Some blogger hacks n tricks

1. Removing The Blogger Bar
I hated the blogger bar across the top of my Web site because it didn’t really go with my template and I already had a Google search bar integrated. So I went on a mission to remove it and de-bloggerify my blog. I searched far and wide and for some reason kept hitting a dead end. It turns out that the code used to change the old blogger templates no longer works! So after tracking down the CSS changes here is how I did it:

All you need to do is add the following CSS to your template under edit HTML. You need to put in anywhere in your template between the     3. Recent comments Use this script to achieve a WordPress-esque Recent Comments module for your side bar! Start some riots among your readers! Let them know what others have to say. This site provides a widget creator that I used to make my recent comments module. I found that after adding this, it actually encouraged people to comment more frequently. I don’t know if they like seeing their name up in lights or if they read what others wrote and want to kick in their two cents… But either way it has increased commenting by about 70%! 4. That’s a lot of comments!! Replace your commenting system with Intense Debate for more control over comments with a social flare. It is really easy to do, check out this information from their web site:

Interested in the comments your friends make? What if there was a way to follow your friends and be notified when, where, and also what they comment? Intense Debate provides this functionality through RSS feeds for each user. Subscribers will be notified in their RSS readers with a direct link to view the context surrounding the comment as well. Give it a try! Also, don’t waste anymore time checking back in on a blog to see if anyone responded to your comment. Now you can get email notifications of replies to your comments, letting you know when the conversation continues while you’re gone.

5. Adding inline ads Want to add advertisements into your posts for maximum exposure? By having your ads out their in front of peoples face they just might click them more often. I am not a big believer in ads. But maybe you are and by following these instructions from MyDigitialLife you can add adds in your post between post or even in the footer. It is not hard to do and involves a little modification to your template. Due to the fact that Blogger parses out some code and changes some characters when you enter it manually in the html this will show you a workaround for that.From their web site: 6. Use Feedburner Feedburner lets you “burn your feed” and add feed flare. Before they were a Google company they were awesome but now that they are a part of the Google they are even better. I use Feedburner for feed statistics, monitoring users subscriptions, managing our daily email blast list and adding feed flare enhancements to your feed. This is a MUST do for any blog. Almost a no brainer. Blogger lets you specify your Feedburner information in their ‘Site Feed’ tab inside your dashboard. Once there you will see a place to plug in your Feeburners URL. 7. Add additional pages (Add links to older posts that you can customize like a contact page.) This is one thing I always hear people complaining about blogger. But I can’t add a second page or even a page for contact information… Wahhh Wahhh Wahhh. How about a little creativity? For this hack all I did was create some posts labeled About Us Contact Us etc. And then made their published dates way back when and linked to the posts from my template. Result – pseudo additional pages! 8. Use a real domain name instead of blogger’s default naming conventions In the beginning before we knew any better we though using a free service like Blogger meant being locked into certain things like the sub-domain name off of Blogspot. Google lets you “Brand” your blog and link up a real domain name to forward to your Blogspot address. But they did one better and redirect their address’s to yours. So even if you type in http://askTheAdmin.blogspot.com you will wind up at http://www.askTheAdmin.com! Sweet. 9. Add Instant Messaging to your Blogger blog. Want to chat with your users real time? I added Plugoo to my site, linked it up with my AIM account and I am in constant contact with users looking for help or just wanting to say what’s up. This is not for everyone but I found it so cool I now turn my AOL IM mobile when I am AFK and my IM’s hit me via Text message on my Smart Phone. 10. Update you blog daily and have quality content. . And the last but certainly not least Blogger tip/hack is not a hack at all but a piece of advice . Update your blog on a daily basis. Because that is all the readers want now isn’t it? Would you read your own site – if it wasn’t yours?? If your answer is no, then you got some serious re-thinking to do! Do you have any additional tips or tricks for blogger or other blog hosts? We would love to hear about it in the comments!

What are the Meta Tags?

Meta Tags are the html tag which tell the search engine to locate your web page in the search results.

What are meta tags?

The Meta tag in html is not a required tag when you're creating your web pages; many pages don't use the tag at all, and I must confess that I've not used it on my home page, although I put it into this page by way of demonstration. To put it briefly, the meta tag is used by search engines to allow them to more accurately list your site in their indexes. Sometimes.
If you simply produce your home page and register the URL with a search engine, or a number of search engines, their spider programmes will (eventually) toddle along to your site to index it. Now, each of the search engines does this slightly differently. Altavista for example will grab everything in your document and index it, but will only show the first 250 characters in its description. Consequently, if your site included say, 'Thanks to:....' right at the beginning, this is what Altavista would show in its description, and it wouldn't give the viewer any idea of what your site actually covered. Of course, not all search engines work this way; I'd suggest you ferret around a little bit to see exactly how the popular engines work, and certainly the major two or three such as Altavista, Lycos, Yahoo, Infoseek and Excite. It therefore makes sense to ensure that your opening paragraph is carefully written to ensure it accurately reflects what your site covers.
However, you may be able to exert a certain amount of control over how your site is indexed by the use of the meta tag. (I should however point out that not all search engines will use this tag - Altavista does, but Excite doesn't, for example. Its not a total cure-all therefore, but you won't miss out by putting the tag in, and it may well work well in some cases.

What does a meta tag look like?

You should insert the meta tag element at the top of your document, just after the

but note that you don't have to have a at the end of the tag, the way that you do with something like bold . However, make sure that each tag does not include any line breaks, since some search engines get a little bit tetchy about this.

Meta tag generator :-

Yes, there are a few of these things about. One that I've been told of is at http://www.hisoftware.com/taggen.htm. I've not tried it out myself, but it looks interesting. I'm currently downloading a trial version, to see what its like. I'll let you know.
http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/dcdot/ This site will automatically try and generate meta tags based on the Dublin core for you. Seems to work well, though its a little enthusiastic about the number of keywords it generates!

How to monitor your blogg's performance?

Every blogger want to have a good GOOGLE PAGE RANK and a good TRAFFIC for his blog To achieve this target one should be able to monitor his blog's performance. Monitoring your blog's performance is a good idea and it can be done by several ways.

1. USING GOOGLE WEBMASTER TOOLS:-     Google WebMaster Tools is a nicw way to monitor performance of your  blog. In Google  Webmaster tool we can use 'site configuration', 'Diagnostics' ,'lab' in  these categories you can monitor your site performance.
2. ANALYSING YOUR BLOG'S SEO SCORE:- You can analyse your blog's SEO score. For ex- go to http://www.promojunkie.com/seo-score/  you can also analyse how relevant your domain is.
3. ANALYSE LOADING SPEED OF YOUR WEB PAGES:-  You can use firebug  addon in firefox to check the performance of your web pages.
4. KEEP TRACK ON GOOGLE PAGE RANK and ALEXA PAGE RANK:-  You can simply download a toolbar for your web browser for keeping track on your blog's page rank.