At this point in time, the backgrounds are designed to work on Blogger blogs. (Drat!)

If you have a blog on Blogger, this is a MUST SEE website! Especially if you like to change your Blogger background with the seasons. They have some really nice holiday backgrounds.

Go to The Cutest Blog On The Block and see for yourself.

P.S. For those of you as loyal to WordPress as I am, they have have plans to make these backgrounds compatible with WordPress soon. I’ve also contacted the website owner to see how much of the free designs we can tweak for use with our hosted WordPress blogs. In the meantime, there are some cute “accessories” we can use now.

But did you know that most blogging software (like WordPress) automatically prevents your comment links from being followed by search engines? The software puts a tag rel=”nofollow” on your link telling the search engines not to count your link. NO comment link love!

I don’t know about you, but I like getting some link love for commenting on other blogs. And since I try not to be a hypocrite, I want to make sure that I am giving you plenty of comment link love when you comment here.

Therefore, I have activated two WordPress plugins on this blog:

1. The DoFollow WordPress plugin disables the automatic nofollow. Now all comment links on this blog will be followed by search engines and given incoming link credit.

2. The CommentLuv WordPress plugin gives bloggers double comment link love! This plugin will check your comment link for an RSS feed and, if it finds one, will add a automatically add a link to your latest blog post. Now you not only get a link to your website, but you get an internal page link to an individual blog post too!

Want to give some comment link love to your blog readers? Here are the links to the WordPress plugins mentioned above: DoFollow and CommentLuv. If you need any help installing these plugins, just let me know.

I have this blog. I write to it on a regular basis. I think what I have to say is pretty interesting. Somebody else out there on the world wide web must think its interesting too. Right? This question sent me on a quest to find out about blog subscriptions. After all, what is the point of putting your “diary” out on the internet if it isn’t for people to read it?

I found buttons that said “XML” and “+ Yahoo!”. I heard things like “RSS”, “Atom” and “feed”. I also found a lot of people who didn’t know any more about these things than I did. Somebody just told those people that they needed them and where to get them.

So, I followed the crowds to http://www.feedburner.com, put in the URL of my blog and got some code to put up this cool looking graphic:

At least I was making progress. Now instead of just posting my text link someplace, I had an animated graphic link. I still didn’t understand what all that other stuff was.

The best way to learn about something is to try it out. If I wanted other people to subscribe to my blog and read it, I needed to figure out how to subscribe to a blog myself. It was not easy for me, the novice blogger/reader, to solve that mystery. Therefore, I am writing this entry to help the next novice.

Sparing all of the other details that led me to the solutions, I will simply summarize the solutions I found. (I’m sure there are others too.)

If you want to read blogs:

• Determine where you want to read the blogs from. You can:
  • bookmark the blogs and visit each one at a time;
  • pool them all in one website with a blog reader such as My Yahoo, My MSN, BlogLines, NewsGator, Rojo or Newsburst;
  • or have them emailed to you.
• Find the blogs you want to subscribe to and, if the writer has made things easy for you, simply click the subscription button that corresponds to your chosen blog reader. If you want an email subscription and the blog doesn’t give you that option, try Bot a Blog.
• Visit your blog reader and start reading.

If you are writing the blog:

• Read the section above. Make subscribing easy for your reader! Include as many of the blog reader buttons and options as you can. The Publicize tab on Feedburner will provide you with the code for a majority of options. The buttons are under Chicklet Chooser and the email subscription form is under Email Subscriptions. Bot a Blog will give you code for their button and form, but Bot a Blog only works for RSS feeds.
• If you haven’t got a clue which type of feed your blog produces or even what a feed is, Feedburner will take your blog URL and provide you with an RSS feed.
• If you don’t know how to add these options to your blog, contact your friendly website consultant.
• Always PING the blog directories when you’ve updated your blog so they will notify the blog readers of your update. Your blog probably does this for you automatically, but check out Ping-o-Matic! just in case.
• If you are confused, be watching for an article that explains all of these terms.