[haus]

I wanted to put a thread up about the nitty-gritty details of blogging. A place where bloggers can share techniques, technologies, and strategies. Feel free to ask questions, leave links, and request input here.

There is, in the POL long term strategy, a bullet point about combining the existing forums with a "multiblog." When that happens, there will be good reasons to consider moving blogs here. But that's down the road and it's a complicated topic. Suffice it to say that when it does happen, the more seasoned bloggers that participate, the better the final product will be.

One final comment before we really get started: take pride in the number of visitors your blog will attract. But I encourage you to also take pride in the number of visitors you can refer to ProgressivesOnline. Despite some obvious warts, it's a unique little community, and it's a lot of fun helping it grow into a unique medium-sized community.

[haus]

Some Topics that Come To Mind
1. Decide where to blog
2. Set up a hit counter
3. Make your first post
4. Submit your RSS feed to aggregators
5. Customize your blog
6. Widgets are fun!
7. Trading links and building traffic
8. Cross-posting for traffic
9. Make $3.00 a month for only 400 hours of work!

Other topic ideas? Drop a post.

[haus]

2: Set up a Hit Counter

The reason to put a blog up is to get the word out. The game gets old fast if you don't have some kind of feeling how many people are reading your painstakingly composed posts. That's where hit counters come in.

Some blogging services have built-in hit counters. If you have one built in on your page and it suits your needs, by all means stick with it. If you've got a list of Hit Counters and you want to compare their pro's and con's on you own, by all means do. The important thing is to find one you like and tells you what you want to know.

The three pieces of information I like to see are:

1. Who's coming to the blog and when? (daily, weekly, monthly traffic)
2. How are they finding the blog? (referrers)
3. Where are they clicking to next?

There are two free hit counters that I use to answer these questions: sitemeter.com and addfreestats.com. Of the two, sitemeter is easier to set up and use. You can give it a test drive here: http://www.sitemeter.com/?a=stats&s=s15headstrong&r=8

addfreestats shows more information on one page. In particular it shows the referrer next to each hit. For me, this means I don't have to open as many windows at the end of the day.

Many, many lefty sites use sitemeter. dailykos and mydd come to mind off the top of my head. Surf around for a while and you can come up with a list of 50 sites that use sitemeter.

Questions, comments, suggestions?

[haus]

4. Submit your RSS feed to aggregators

Submit your huh to who?

An RSS Feed is a text file that describes recent changes to your blog. It's formatted in a special way so that lots of programs can easily read the information and use it. For the purpose of this post, I'm going to use "RSS Feed" as a generic term, to include RSS, RSS2, Atom, and "XML Feeds." From a blogger's standpoint, they're all approximately the same thing.

RSS Feeds are (generally) constructed automatically every time you update your blog. You write the post, and blogspot (or typepad or whatever) creates the feed for you. No fuss, no muss.

So, what's an aggregator?

This is another term that's used loosely. More or less, it's this: any program that can do stuff with an RSS Feed. There are tons and tons of examples of aggregators. One example is a news-ticker that scrolls articles across the top of my screen. That's cool and all, but it's not the central point. The central point is this:

There are many aggregators that act like search engines on the web. You submit your feed, and they bring visitors to your blog.

In fact, there are so many that folks have written tools to automatically submit your feed to multiple aggregators at once. Again, you should pick the one that works for you, but I'd like to suggest trying the one at http://blogflux.com.

The reason has to do with "pinging." Pinging is telling the aggregator "Hey, read my feed again!" With bloxflux, you put a little button on your blog and when you click it, it pings 13 (?) aggregators for you automatically. Your new article will show up on 13 aggregators within 5 minutes or so.

What about the other 4-zillion aggregators? Well, sooner or later, they'll read the update feed from one of these 13 aggregators and update themselves. I can't swear this will get you to every aggregator you might want to be listed at, but for 1-click simplicity, it's hard to beat.

This article is kind of tech-heavy already, so I think I'll stop here. If you're interested in the subject and I failed to explain part of it clearly enough, let me know and I'll take another swing at it.

To see an example of an aggregator acting like a search engine, check out this link: http://www.technorati.com/search/feingold. Several times a week, my blog gets mysterious hits from the U.S. Senate on that search.

[MAGI]

haus,
Will you post your blog here?

[haus]

sure. mine's http://headstrong-america.blogspot.com

i just visited kyindy's and unlawfulcmbtant's last night. i'll dig up the url's this afternoon and put 'em in this post.

[MAGI]

Thanks haus,

I so appreciate ALL you people fighting to change what has so seriously damaged our way of life these last 30 years, especially these last 12 years.....................
:thumbup: