Blogging for Beginners

This blog is now located at http://bloggin4beginners.blogspot.com/.
You will be automatically redirected in 30 seconds, or you may click here.

For feed subscribers, please update your feed subscriptions to
http://bloggin4beginners.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default.

What is Twitter? You asked that if you read the previous post, and followed to this post! Well, its somewhere between a blog and an IM. It uses both, if you want to.

What they say...
A global community of friends and strangers answering one simple question: What are you doing? Answer on your phone, IM, or right here on the web!

Multiple interfaces to a list of what you are doing. Your friends can "follow" you and get updates via their IM, the web or even their phone.

I have chosen to just use the IM and web, my phone makes noise and vibrates enough as it is.

Check out Twitter and see what all the Twittering is about.

Tumblelogs are small blogs. Perfect for beginners. Very simple. The home page boasts that you can set up your own in 30 seconds. ( I did it in less, but I am not a beginner. ;) )

Go and check it out. I love this site.

My tumblr is at http://tumblr.dixbert.com/ - I post directly to it, and I also have it set to publish my Twitter feed. What is Twitter? Read the next post.

-Al

Labels: beginner, blog, tumblr, twitter

I’m always reading about how Adsense is the best source of income for a blog. While I love Adsense myself, I don’t believe it necessarily has to be the biggest source of income for a site. My sites’ biggest income comes from directly selling ads to people...

Other Blogging Revenues by Blogging Pro

Blogger users can post entries from their Palm or WinCE device via AvantGo using AvantBlog.

Blogger Tool: AvantBlog by Blogging Pro

Every business day, I wake up and shuffle over to my computer and breathe a sigh of relief as I read through the RSS feeds I subscribe to on various topics. I then get to do my dream job which is to research and write about the topics I love....

Passion or Knowledge by Blogging Pro

10 Key Ingredients of a Great Blog | Performancing.com

Chris Garrett tells us some common sense requirements for a "Great Blog". Sometimes common sense has to be written down and read though, so here are the 10 things. You'll have to go to his post to get the lowdown though.

Credibility, Authority, Passion, Personality, Reliability, Empathy, Reality, Unique(ness), Timeliness, Membership.

There is also some good discssion by other members at performancing.com at the end of Chris' post.

Link Dump: A link dump is a technical term that many bloggers use when they have a lot of links to put out to their readers, but not enough time to talk about each one. So here's a link dump on Blogs for you.

Blogging Hits the Conference Circuit at BlogOn

CBS.com Announces Blogging for Primetime Programs

AOL Extends Free Journals Blogging Tool to AIM Service

Live Bookmarks from Firefox allow you to "Bookmark" your favorite Blogs

Blog Search Market Heats Up

One of the best attributes of a good blog post is its links to background information or supporting documents. It is one thing to state fact or opinion on a subject, and another alltogether to provide some means for your reader to explore the subject on their own and come to their own conclusions. This is one of the key differences between "blog" reporting and mainstream media reporting. Most bloggers love to reveal their sources...

So how do you make a link in your post to another location? All you need to know is the most basic of html tags and the destination URL (Uniform Resource Locator) of the page you wish to link to.

Lets say I wanted to create a link to Paschal Baute's home page. I know the URL is http://www.paschalbaute.com, and I include the http:// too. That is the part that takes it from just being a description of the address to being an actual, well formed web address.

Most blog interfaces contain a toolbar button for links. To use that button, simply highlight the term in your post you wish the reader to click on, and then click the toolbar button. A small dialog will pop-up will appear and will contain the text that you highlighted, and a blank space for the URL. Copy and paste the URL into the space provided and hit the ok or save button. Depending on the view of your work that you currently have, HTML or WYSIWYG, you will see the link applied to the text.

Doing so manually, is just as easy. Before the text you want to be the link, add this html tag to your post.

<a href="http://www.paschalbaute.com"> but replace my URL with the page you want the vistor to go to.

At the end of the text, close the html tag like this: </a>

So the end result looks like this:

<a href="http://www.paschalbaute.com">Paschal's Home Page</a>

When you post, the html will be rendered as part of the web page and all you and your vistors will see is this.

Paschal's Home Page

Have you ever selected a bunch of text from a web page because you wanted to email it or add it to a document, or perhaps even add it as a quote to your own blog? What happened when you pasted it? Did you get pictures too, or tables and lines where you just wanted text? Did it take a long time to finally paste? If all of this sounds familiar, then you are probably a Windows user that copied text out of Internet Explorer.
A quick explanation of how the Windows operating system works first, then I'll tell you how to avoid this annoyance in the future. One of the early conventions in Windows was a Microsoft convention known as OLE - Object Linking & Embedding. This was a cross-application feature that allowed you to drag little Excel spreadsheets into your Word documents, or to put a graph you created in Visio into your Powerpoint presentation. During the process, a certain amount of data, and instructions about how to display that data is wrapped up into an "object" The final result is that "object" embedding into another "object", like your presentation in Powerpoint. The power of this technique was that if the data that was used to create the graph in Excel ever changed, the graph that you had already inserted (embedded) elsewhere would automatically "update" itself because it was "linked" to the original data. Hence, Object Linking and Embedding, (OLE).
Today, when you highlight a section of text on a web page in IE, this same process, which is now an inherent part of the Windows Operating System, creates an Object, along with the rules about how to display it, and copies it to your clipboard. When you paste that object into your listserve post, or your blog page, or your word document, the object, its HTML and its display instructions all go with. Its a lot of data, which is why it sometimes takes a little longer that when you simply copy and paste text.
If you do a lot of this, say you are an avid poster to list-serves or you are a frequent blogger, there is a simple solution. Get Firefox. Firefox is an alternative browser from the Mozilla foundation, an open source group that thinks you can do better than IE. And you can. There are many reasons to stop using Internet Explorer, which I won't list in this post. The reason you should switch if you fall into the category of web user that I described above, is because of an extension to Firefox that you can't get with IE.
What is an extension? It is an add-on. An enhancement. It is a little bit of code that adds itself into the Firefox program you initially downloaded and installed, and it makes it better. The extension I am talking about here is called the copy-plain-text extension. Once you have Firefox, you can download and install this extension, and here is what it gives you.
You want to use some text in a post you are writing, but the web page you found it on is cluttered with tables and lines and images. You select and highlight the text, but there is an image in the selection too - take a deep breath, right click on your selection. In the menu you will see an option called 'copy as plain text' - thanks to the browser extension you have. When you select this option, it removes the HTML, the image, and any display instructions associated with any objects and copies just the text to your clipboard, so you can paste just the text anywhere you want. I should mention that one additional thing it does can be kind of confusing. If you hold your mouse over some images, and a little box appears that has text in it, this text will also be included in what you copy and paste. Its not the image, its the text describing the image, and it is easily deleted if you don't want it.
This is a speedy way to get just the plain text off a page and into your post. Here are the tools you need to do it.

The Firefox browser can be obtained here.

After you have that installed, open this address and get the extension.

You'll have to close your browser and re-start it to see the option in your right click menu.

There are hundreds of extensions available at the site listed above. Some of them do things that I don't understand or have a need for - but there are some that add ease of use and additional functionality to the browser that will make you wonder how you got along without them. Check it out.