decades-old teletype/printer and television (as well as to add the gray-suited man to the left-hand side of the photo)”

The original color picture was taken in 2000 at the Smithsonian Institution exhibit “Fast Attacks and Boomers: Submarines in the Cold War” and depicts: full-scale display of a typical nuclear-powered submarine’s maneuvering room in which the ship’s engineers control the power plant and electrical and steam system.

I always, always check out every email about viruses and the like before sending them on. But I forgot to check this one before posting it. I generally get all my information from verified sources so I didn’t think to check this out. And I forgot that posting something is different than just forwarding on an email.

Well, live and learn! This is a very good lesson for me and I am glad I learned it (although I wish it was not in such a public manner).

Blogging is very much like writing a newspaper column and requires the same verification of sources and attention to detail. It isn’t like email where you can just forward something interesting.

This is definitely a lesson learned for me and not just that all sources need verified, but that blogging is reporting and a reporter needs to be sure they have their facts straight and need to be highly professional at all times in their approach, at least those bloggers who are trying to provide information for other people and not just using it as a diary or such.

So while this was learning the hard way, I hope it helps you avoid this problem for yourself and you can bet I will be more careful about this, and especially will verify email sources in the future.

~Susan Mellott

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Before I get back to my regularly scheduled posts, more typically on Web 2.0 tools, I have one more generally useful tip/trick for you.

Yesterday, we had a refrigerator delivered by Sears and once again, I saw that they were using a really interesting system to move the fridge. They each had harnesses on and they took a strap and put it under the fridge and hooked it to their harness and moved the refrigerator very easily, even through a tight doorway where the fridge was almost as tall as the doorway.

I had seen delivery men use this before for us, the last time was when our stove was delivered and before that, our very large screen, rear projection TV. And each time, they seemed to lift and maneuver the large, bulky, heavy item with ease.

So I asked the Sears delivery guys about it and they said you can buy them for yourself from Shoulder Dolly for about $60 and that they highly recommend them. They said that it takes all the strain off their backs and that they can lift and maneuver heavy, bulky things easily up and downstairs, around corners, through tight spots, etc. They said it makes it very easy to move large items.

So I went to their website and it was very informative. Here is an overview of the Shoulder Dolly system:

“The Shoulder Dolly® is a revolutionary system of moving heavy and bulky objects that works using leverage. Rather than bending over to pick up an object from the bottom for a good hand hold, the Shoulder Dolly uses webbed harnesses that go over the large shoulder muscles. The system allows the lifters to maintain an upright posture using the large shoulder and leg muscles to lift the weight, significantly decreasing strain and risk of injury to the lower back, hands, biceps and forearms. There are two models of the Shoulder Dolly, The Heavy Duty and the Light Duty.”

It looked to me like the Sears guys were using the light duty shoulder dolly. Here is a video from their site on how to use the light duty shoulder dolly:

There are several places to get the Shoulder Dolly, including from Amazon: Shoulder Dolly #LD1000. And I see that it is marked down on Amazon to $39.99 (free S&H).

And here is a link to the Above All Company Forearm Forklift Lifting Straps, 2-Pack #L74995CN which is another moving enhancement product, although I really do not know anything about it except it seems reasonable and has gotten good reviews.

We have been very impressed each time we saw delivery men deliver our products using the Shoulder Dolly and we definitely plan to buy one.

This is not a paid endorsement. I do not know, nor have any affiliation with Shoulder Dolly, TDT Moving Systems or Tom Dent. I just think it is a good and useful product.

~Susan Mellott

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One big problem with Google Blogger is that it doesn’t have a mechanism to back up your blog. So if something happens to Blogger and you lose your data, you do not have a backup. Or for a more likely scenario, if you want to move some or all of your posts to another Blogger blog, you can’t do it.

When I reviewed the various blog engines, I noted this problem and came up with a “hack” to backup your data. You can create a blog on Wordpress.com and use it to create a backup of your posts and comments. In Wordpress, you can go to “manage” and then “import” and it will let you import your blog posts, comments and users (but not categories) from Blogger (or LiveJournal, MovableType/Typepad or a saved Wordpress file). Then you can choose “export” and export your blog to a file that you can store on your hard drive or where you want to save it.

That works and works pretty easily and well but requires 2 blogs and may not be right for you. Well, there is also another option that isn’t quite as full-featured yet, but is easy and does a good job of backing up posts (and comments, but doesn’t have the ability to restore the comments to the post they belong to yet, they restore as a separate post).

It is Blogger Backup on CodePlex.

*PLEASE NOTE: The Blogger Backup utility uses (and has always used) your Public Feed to backup your posts.

If your feeds are off, then nothing can be backed up.
If your feeds are set to Summary, then only those Summary feeds will be backed up.

Additionally, if you have your feed redirected, like to feedburner (look in your settings/site feed to check), you need to turn off the redirect while you are backing up your blog. You can also look here to make sure you have your “Allow Blog Feed” set to “Full”.

Blogger Backup is easy to install and easy to use. It uses windows installer to install and is pretty self-explanatory to use. It doesn’t have great help and it doesn’t have a readme.txt but there is information on CodePlex and forums where you can post issues and questions.

After you have installed it, you should go to Microsoft Windows Updates and verify that you have the latest version and patches for .NET framework. If you select the “custom” button, it will scan your computer for updates and then give you a list of updates. Then click on Software (optional) on the left and look for Microsoft .NET framework. If you find anything, install it.

One note about the Windows Updates site, you have to be in Internet Explorer to use it. If you (like me) use another browser, you’ll have to go to IE to run the updates.

Then open the Blogger Backup and it asks you for your blog, or easier, you can give it your Blogger name/id and password and it will search for all your Blogger blogs for you.

To run a backup, you can choose to create 1 file with all your posts, or to create separate files for each post and comment, which lets you pick which posts to restore. You can choose whether or not to back up comments (this is unchecked so be sure to check it if you want your comments) and you can pick all posts or a number of posts to save or only new posts since a certain date. Here is what it looks like after you have run a backup (backing up each post individually). Click on the picture for a bigger view.

It puts these in My Documents\Blogger Backup\”your blog name”. Here is what the list of post backup files looks like in that directory.

When you click on Restore, you see a screen that looks like this one below. It is blank until you add some posts (as I have). It shows you the window above so you can pick the post(s) you want to restore.

In the larger view (click on pic) you will notice that the second line in my list of posts to restore looks different. It is actually a comment. But it thinks it is a post. I’m sure they are planning to fix that so it will restore comments correctly instead of as a post.

Note that only 50 blog posts can be restored each day due to a limit in Blogger.

When you click on OK, it restores the selected posts.

NOTE: you can backup posts from one blog and restore it to another. I have 2 blogger blogs. I backed up both blogs. Then I did a restore on one of the blogs but chose the subdirectory containing the posts from my other blog. They restored fine to the new blog.

This is a handy little tool and will become handier as it is developed. It is considered to be beta, so they are still working on it and adding features and functionality.

It doesn’t backup/restore comments properly yet and it doesn’t backup/restore any videos or pictures or other unusual items in a post. It doesn’t backup/restore tags and I doubt that it restores links either. And you have to have your full feeds turned on. I’m not sure if this would work if you didn’t have them turned on before. It may only restore back to when the feed was turned on, although I am not sure.

But it is easy to use and allows selective restores and backups of your blog. If you use Google Blogger and don’t backup your blog, this is a good way to get a basic backup. If you ever want to move blogs or lose posts, you will be glad you used it.

UPDATE: Greg (the author of Blogger Backup) is currently working on many new enhancements. It is a labor of love for him and he is doing a great job.

In response to a comment I posted on CodePlex, he says: “I plan on adding both a “comment only” (restoring comments to an existing post and Post & Comment (the post and its commnets) restore capability in the future. And the feed redirect issue is fixed in the version I’m currently working on… ”

and I asked about possibly enhancing the help and he replied that it is changing so fast that it is hard to keep any help files up-to-date but said “What I’ll do is add a couple simple pages to this site, one for requirements & installation notes and one for basic usage. That will be pretty easy and a good starting point… I’ll hack those out this weekend or so (depends on work… I’m currently stuck in a work cycle from hell and haven’t had much “spare time” to work on “my” stuff)”

Thanks, Greg, you are doing great work and are really helping a lot of people with your program.

~Susan Mellott

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There is an excellent and very popular blog called Blog About Your Blog, that takes an in-depth look at all the ways to improve, promote and market your website. As an example, they look at thing like Why it is Important to Increase your StumbleUpon Network and other networking tools like Digg, Reddit, Sphinn, Plugim and the pros and cons of each.

Also, they look at ways to monitor your blog activity, how to increase it and how to improve it, market it and make money from it.

Here is a list of some of their most popular posts, that includes such things like Writing a Great Blog Title, 5 Must-have Comment Plug-ins for WordPress, Optimize Your Blog and many others.

Another very interesting idea that they have implemented is a “Comment Friday”, where they ask their readers to post ideas about whatever topic they have picked. They have asked about things like What You have Been Blogging About Recently, SuperBlogging Tips, What You Think About SEO (search engine optimization) and How You Implement It and many other topics.

They use a very interesting incentive to get many comments, which helps them promote their website and helps the readers get a lot of good ideas. Here is what they say about Comment Friday: “If this is your first comment friday, the idea is pretty simple. Leave us a comment about anything you want. I will select one lucky commentor that really stands out, and I will give a free link to them. Not only that, but they will get a one week free blogroll spot.”

This not only improves their standings by increasing their comments on their posts, but also provides exposure to the person who is selected each Friday.

Besides the good information in their posts and comments, you can also learn a lot about promoting your blog just by looking at theirs and seeing how they go about promoting their own blog.

An example is the current contest they are running to increase their technorati score through linkbacks. A person just mentions their blog in a post and they can win one of three prizes, including an MP3 player, banner on their sidebar or full site review by Adsense Tracker on their blog. The contest ends Sept. 19.
Since I had planned to write about this blog for a while, the contest gave me the incentive to sit down and do it. I like prizes!

Blog About Your Blog is filled with good ideas and advice and really is a must-read for anyone who is serious about their blogging.

~Susan Mellott

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I have had trouble adding the embed code for a YouTube video to my self-hosted WordPress blog from wordpress.org.

Normaly, you would copy the embed code from the page of the YouTube video you want to copy, into your post where you want to add it, using the ‘code’ tab for your post.

But that doesn’t usually work and you end up with nothing showing up, even though you can see the code when you switch from the Visual tab to the Code tab of your post.

So what you need to do is go to your wp-admin and then to Users and then edit the user you are currently using to post under (logged in as). You’ll see a checkbox at the top that says “Use the visual editor when writing”. Uncheck that box and save.

Then go back and edit your post and copy the embed code from the video into your post. Your post will appear as it would if you were looking at it on the Code tab, but there is no Visual tab.

You have to do this after you have set the user to not use the visual editor. If you copied the code before you changed it, delete it and re-add it. It is usually easiest to do your whole post using the regular visual editor and then switch to not using it just to add the YouTube code. Also, be careful that you don’t edit the post using visual editor after you have embedded the video.

It doesn’t make sense, since there is a code tab that should allow you to add it, but this is how you can do it so it works.

Here is a video I took of my cat that I embedded in this post.

~Susan Mellott

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If you have been using Wordpress.com to host your blog, you might be wondering how to embed a video in your post. I know I have been! Well, thanks to what else, a YouTube video, I found the answer. It isn’t hard, but I just didn’t know.

Essentially, you just copy and paste the code next to the “embed” tag that is part of the information listed for each YouTube video while viewing the post using the “Code” tab (not the “Visual” tab). This worked for me and I didn’t need to do anything.

It is the same in Google Blogger except you go to the Edit HTML tab to add the code instead of the Code tab.

Actually, the video didn’t really help me except to point me to the ‘embed’ code and then it was obvious that it needed added to the Code section (or Edit HTML section in Blogger). And it was even more obvious when I tried it again and forgot to go to the Code first and it just displayed the code as text (as you would expect).

But if that doesn’t work, according to the video, it may be because of the WordPress Advanced Text Editor. Now the instructions in the video seem to be a little different than what I see so I’m wondering if it is pertaining to the WordPress version that you host on your own, or maybe to an earlier version. So this may or may not be applicable. I think maybe it was an earlier version of WordPress that didn’t allow you to view the code, since all I needed to do was to copy the embed code into the post while viewing it in the Code tab. But here is the video I watched for this, and my first embedded video (I cheated and went back and put an embedded video in the post before this one too).

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wgLv9XQWlMA]

~Susie

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