Jonesieblog

So you’ve read the earlier Blogging for Beginners posts in this series, and you’ve set yourself up with a feed reader? Maybe you’re wondering where to find the good stuff to subscribe to?

One solution is to gradually build up a list of blog feeds based on the people you know, folk that comment on your blog etc. This is an important part of the process, and what I’m about to tell you won’t do away with that feed-by-feed addition of blogs to your feed reader – finding interesting blogs and subscribing to them is part of the fun of blogging!

The shortcut solution is to find a list of blogs relevant to your interests and add them all to your feed reader in one go. Lists of feeds can be stored in a format that your feed reader can import automatically – this format is called OPML.

So, where do you find OPML files to import into your feed reader? Well, one good place is Technorati, where you can grab the results of a blog search in an OPML file. For example, this page lists 83 blogs about geography, and you could import them all into your feed reader in one go using the OPML link on the page.

If you are in the Scottish Education world, I’d like to plug the scotedublogs.org.uk blogs page, which enables you grab OPML files of Scottish education blogs filtered by authority and tags

One word of warning – go easy with OPML, and think about putting imports into suitably named subfolders in your feed reader. Otherwise it’s easy to get swamped!

Stumble it!

Blogs exist in communities. For example, in my community – Scottish education – there are probably around 500 blogs. Each blog will be publishing new posts at varying frequencies. Some will post almost every day, whilst others may only post once a fortnight or have fallen into disuse altogether. If you are a blogger in such a community, how on Earth are you supposed to keep on top of the new posts in all these blogs? 500 favorites that you visit every day? Impossible!

Feeds and feed readers are the answer. Feeds turn the whole problem on its head by, in effect, making all these blogs tell your feed reader when they post something. You only have to visit your feed reader – such as Bloglines – where you can see at a glance which of your chosen blogs have published new posts. It’s like having a personal shopper that goes around all your favorite shops and tells you when interesting new stuff appears on the shelves. With these tools at your disposal, it becomes feasible to monitor hundreds of blogs and still have something resembling a life!

Read this RSS Guide from weblogg-ed for more details!

Stumble it!

In this instalment of “Blogging for Beginners” I’d like to answer a few questions, and explain the simple things you can do to make it easier for potential readers to find your posts. Subscribers (people who have put the RSS feed from your blog into something like Bloglines) won’t need these, but how is anyone going to become a subscriber unless they read one of your posts?

Write something worth reading!

I don’t claim to have any clear idea of what constitutes a good post, but there’s clearly no point drawing huge crowds to your blog if they find mince when the get there! ProBlogger (a blog that covers every aspect of blogging in much more detail than I have in this series) has a category full of great advice on writing worthwhile content.

Liz asked me how long a blog post should be. ProBlogger has an answer of sorts here.

Actually, ProBlogger has the answer to just about everything! You should definitely stick it in your RSS reader because it’s full of useful advice.

Tag your posts.

Now that you’ve got something worth reading in your blog, you want people to be able to find it. Help them by adding tags (or categories) to you posts. All blogging software allows you to put posts into multiple categories, and many also allow you to add Technorati tags. These categories and tags make it much easier for readers to find relevant material.

Track conversations with CoComment.

As I said in the last post, commenting on other people’s blogs is what keeps the blogosphere going. It becomes very time consuming to keep track of all these conversations once you’ve written comments on more than a handful of blogs. This is where CoComment comes to the rescue. Once you’ve registered (free again!) and installed the Firefox add-on the comments you make are automatically tracked. You can subscribe to a feed of all comments made subsequent to yours. Very cool! I gather it even works with other browsers

Stumble it!

I’m a relative newcomer to the blogging game. It’s not rocket science, but there are a few things that I wish I had been told when I started. I’m aware that there are a lot of new bloggers in East Lothian – this post is for you guys! I’ll explain how you can help your blog to get connected to the bigger world of blogs.

The blogosphere (a hideous term used to describe all the blogs out there) is held together by the connections between blogs. These connections do not form by themselves – you have to get out there and make them yourself. It’s like going to a party – if you stand in a corner and don’t speak to anyone then you are unlikely to have a good time!

Technorati is your friend

Technorati sits at the centre of the blogging universe. Register with Technorati (it’s free) and claim you blog. You will then get to something like this:

Not particularly impressive stats, but the number of links is an important measure of how widely your blog has been noticed. It’s nice, as time goes by, to see the numbers go up

Write some posts

Before you launch yourself onto the world of blogging, try to have several posts on your blog already. When bloggers become aware of a new blog, they are very likely to have a look at it. If they find an empty blog, or one where the last post was written 2 weeks ago, they may never come back! There’s good advice on launching your blog here.

Learn about RSS

RSS feeds are tiny files that each blog produces. They list all the recent posts on a blog, and can be used with an RSS reader to keep an eye on lots of blogs without having to go visit them all every day. Register with Bloglines (free) and add feeds from your favorite blogs. If you’re in Scottish Education, you might like to use this OPML file as a starting point. You can import this into Bloglines and you’ll get feeds from a whole bunch of education related blogs. More on the importance of RSS on edu.blogs.com.

If you want to get comments, make them

The most important way to get noticed is to start commenting on other people’s blogs. Be sure to enter the address of your blog in the relevant field, so that readers can easily get to your blog. Commenting on each other’s blogs is the central means of communication in the blogosphere. It’s good to talk

Learn about Trackbacks

The exact workings of trackbacks depend on what blogging software your are using, but basically a trackback is a message from one blog to another, saying “I mentioned this post on your blog.” If you look at the comments on some blog posts, you will see these trackbacks at the bottom. If you read an interesting blog post, and feel inspired to write about it, be sure to put a link to the post, and enter the address into the trackback field in your post editor if such a thing exists. That way the author of the original post and other readers of the post will become aware that you have joined the conversation.

Use you Blogroll

All blogs have some form of blogroll – a list of blogs that the author recommends. Use yours! Every blogger you list will notice that you’ve done so (via Technorati or a similar tool) and may potentially become one of your readers.

Have fun

Blogging is fun. Don’t let it become a chore

Stumble it!