Some HTML Tips & Tricks

One of the most mystifying things about being a blogger is understanding the language that your site is written in. I don't mean the language of your content, but rather the language that the actual page is written. The language which makes text look like this or this - HTML.

HTML stands for Hypertext Markup Language and was created in the late 1980s by engineers at CERN, who were the creators of the World Wide Web. The actual specification has gone through lots of changes over the last two decades. The latest specification to be released was version 4.01, which was released in 1999. However, other languages have started to appear which use HTML as their basis.

On the surface, it can all sound confusing, but I'm going to show you how to do some neat tricks with HTML that will allow you to maximize the potential of the language itself. When I put a sample of HTML down, it will look like this -

Typewriter text: Tag - <tt>Typewriter text</tt>
I'll also give a table later on to show you how to get characters such as the less than and greater than symbol into your text, without your browser confusing it for actual, bona-fide HTML.

Adding text to images

Something that you see quite often when it comes to a web page is when you see an image, and put your mouse over it, you see this -

- that is the result of using the "title" property for an image. You can also use the "alt" property, which is good for disabled accessibility, but the text you put there might not appear in some browsers unless the image cannot load. Also, it is technically correct to not show the "alt" property in a tooltip, something which I've just learnt while writing this. The "title" property can also be used for a wide variety of tags. To add "alt" or "title" to an image tag, simply use this code:

<img src="http://address.of.image.net/img/sub/img.png" title="You can place the title of the image here." alt="Alt text is useful for disabled access, but also if your image doesn't load as some browsers will display the alt text in place of the image." />

The result would look something like this; put your mouse over each image to show the title and/or alt information. Let me know in the comments which information you wind up seeing. ;)

As I mentioned, you can also place the title information (also called an "attribute") in a wide variety of tags. For example, you can put the title into a link by doing this -

<a href="http://hyper.link.net/page/blog?p=3292" title="Put a page title or possibly a snarky comment here ;)">click here to begin</a>

It will look like this - click here to begin.

You can also make sections of text show a title by using the following code (I'm going to add a bit of extra code to my example which will make it stand out from the rest of the text) -

<span style="text-decoration:overline" title="This means that you can see it">hover to see a secret message!</span>

The result is this - Hover to see a secret message!.

CSS Primer

That last example brings us neatly to another topic that has become quite prevalent in blogs nowadays: using CSS to change the look of your page. The key in the last example is the

If you use Blogger, you've certainly logged into your blog's template and seen this -

- then wondered what in the world does all that garbeldy-gook mean? Well, it is called CSS, or Cascading Style Sheets. They have been a part of HTML for many years, but were first officially implemented for use on the web in the mid-90s. Now, it is a common way of telling your browser how to show a page to you.

With CSS, there is an almost-endless variety of things that you can do to a page using CSS, including putting items into certain places, setting the width of a page element, and even changing the look of the text in your page, as I did in the example above. In fact, changing the look of your font is one of the most common, and easiest, things you can do with CSS.

For example, if you wanted to have (and this is not an example I'd recommend you actually do, it's just for demonstration purposes ;)) text that was about an inch high, with a line through it, and blinking red, with the font as Comic Sans. Here's how you'd do it:

<span style="font-size:400%;text-decoration:line-through blink;color:rgb(255,0,0);font-family:'comic sans ms'">Use smaller numbers, and don't use blink</span>

Here's how it would look (warning, you might want to put on glasses!)

Seriously, change some numbers and don't use blink, ok?

Now, if you haven't been blinded by that, here's an example of changing the alignment, width and height of a section, causing a scrollbar to appear. The text comes from the automatic complaint letter generator, but first the code I'm going to use. Since the text I'm using is longer than a couple of words, I will use the "div" tag instead of the "span" tag:

<div style="text-align:justify;width:338px;height:325px;overflow:auto">Put really long chunk of text here</div>

And now, here it is in practice; I've added centering tags for viewing purposes:

Based on Gov. John Q. Public V's response to my previous letter, I believe it's safe to say that Gov. Public shows a complete lack of foresight. You see, I undeniably believe that Gov. Public has managed to elude any direct ties to specific acts of negligence -- no small feat considering her history. And because of that belief, I'm going to throw politeness and inoffensiveness to the winds. In this letter, I'm going to be as rude and crude as I know how, to reinforce the point that Gov. Public says that choleric creeps aren't ever antihumanist. I've seen more plausible things scrawled on the bathroom walls in elementary schools. She is typical of obscene cretins in her wild invocations to the irrational, the magic, and the fantastic to dramatize her codices. Easy as it may seem to carve solutions that are neither quasi-hectoring nor frowzy, it is far more difficult to give Gov. Public a rhadamanthine warning not to concoct labels for people, objects, and behaviors in order to manipulate the public's opinion of them. I have seen and heard enough. Now, it is time to fight the warped, distorted, misshapen, unwholesome monstrosity that her quips have become.

If Gov. Public had lived the short, sickly, miserable life of a chattel serf in the ages "before technocracy" she wouldn't be so keen to deflect attention from her unwillingness to support policies that benefit the average citizen. Maybe she'd even begin to realize that if you want to hide something from her, you just have to put it in a book. She maintains that she is the ultimate authority on what's right and what's wrong. Even if this were so, Gov. Public would still be disorderly. But our path is set. By this, I mean that in order to call a spade a spade, we must stop this insanity. I myself consider that requirement a small price to pay because someone has been giving Gov. Public's brain a very thorough washing, and now Gov. Public is trying to do the same to us.

I appreciate feedback and other people's views on subjects. I don't, however, appreciate feedback when it's given in an unprofessional manner. I got off on a tangent. An equal but opposite observation is that Gov. Public has a strategy. Her strategy is to twist the truth. Wherever you encounter that strategy, you are dealing with Gov. Public. I cannot promise not to be angry at her. I do promise, however, to try to keep my anger under control, to keep it from leading me -- as it leads Gov. Public -- to achieve total world domination. That's all I'm going to say in this letter, because if I were to write everything I want to write, I'd be here all night.

In the further reading section, you will find some links to sites that give you every single property that you can use CSS with. Trust me on this, I've used them quite often when working on blog templates. ;)

Making HTML code appear

You'll notice that throughout this post, you've been able to see the actual HTML to use in a page written out for you. There is a secret to getting it to show up; that is called using an "escape character". If you've worked on some computer systems in the past, you may be familiar with the use of the backslash to get things to appear. In HTML, it is almost the same thing, but there is a specific way that you have to write it out for it to work.

All of these characters start with an ampersand (&) and end with a semicolon. The letters in between determine the character that will appear. Below is a table with some of the more common escape characters used in HTML.

Escape Character	Output
&	&
"	"
&lt;	<
&gt;	>
&nbsp;*
&euro;	€
&oslash;	ø

*&nbsp; creates a single space. This is useful if you want to have multiple spaces between words.

There are at least 300 characters you can make with these escape codes. You can view the full list here.

Further Reading

In the companion post to this, Snoskred gives you some good Basic HTML for Bloggers. She has some great information about some of the more important bits of code you will use as a blogger.

There are many great resources out there for learning HTML and CSS. First, here are some useful links for learning HTML (nicked from Snoskred's post, with her permission ;))

HTML Reference:
If you know nothing about HTML, this is where you start
Getting Started Tutorial
HTML Code Tutorial
HTML Help
HTML Tutorials At W3
HTML Goodies
HTML Dog
Learn HTML And CSS
Learn Basic HTML For Your Website
Web Safe Color Chart
Non-dithering colors

CSS Reference:
All CSS Properties Listed Alphabetically
CSS Reference at W3 Schools
Mashable: CSS Toolbox, 22 Tools for Working with CSS (there are some great resources there, definitely have a look!)
How to Style an Unordered List with CSS

Previously in the Tuesday Think Tank
21st August: RSS
14 Reasons Readers Unsubscribe From Your Blog
Tuesday Think Tank: All About RSS

28th August: Blog Templates
Blog Design - Open Your Eyes.
Demystifying Blogger Template Editing

4th September: Nofollow
Spam, Spiders And Do Follow, Oh My!
Say No! to Nofollow

11th September: Site Meters
Do NOT Rely On Your Site Meter.
Track Your Visitors with Google Analytics

18th September: Technorati
Technorati - Sending Out An SOS
The Ups (and Downs) of Technorati

25th September: Google Reader
Google Reader Can Make Your Life Easier - Here's How.
Improving your Google Reader Experience

Over to you!

HTML isn't that hard to learn, and if there's something that you're trying to figure out and would like looked at, feel free to comment here.

As always, if you have something that is on your mind that you would like to have explained in a future Tuesday Think Tank, contact either myself or Snoskred via email or in the comments and we'll post about it.

Lastly, if you like what you've read, you can Stumble the post, either using the toolbar or the link below.

Falling for some Link Bait ;)

As I was running disk cleanup on the Windows 98 machine we have here (it's not used too often, and the only practical use that I have for it is to use our ancient parallel scanner, other than that my mom uses it for the most part), I thought of the contest being run at sitefever.com.

It was going to run until October 23rd, but apparently it's been shortened to end in the next week or so. What is the contest, y'all are asking? It's a contest to win a 1TB external hard drive. So, there's the link bait ;)

However, there is another part of the contest - what I'd do with a 1TB hard drive. Well, I haven't mentioned it before, but I'm addicted to watching TV shows from around the world - particularly Australia. We don't get a lot of the quality shows that they have down there - Enough Rope with Andrew Denton and The Chaser's War on Everything (even though I didn't think that their stunt at APEC was terribly funny) are two shows that I watch on a regular basis, usually by them magically being sent to my computer.

I'm also a sucker for forms of racing that, while they do air here, they don't show it until December, when the series has already finished their seasons; and even then, they only show highlight shows. Again, these are magically sent to my computer. ;)

The problem is that it takes up hard drive space. I do have DVDs, but I'm a lazy sod that has a ton of DVDs, but need to make the time to actually burn them (it's a longer process because I like to confirm the burnt data).

With a 1TB hard drive, I'd be able to store tons and tons of videos on there. I'd also be able to record more TV using my capture card, as the recording settings I use take about 70 megs per minute. I then compress the video files down to about 8 megs per minute.

Oh, and the other computer? I'd be able to take almost everything that isn't system or program related and store it on the vast expanses of the terabyte. Trust me, there are a lot of documents on that computer, though they could almost all be removed, but I'm a certified digital packrat.

I know that one terabyte is probably more than I'll ever need, but if I did have it, I'd certainly take that for a test. Then again, I thought that 200GB would be more than I'd ever need, but I've gone all the way down to 20GB free. ;)

The Ups (and Downs) of Technorati

This week's Tuesday Think Tank came as the result of a request from Julie, who had some questions about Technorati and why her ranking has been changing recently. If you have something you want to have covered in a future Tuesday Think Tank, we always are willing to take suggestions; all you need to do is send an email to either myself or to Snoskred, and we will tackle your topic on a future Tuesday. :)

There really isn't a lot to explain technically when it comes to Technorati. The biggest thing is basically an explanation of how it all works.

Technorati is most often considered the way to gauge a blog's popularity. It works by counting both the number of blogs that it finds with links to your blog, and also the actual number of pages that link to your blog.

There are three different numbers that come as a result of Technorati's counting - Authority, Rank, and Reactions.

Authority and Rank are intertwined, one based on the other. Authority is simply the total number of blogs that have linked to your site, or to a page on your blog. In other words, no matter how many links a particular site may have to you, it will only count as one authority point. Rank is derived from authority and is simply where your blog's authority ranks among all blogs they have listed.

When you start a blog, it starts with an authority of 0 and a rank of somewhere around 8 million. As blogs start to link to you, the numbers do improve; however, to get into the top 100 blogs by Authority, you'll have to have close to 4,000 different blogs linking to you. To get into the top 100,000 (which would have gotten you a nice graph in the past, but recent changes have seen the dropping of that graph), you would need an authority of around 60.

The most important thing to know is that authority and rank are not permanent numbers; of course you do want them to improve over time, but after a while, specifically six months, they may begin to go down. The simple reason for this is that links listed on Technorati "expire" after that amount of time. While I'm not an expert in Technorati, the main reason would be that some of the links might be in posts, or they might be temporary links which go away (for example recent comments lists on dofollow blogs).

Reactions are simply all the links that go back to your blog. This includes links in blogs' links lists, links within posts, and links that come from other methods of linking, such as from the dofollow blogs.

If you want to see the daily "performance" of your blog's reaction, you can check out an image like this -

- which shows you the links over the last X days. The address to use is the following -
http://www.technorati.com/chartimg?q={URL}&days={# OF DAYS}&width=460&height=200&type=url
putting in your blog's url (minus the http://) and the number of days in the appropriate slots.

Of course, none of this works without Technorati finding the links on blogs.

How do they find links to my blog?

Technorati finds links like any other search engine would - through the use of spiders. It used to be that these spiders were fully-functional, seeing almost all the links that were on a page - including blogrolls, if you have them on your blog.

However, at one point in time in the last few months, they changed spiders to ones that are more in line with regular search engine spiders which cannot see JavaScript elements on a page. That means that if you're part of a BlogRolling blogroll (for example, the Blogger Chicks blogroll), links back to you on other blogs that are part of the network will not count towards your authority. If you're a part of a big blogroll and have experienced a drop off in your authority recently, that means that the six-month window has passed.

Another way that Technorati can find links to other blogs is by reading RSS feeds. If you ping them with a service such as Ping-o-Matic, and include your feed's address, Technorati will look at that, along with your blog, to find links you've put in posts.

A word of advice

Something that I've seen ever since joining up with Bumpzee are these "link trains" which are meant to increase both your PageRank and your Technorati Authority. You'll notice that I don't participate in them; at first it was because I was lazy, but then it was because I didn't see the value in linking to sites that I don't read (or in a lot of cases, never heard of), all in the name of possibly increasing my rankings (and supposedly my traffic).

The other part of the equation for that is that any gains that I'd see would be short-lived (for example, anyone who had participated in the exchange would not have their link to me counted on Technorati). Additionally, have updated their webmaster guidelines that these schemes are not good practice for you to follow as they feel that these types of links are not "proper" links.

Further Reading
In the companion post to this, Snoskred discusses the issues she's having and sends out an SOS.

Previously in the Tuesday Think Tank
14 Reasons Readers Unsubscribe From Your Blog
Tuesday Think Tank: All About RSS
Blog Design - Open Your Eyes.
Demystifying Blogger Template Editing
Spam, Spiders And Do Follow, Oh My!
Say No! to Nofollow
Do NOT Rely On Your Site Meter.
Track Your Visitors with Google Analytics

Over to You
Do you have any more questions about Technorati? (Other than the obvious one of why in the world their servers are so blasted slow, or don't work half the time.) Feel free to leave a comment.

If you've liked this post, feel free to Stumble it using the links below. :)

Track Your Visitors with Google Analytics

One of the first things that bloggers do when they set up their blogs is set up some form of visitor tracking. A few of the more common trackers are Statcounter, Site Meter and Google Analytics.

Personally, I run all three counters on this blog, but mostly look at Statcounter's stats. It is useful to give me an overview of what is happening *right now* on my blog, and lets me see each individual visitor as they come into the blog.

Google Analytics is most useful to get an overview of your blog's trends, and it does not give you the information on individual visitors like most other counters do. There are a vast array of things that you can do with the data that Google Analytics picks up, but I'll explain some of the more common things that you can do.

Setting up the code

When you first start with Analytics, you will be sent through a seemingly lengthy sign-up process.

To start, you need to go to Google Analytics and sign in with your Google Account (if you don't already have one, you can sign up for one easily and for free).

You'll then be taken to the first page in the sign-up process. To move on, click Sign Up »

Then, you will be asked for some basic information about the page you wish to track - its address, the name you want to assign to the site, your country and your timezone. Click Continue » to proceed. In this example, I'll use the testing blog from a couple of weeks ago as the example.

Then, Google will ask you for your information. The only information that is required is the Country or territory. Again, click Continue » to move on.

The next step is reading through the Terms of Service. As always, be sure to read the whole thing, and if you're OK with the information that is being collected, how it is used, etc. Click Yes to agree to the terms, and then click Create New Account » to set your account up.

Now, you have to set up the tracking code in your blog. This does require you to have the ability to edit your template, and for you to use Javascript in your site. They recommend that you put the code right at the very end of your site's code, but you can place it anywhere on your page that you wish. Simply copy the code and place it in your blog's code. I won't show you how to do that here, but if you need assistance, let me know and I'll post about it. :)

After installing the code, you will be taken to the Analytics Settings page - here you will have access to all the sites you've set up tracking for; you can view the reports, edit settings, delete the tracker and check the status of your site's metering. When you first set up your site's code, the screen will look like the one below, with the status saying that the code is not verify. After you've installed your code and saved the page, you can click on Check Status to tell Google to check that the code is there.

This is the page that you will see after clicking on Check Status. When your code has been just put into your page, you will see that it is Waiting for Data. After about 24 hours, the staus will change to Receiving Data, and unless there is an error with your page, it will stay that way for as long as you have the tracking setup.

Exploring Your Data

So, now you've been receiving data for a while and want to do something with the data you're getting with your new tracker. This is really where the power of Google Analytics shows itself. This is also the point where I must depart from the testing blog and open the books of my own blog for you all to see, hehe ;)

When you go into the View Reports screen, you're taken to the Dashboard, where you are given an overview of the last month's activity on your site. An important thing to know about these reports is that in the default view, you will only see information through yesterday. However, you can change the date quite easily.

This is what the dashboard looks like -

The main graph is the number of visits. Below that, you will find six other types of data for your site. If you click on the links in that section, you will be taken to a page detailing that particular stat with daily breakdowns. The next four sections below that are movable. There, you see a pie chart detailing where traffic has come from for your site, a map of all of your visitors, a graph of the number of visitors to your site, and a list of the five most popular pages on your site.

To change the dates that you wish to look at for your stats, simply click on the date range in the upper right. This will bring down a calendar that allows you to click on the dates you wish to use for the stats. An additional feature that can come in handy is the Compare to Past checkbox. If you check that, you will be given a second set of dates. When you select a range of dates to look at with this option turned on, it will select the same amount of time previous to the period you selected to use. To confirm the date range, click Apply Range, and your stats will update to reflect the new timeframe.

Also, you can select dates by using the Timeline feature. You can drag the frame to move the dates you want to cover, and you can expand or contract to increase or decrease, respectively, the timeframe you want.

One of the most common things done by bloggers is to look at some of the unusual search terms that people used to get to their page. This is one of the best things about its ability to keep the data for thousands and thousands of visitors to your site - you can see all the keywords that have been used, and not just the ones from the number of visits or page views the counter is limited to.

To get to the list of keywords from the dashboard, click on Traffic Sources. That will bring you to the Traffic Sources Overview, which outlines where your traffic has come from. Here, you will see a list of the top five keywords that have been used to get to your site. To see all the keywords, just click on either "view full report" in the main section of the screen, or on Keywords in the left hand side.

On the Keywords report screen, you will see yet another line graph, showing you how many visitors came by via the use of keywords over your specified time frame. Along with that, you can see some statistics about the visitors which came in via keywords. Below that are the actual keywords; clicking on them will take you to a page charting that keyword's use over time.

The stats, from left to right are: total number of visits and percent of site total; Pages per visit; Average time on the site (the time that they had the site open); percentage of visitors who are new; and the bounce rate (percentage of visitors who viewed only one page and then left). These four have comparisons to the site average, with the percent difference between the site average and the average for that particular category.

For all the keywords, you can see the statistics for each category as well.

This is just one example of the information you can find using Google Analytics. My best advice would be to take some time and just have a look around. Below are all the different categories that you can look into with your Analytics account. There is almost no end to the information you can get.

How it all works in a nutshell

Basically, how most trackers work is by your browser having Javascript activated. When a page loads, it will see the javascript code and send the server information about your browser and system. Most of the time this will include your browser's information (as in the version you're running), your screen resolution, your Operating System, IP address, and the referrer.

Some counters do have code designed for users who have turned Javascript off, but you can never be sure that it does work for them.

Snoskred has a lot more on this in her companion post to this, but the reason that most of us do decide to run multiple counters on our sites is that they are notoriously unreliable. The count can vary widely from one to another, depending on the user's configuration, and how you've set up the code in your blog.

Further Reading
Google Analytics Official Blog
Unofficial Google Analytics Blog
27 Features that Make Google Analytics Best of the Breed
Google Analytics Tutorial on Squidoo

Previously in the Tuesday Think Tank
14 Reasons Readers Unsubscribe From Your Blog
Tuesday Think Tank: All About RSS
Blog Design - Open Your Eyes.
Demystifying Blogger Template Editing
Spam, Spiders And Do Follow, Oh My!
Say No! to Nofollow

Over to you

Have you used Google Analytics? What do you think about it? Do you prefer another counter such as Statcounter, or does GA do it for you? Let me know in the comments.

Also, if you like this post, feel free to Stumble It. ;)

Say No! to Nofollow

One of the most controversial subjects in the world of blogging recently has been the growth of the use of something called "nofollow". However, there are ways to remove it from most parts of your blog.

The short story on nofollow is that it was created a couple of years ago by some of the folks at Google in an effort to prevent spam sites from getting legitimate value from a link left on another site. The primary example of this comes from comments left on blogs, a known target for spammers.

What makes nofollow so controversial is that, while it does prevent the spammers from reaping any benefit from their comment in the way of increased pagerank, it has the unintended consequence of not allowing other bloggers who leave legitimate comments on blogs the right of having the link made when they post the comment recognized by the search engine spiders as existing.

Therefore, a movement has come forth to stop the use of nofollow on blogs, through a variety of ways - most commonly for Bloger users is by removing the code from your template.

An important distinction should be made between the nofollow tag and other forms of instructions to robots. The nofollow tag only tells a robot to ignore the fact that the link exists - it can still go to the site, but the link will not count.

Removing nofollow

For almost all bloggers, it is relatively simple to remove nofollow from your blog. About the only system (that I know of) where you cannot remove nofollow from your blog at all is if you're on wordpress.com. The reason is that you need to use a plugin to remove nofollow and if you're on wordpress.com, you are not allowed to install plugins beyond what you are given by Wordpress itself.

On other platforms and sites, check below.

Blogger

In Blogger, it is relatively simple to remove nofollow from most of your blog. It is important to note that when you do remove nofollow, it is not removed from all aspects of your blog. The areas where nofollow will still exist are blogger comment pages (the page where you actually leave a comment), and any links within comments.

There is no way that I know of to remove nofollow from those two areas (for the first, I don't expect there ever to be a way devised since it is a page created and served by Google). If you do know how to remove nofollow from posted links in comments, leave me a comment ;)

To remove nofollow, you will need to go into the Edit HTML screen of your blog's dashboard, by going into Template -> Edit HTML

Then, the first thing that you need to do is save your template. It is unlikely that you will make a catastrophic error, but it is always advisable to back it up, just in case.

The next step you need to do is to click Expand Widget Templates.

After that, if you have Firefox 2.0+, this is really easy; other browsers, you will have to dig through the template to find it. I'll give you a pointer to where they are located though (the two occurrences are not that far apart actually).

Search in your template for nofollow - the first appearance should be in the comments section, in a tag that starts <a expr:href='data:comment.authorUrl; …. After that, you will find the first "rel='nofollow'". delete that, and then you can move on.

The next part of your template that will have nofollow is in the backlinks section. The text to look for this time is "<a expr:href='data:backlink.url'…. As with the comment section, simply delete "rel='nofollow'" from the tag.

Now, you can go ahead and save your template. Now, your commentators will be able to leave a link with their name and have it recognized by the spiders. :)

WordPress

There are a number of plugins that are available which remove nofollow from your independently-hosted WordPress blog (again, if you're on wordpress.com, you cannot remove nofollow since you cannot install plugins). I have only tried out one - Lucia's Linky Love, and it is a very comprehensive plugin.

You are able to control how many comments a person has before their name has nofollow removed, how many comments they must make for links left in the comments to be made dofollow, and lots more. However, it is slightly more complex than the other solutions.

See below for some alternative plugins to remove nofollow from your blog.

TypePad

I've never used TypePad (mostly because they require you to pay at least $4.95 per month for basic services), but there is a way to remove nofollow from your blog. You can read up on how to remove Nofollow in TypePad Comments, but if you're not hooked up with at least a Pro ($14.95 per month) account, you won't be able to do anything.

Movable Type

Again, I've not used MT, but it is a very common system to use for blogging. You can remove nofollow from your blog by reading about Disabling “nofollow” on Movable Type 3.3.

Making links Nofollow manually

There are some circumstances when you will want to set links as nofollow on their own. For example, when I was talking about paid comments on my blog, I linked to the sites in question, but made them nofollow. You will have your own sites and reasons for making them nofollow, but here is how to do it:

When you're making a link, instead of just leaving the link code as this -

<a href="linky">link text</a>

add "rel="nofollow"" after the "href" segment of the code, for example -

<a href="linky" rel="nofollow">link text</a>

What can I expect after I remove nofollow?

For the most part, you will not notice any difference between your blog before taking nofollow off, and after. However, if you do make it known that you have removed nofollow, you do open yourself up to receiving spam from paid commentators.

A paid commentator will go around a list of blogs which have taken nofollow off and leave comments which are quite generic, but on-topic enough to not raise a lot of suspicision. In the name field, where you would leave your blog's address, they leave the address of the blog (or website) they are advertising for.

Having said that, there are a lot of cool things that you can do with your blog after removing nofollow. If you're a member of Bumpzee, you can join the No Nofollow | I Follow | DoFollow Community. You can also put up one of the neat badges that are available, in order to signify that you do follow links now. Most importantly, you can let your readers know that you've made the decision by posting about it.

Further Reading

As always, there are tons of great resources on this matter out there to read. These are only a few of the better ones. :)

- Ultimate List of DoFollow & Nofollow Plugins - Banish Nofollow From Comments and Trackbacks - this is a list of almost all the plugins that you can use to remove Nofollow from your blog, along with instructions for other platforms
- Removing Nofollow from Blogger Styled Layouts - the "original" when it comes to directions on removing nofollow from a Blogger blog.
- Official Google Blog: Preventing comment Spam - this was where nofollow was first announced. Google all say that it has had a positive reaction, but take a look at the links below the article...
- 11 Reasons against nofollow - nonofollow.net gives 11 great reasons why we should not be using nofollow.
- Spam, Spiders And Do Follow, Oh My! - in the companion post to this, Snoskred discusses the ramifications of nofollow on you, as a reader, and as a blogger who interacts with your readers.

What do you think? Is it right that some bloggers are stuck with nofollow and no way to change it? Should it be easier to remove the function from blogs by making it a simple option in a blog's control panel?

If you've liked what you've read, feel free to stumble the post, or to make a note of it on your own blog. :)

Sometimes Free Ain't Free

A couple of weeks ago, I read a blog post about an offer of Free Hosting through a company (which I had not heard of at the time, but they claim to be the "World's Leader in Hosting Services") called EasyCGI. At first, I was sure there was a catch, but when I checked out the page which outlines the promotion, they say that there are "No gimmicks or hidden costs."

My experience, however, has not been as smooth as their promotion would have it make out to be.

After doing a bit of searching and finding out that they were on the up-and-up, I decided to take the plunge. While the first step of entering my domain name, and telling them to keep it on my current registrar was quick and easy, my whole experience fell apart on the second step - giving my credit card information. The first time I provided the information, my card was declined. I thought that, maybe, I made a mistake on a number, or on my expiration date.

However, all of that was correct, so I did it again. Once more, my card was declined.

I should have given up at this point and contacted support concerning the problem. However, I tried it a couple of more times, and instead of getting a card declined message, I received a message saying to contact support.

So, I then contacted support using the web form that they have available. After submitting my message, they said that I would get a reply within 24 hours.

Sunday passes, and there is no reply from them. However, I did hear from my credit card provider - the fraud department called asking to verify that I was, in fact, the person who was trying to use my card with EasyCGI. I had asked them what the issue with the declinations was, but they could not give any information on that.

Then, on Monday, I decide to call EasyCGI's toll-free support line. I get through to one of their staff and told him about my situation. He said that they don't handle their own promotions and that there is some outside vendor who provides them, but he'd look at the situation and send an email to me about it.

On Monday night, after receiving no email back from that person, I then attempted to contact the "24-hour" support, only to be sent to their messagebank. Based on my experience with the web form, I decided that it would be better to keep trying to call. Then, I went to the Live Chat feature on the website. I told the person about my situation, and the immediate reply was to call or email the support department. I did some more looking around the website, and spotted a note that said if you weren't satisfied with the service, you should send an email with a subject line directing the email to a manager.

I then sent this email -

To whom it may concern,

I have been attempting to sign up for the August 2007 Free Hosting for
1 year promotion (details here - {snip website address for promotion} )
with your company since Saturday. The first two times I attempted to
sign up, my credit card was declined. After that, I have received a
generic error, with the only remedy being to contact support.

On Saturday, I contacted support via the Web form, and was informed
that I would receive an answer back within 24 hours. That time came
and went without any reply from your end.

I then called support this morning, spoke to, I believe, {an employee} -
I didn't make a note of his name, but he was decent to work
with. After informing him of the issues I had and giving him my email
address, he informed me that he would send me an email about this
issue. It has been over 16 hours since I called and have not heard
anything further back.

I would like to sign up for the hosting service, but I am unsure if I
will be able to. I would like to have some answers to my issues before
I attempt to sign up again.

I then waited a few hours, and after about 12 hours with no reply to my email, I decided to call the toll-free number once more - this time going through the Billing Department. The lady I spoke to was polite with me while I explained my situation. She looked up my record (by email address) and noted my call on Monday. However, what she said and what I was told on Monday had changed into two different things. She said that she had spoken to the person I spoke to on Monday, and he said that I was supposed to contact the vendor sponsoring this promotion, and that there was nothing about an email being sent to me.

When I asked about why I was still receiving the error, she said that I had been put on an IP blacklist for trying to sign up numerous times with "bad" information. She suggested that I send an email to the support department with the last four digits of my card, the IP address I used, and my email address. She also surmised that changing IP addresses might work to allow me to register.

So, I decided to change IP addresses and tried to sign up again, only to get the same generic error to contact support.

A couple of hours after that, I received this reply to my email:

Hi,

Your credit card ending in 'xxxx' was automatically blocked by our system after numerous failed attempts. We have removed this block allowing the signup to go through on another attempt. This ordinarily happens if there is a decline on an authorization attempt for the initial amount on the credit card. While our billing does not run until the first of each month, on the initial signup, the credit is checked for available funds. Additionally, there are conflicts in contact information that may also cause these errors. While our agents cannot extend a promotional signup, if you continue to encounter related errors, please contact one of our helpful support representatives toll free at 1-866-xxx-xxxx (internationally at +1.xxxxxxxxxx) for further assistance. We apologize for the inconvenience. Please let us know if you have additional questions.

To be honest, it makes more sense to me that the card would be blocked rather than my IP address. However, I find the explanation of the decline for the credit card a little mystifying. This being a free offer, and my not requiring the services of their domain registration, it would be more than reasonable for anyone to think that they would only need to have the card number for future billing - i.e. after the free offer finished. As far as checking for available funds - it's a common practice for gas stations to put a hold of up to $75 on a card when you go to buy gas, then refund the amount that you didn't spend after a couple of days.

I will also note that there is a minor inconsistency between my actual contact information and my "card holder" information - my address consists of four words, and the one on file with the bank has three, and my card uses my middle initial. I've never had a problem with the contact information in the past for other online vendors I've worked with, however.

As far as the information I was given on the phone, I'm still curious as to who this "vendor" sponsoring this promotion is, as I have found a bunch of sponsored posts, all of which link to a page at www.easycgi.com, which in turn redirects to the promotion page. The more recent posts about this have had links that go through tinyurl to EasyCGI's promotion page.

I'd contact the vendor, but I'm fairly certain it is EasyCGI who are sponsoring it - since when you go to sign up for their service, they have information about the promotion on the signup page. In fact, it's the first thing you see when you go to enter your domain information.

At this point, I've been through quite a bit of frustration, but I need to stand up for myself and for the fact that there are a lot of people out there promoting what is, really, a once-in-a-long-time opportunity. I'm sure that I am not the only one who has had similar issues with trying to sign up for this promotion.

Last Thursday, I sent a copy of this post, along with the note below as a reply to the support person who had written to me on Tuesday.

Thank you for letting me know. Unfortunately, I have had such a difficult time with signing up for the promotional offer that I will be letting everyone know about my situation. This includes posting the text below on my personal blog, along with visiting as many blogs as I can that have posted about the promotion and letting them know of the issues I have had.

Is there anything that you might be able to do to get this situation sorted out? If so, please get in touch with me as soon as possible so that we can make it so.

However, I have not received a reply to that email in a week, so now I am posting about my experiences. If you've tried to taken advantage of this offer and have had a similar experience, I'd like to know about it. Also, if you have signed up for the service, I'd like to hear how it's been going for you.

Honestly, I'm surprised that they weren't able to find a solution to the problem. I went into this wanting to be a customer of theirs, but after all of this, I can safely say that I'll stick to some of the more popular hosting services out there.

How-to: Add a Google Search Box to your blog

Here's a quickie for those of you who want to add a Google search box to your blog or website. It's a lot easier than one would think. ;)

I finally got the right idea of what I was looking for after haggling with Google's Ajax search API - if you want to have an almost fully functioning mini-Google on your site, definitely go ahead and install that. I will warn you though, it can get a bit confusing.

Instead of that, I finally found what I was looking for - a Google search box for my blog. This code is based on the code that is posted on Dave Taylor's site; I've modified it to put the Google Search button on the bottom, after the option section, instead of between the search box and the options.

To add the code to your Blogger blog - if you're using "New" Blogger - make a new Widget - an HTML/Javascript widget and give it whatever title you'd like. Edit it and put this code in, substituting your site's address (without http://) and name where indicated.

<center><form action="http://www.google.com/search" method="get">

<input maxlength="255"
value="" name="q" size="31" type="text"/><br/>
<input value="" name="sitesearch" type="radio"/>
The Web
<input checked
value="YOUR BLOG ADDRESS" name="sitesearch" type="radio"/>YOUR BLOG'S NAME<br/>
<input value="Google Search" type="submit"/>

</form></center>

If you find that the search box doesn't fit into your site's style (i.e. it's too wide, or too narrow) - just make the number in the size section (currently 31) larger or smaller, depending on your needs.

Save the changes, and you're set with a Google search box on your blog! ;)

Demystifying Blogger Template Editing

One of the most common criticisms of Blogger templates is that they're somewhat plain. This is somewhat true, however, it is also one of the biggest misconceptions. If you know where to look, you will find that Blogger's templates (yes, even the ones in the Templates screen) are almost infinitely changeable to suit any style you might want to have for your blog.

The easiest way that you can change the look of your blog doesn't even involve changing templates - you can change the colors and fonts used on your blog by using the aptly-named Fonts and Colors screen in your blog's dashboard. There, you can change literally anything from the color to the text on your page to the color people see when they put their mouse over a link. Each template will have a different set of items that can be changed; for example, on my template (tictac blue) - I can change the text colors, but the background color is set.

When you first view the Fonts and Colors section, you will see the list of changeable elements on the top, and your blog on the bottom. The really cool thing is that when you change something in the top, it is automatically reflected in the bottom half of the screen. These changes, unless you click Save Changes, are only seen by you - not by people who happen to visit your blog at the time.

If you don't like the changes you've made, you can clear the edits you've made, reverting your blog back to how it was when you started, or you can revert it back to the default colors for your template. However, note that this will revert all the colors to the defaults set out in the template code.

You can also use the Shuffle blog colors link to take the colors that you've used already and shuffle them up. To be honest, I think you'd be better off manually choosing colors than using shuffle - I've done it a couple of times and haven't liked the resulting look.



Something that deserves some special attention is the section in the middle where you select colors. There are two "special" groups of colors that blogger puts in to give you a bit of an assist - Colors from your blog and Colors that match your blog. To the right of that is a set of 65 colors which are generally good colors for a blog.

To the right of that is the Edit color hex code box - that's if you have a specific color you've chosen - likely from one of the great color-picking sites out there - and have a hex code for it. The range of colors that you can have in hex goes from #000000 - black to #ffffff - white, with all other colors represented in between.

Further down the list of items that you can change, you will begin to see some Font-related items - generally, Text font, Page Header, etc. Here, Blogger gives you a choice of six basic "universal" fonts to choose from - Arial, Courier, Georgia, Times (New Roman), Trebuchet (MS), and Verdana. While these fonts are alright, a couple of them are somewhat plain to me - Arial and Courier. Arial is one of those "I see it everywhere" fonts, and Courier makes things look like a typewriter generated it.

Aside from the actual typeface, Blogger give you the option of setting it to bold and/or italic, and you can change the size of the font to be as small or as big as you want. Of course, though, you don't want to have your font so small or so large that it's unreadable by your visitors. ;)

Edit HTML

However, Fonts and Colors is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to changing up your template. The quickest (and for a lot of folks, most intimidating) way to change your blog's look is by using the Edit HTML screen.

The reason I say that it can be intimidating is that this is the raw code that is used to build your blog's page. If you make a mistake, you can throw off the whole appearance of your blog. I know that even though I have experience in fixing blogs, I've made things disappear completely from blogs while editing templates!

The first thing that you should do when you're working on the edit HTML screen - especially if you're doing a major change to your blog's design - is Download the Full Template. This will give you a file that contains everything in the Edit Template box, so that if you do make a major mistake, you will be able to reupload your template from your computer and be back working again in almost no time.

In the future, I'll explore some of the more advanced features of the new "widget" based functions of Blogger code, but I'd like to feature some of the more common requests I get about templates.

Changing your blog's width

There are a variety of reasons why you would want to change the width of your blog - it might only be taking up a small part of your screen. You may have a header graphic that is too wide for your current template, causing it to "hang" over the rest of your blog.

One important thing to note is that all templates are different, so the exact text that you'll find in your code will be different to the code that I have. However, there are some key words that should be in all templates.

For this example, I'll use the code from my blog's template as it is today.



The section that contains my blog's width information is called "layout structure" - there are a number of subsections here that outline the styles of various parts of my blog.

The first section - #outer-wrapper - controls the overall width of the blog - on some templates, it may have a different name such as #content-wrapper. In general, the width of this section will be the largest number, as it is for the whole blog.

My template has a special background (to the left), so there is a separate #content-wrapper section to tell your browser that, while the blog is 847 pixels wide, the content can only be 763 pixels wide, otherwise it would cover the background image.

The next sections are based on the width set out in your outer or content wapper sections. #main (or #main-wrapper, #main_wrap) is the area covered by your blog's posts, and #sidebar (#sidebar-wrapper, #sidebar_wrap) is for the sidebar. If your template is a 3-column template, you will have two sidebar sections - called either left/right_wrap, or sidebar1/sidebar2_wrap.

Generally, the widths, along with the padding and margin numbers across the main and sidebar sections will add up to the width in the outer or content sections. In my example, there is actually a space of 4 pixels in the page somewhere.

To change the width of your blog, you need to make sure of a couple of things first - that you don't have a template like TicTac which has a background image that sets the width of the page to a specific dimension, and that you have an image of what you want your blog to look like.

For example, when I was editing a template from fixed widths to variable widths (you can check out what it looks like here; it is on a dark background), I sat down with a piece of paper and drew out the page as I wanted to see it. I then calculated the various percentages I'd have to use in order to make the page look good.

Another tip is to check your blog's stats to see what resolution your visitors are using - the vast majority of users now are on either 1024x768 or 1280x1024 pixel monitors, at least for my blog. You might have a situation where a majority of visitors are using 800x600. If that is the case, then you should design your blog to be around 785 pixels wide, so that people don't see the horizontal scrollbar.

Now that you've determined the width you want to set your blog, it's time to save your blog's template to your computer if you have not done so already. After saving, you can then begin your changes.

When I adjust a blog's template, I always start by changing the outer-wrapper or content-wrapper (the largest width in your template). That lays the foundation for the rest of your changes. For the purposes of this demonstration, I'll change the width in my blog to 1000 pixels.

This is what the blog looks like in preview, after just changing the outer-wrapper to 1000 pixels. You'll notice that the whole page has shifted to the left, but none of the content has moved.

The next change will be to make the content-wrapper 916 pixels wide (the reason is that the left and right sides are equally off-set by 42 pixels to accommodate the background graphic.

Here's what it looks like after that change. The main blog has not moved, but the sidebar has gone all the way to the right - that is caused by the bit of text in the sidebar code "float: right;" which tells the browser to put the sidebar as far right as is possible.

Next, I'll change the main section to be 635 pixels wide. (1000 - 84 - 259 (sidebar) - 20 (sidebar padding) == 637, then I rounded down to have a more "round" number).

This is what it now looks like - the main blog now runs into the area that used to be the sidebar, while the sidebar still has the end of the background image going straight down the middle of the graphic. All in all, it's not a good look. And even at 1024x768, there's a horizontal scrollbar - that can be attributed to the fact that the window isn't maximized, so there are a few extra pixels being taken up by the window border.

For comparison, this is what the page looks like at 800x600.

The important thing to note here is that if you were to have come to my blog while I was doing this experiment, you would not have noticed any changes. This is because I always, always preview any changes I make to my blog before saving the template. Since this was just an example of how to change your template, I can now go and click the Clear Edits button, and confirm that I want to discard all the unsaved changes.

Further Reading

These are a couple of guides for colors, you can put the hex figures into the colors and fonts screen under color hex code:

• Hex Hub HTML Color Codes - they've got the colors split into different groups, such as warms, greens, blues and purples. There's also a color mixer, but it doesn't work in Firefox.
• VisiBone Webmaster's Color Lab - here, you have what is known as the 216-color Webmaster's palette, or 216 colors that are "web-safe" - they allow you to see how a combination of colors works as each color you choose is set as the background and the foreground for any other colors you choose

For some more insight on how to put together your template, check out Snoskred's article Blog Design - Open Your Eyes.

You Wanted to See It

A long time ago, I had mentioned someone looking for a video of a truck using an escape ramp. That request was echoed by Radioactive Jam. As it so happened, I flipped on the National Geographic Channel today, and they had a show on about the science behind runaway vehicles.

The first segment mentioned the well-known (at least if you've watched those John Bunnell police chase shows) PIT maneuver - which usually ends a police pursuit. The case they mentioned featured someone from the Washington State Patrol PITting someone, but since he didn't have access to the local PD's frequencies, he couldn't coordinate with them on how to sort out the chase. So the bad guy got away. I'm just curious why they didn't have the local channels available to them - here, the State Patrol is heard frequently on local Police and Sheriff frequencies. I guess it's different in Washington.

Anyway, the last segment of the show featured the Runaway Truck ramps, and their science. They also featured a truckie who was forced into using a runaway truck ramp, and she says straight out that if it weren't for the ramp, she would have rolled the truck down a mountain.

All in all, it's an interesting video to watch. I think that's why National Geographic is one of my favorite channels on cable. ;)

Blogger messing about with search engines

The other day, I was looking at my Google Webmaster site and spotted something strange - a whole bunch of pages on this domain blocked from being read by a spider due to robots.txt.

Strange, I thought. I don't have a robots.txt file on my domain. However, I go to one of the other neat tools Google Webmaster has - robots.txt viewer - and find that this is the contents of my robots.txt -

User-agent: *
Disallow: /search
Sitemap: http://www.sephyroth.net/feeds/posts/default?orderby=updated

At first, I was surprised since I don't have access to my domain to put in a robots.txt, then I was annoyed that it was there, without my permission, and there is nothing that I can do to change it (outside of changing to a proper hosting arrangement) or to remove the file.

But then I thought about it for a few seconds, and it clicked. What the robots.txt file does, in this case, is stop any spiders from crawling the contents of the search folder on my domain. This folder only contains duplicates of posts that are already being indexed. The reality is that this is a good thing since it will give more accurate results for people using search to get to my site. A perfect example of this was a person searching for words in the content of this post (in which the video's already been removed from YouTube). Instead of coming back with just that post page, they were given a link to my music label.

By adding in the disallow on /search, results like that will not be possible anymore, unless the person searching clicks on one of the labels for that posts. Again, that also means less confusion because you will not see one result from the post page, one from (possibly) a "monthly archive" page, and results from any label pages the post might be on.

However, even though I think it's a good thing to have this available for us to have, it should definitely be something that is left up to each blog's owner to choose the restrictions on spiders through robots.txt. Incidentally, you'll notice the line about sitemaps - I think it's a good thing to have in there, especially if you have a blog that is somewhat complex. That is something that I'd been having issues with Google Webmaster tools about verifying my pages as being mine.

In the end, all I want is that we have control over our blogs' robots.txt files. If that cannot happen, then the Blogger people should be upfront about the reason why this is not possible. There's no reason to hide behind curtains and other devices when you make changes in policy that affect every person who has signed up for your service.

A lesson in computer maintenance

Going into the summer storm season, I had what I thought at the time was a brilliant and cunning plan - take my not-too-often used laptop computer down in the basement and leave it there in case we would need to relocate there for a tornado warning. This is an extension of last year's idea of taking it down just for the event and then bringing it back upstairs after the storm had passed.

The day that I had decided to do this, there was a threat of storms so I chose to set it up with Firefox running with tabs for the local National Weather Service office and a couple of radar views open, reloading automatically. I also had installed TightVNC so that I could take control from my main computer to see if everything was working well down there, and in fact to see if the system was still going (it has overheating issues, and has been prone to random shutdowns at times). It all went well, and the threat of storms had passed, so I shut down the computer and left it downstairs and plugged in (mostly just to waste power since the battery in there has never taken a charge properly).

I didn't start it up again for about a month or so, until I wanted to check how a page looked in a really old version of Firefox Firebird. I go and start it up, and everything works fine, so I decide that it's best that I come back upstairs and take remote control over the computer from my desktop. Again, that works fine until I get a message saying that there was no response received from the computer. I go downstairs to see that the screen was on, but completely frozen, so I figure that it's best to bring it back upstairs.

Here's the thing about our basement - it's unfinished with concrete floors and walls, and also a tendency to be on the moist side. I don't know of that had anything to do with what has happened to my laptop, but I'm guessing it's a factor. If you don't have a climate controlled basement, don't leave a laptop down there, it won't do any good. If you need to, just carry it with you in a storm.

So anyway, I get the laptop back upstairs and get it all hooked up again, turn it on; it boots like normal, goes into Windows, works for about 5 or 10 minutes and then the screen freezes again. I think I managed to get what I needed to get done after two or three attempts to do it. However, as it now seems, that might have been the last time I'll have used the laptop properly.

A couple of days passed until I tried to start it up again, and when I did, the screen wouldn't go on - that was solved, of all things, by turning it upside down. Then, the other day, I plug it in and try to start it up again. Now, it starts, the fan goes on for a few seconds, but then about 15 seconds into booting, it just goes off, five seconds pass and it starts up again. This process repeats until I manually turn it off.

So, now I have a laptop with some files that I'd like to have off of there (not critical files, but stuff I'd like to have), and seemingly no way to get it off of there. I guess it's fair to say that all electronics have a lifespan - and this is no different. I've had the laptop since October, 2001 (a week before XP came out, but it was preinstalled on there. To get over five years of functional life from a laptop is probably good, though most of the parts on there (hard drive, screen, fan) are about three years old - they were replaced on the extended warranty.

Does anyone have any idea what I might be able to do to get it going again (it's an HP Pavilion N5475 - 1Ghz AMD processor with 256 MB of memory and a 30gig hard drive)? Or does it look like I have a hunk of dead computer on my hand?

Also, how in the heck do you open the case on a laptop - I've taken almost all the screws (the only ones I've not gotten to are the ones in the body under the screen) out but have had no luck in taking the bottom off of it?

Fingers crossed..

Although I did write the how-to to get a blogger feed integrated with Feedburner, it seems that I have had nothing but trouble with getting my feed to properly forward.

Half of the time, it does work right, but more recently, I've been finding that the feed doesn't forward properly at all, and that I'm not able to take advantage of the stats offered by Feedburner. In fact, Bloglines haven't even checked with Feedburner since Friday, instead just using the site feed that is here.

I've gone and reverified the settings, reset the forwarding and it appears to work now. I can only hope that it will continue to work, but right now my confidence isn't terribly great with the stability of the service.

Interestingly, though, Google has been pinging Feedburner on its own, but I hadn't seen any of the posts come through with the feedflares on them.

So, my fingers are crossed that it will work, otherwise I'll try other ways to get it to work properly..

How-to: Integrate your feed with FeedBurner

This is the first in a series of how-tos that I'm writing up for various blogging subjects. If you have anything you'd like me to untangle, let me know. If I know how to do it I'll post about it; if not I'm willing to take a shot at learning how to do it, and then post about it. ;)

Many of you have seen that you can now integrate your Blogger feed with the services of Feedburner so that you can get detailed stats about your blog's feed. This can also be known by a variety of terms, like merging your feeds, or (the logical choice IMO) combining the feeds, or (officially) "Post Feed Redirect". To make things simpler, I'll just use integrate or its variant when talking about it.

While both sites have how-tos on putting it all together, it might get a bit, well "heady" if you're not used to working with technical instructions. What I plan to do is show you how to do it, with screenshots, and using straightforward English.

In order to use this service, you will need to have registered your blog's current feed with Feedburner. To do this, you need to go to the Feedburner homepage, and put your website's address in the big yellow box. If you are a podcaster, then you should click the box saying that "I am a podcaster". Click Next » to proceed.

You will then be taken to the "Identify Feed Source" page - basically, it tells you the feeds that were found on your page, and you can choose the one you want to use. For Blogger blogs, you can just stick with the first option and then click Next » to move on.

Now, you will be able to give your feed a title; it will automatically fill the Feed Title in with the title of your Blog. Also, you can customize the address that will be for your feed - generally, you should keep it as the title of your blog, or you can change it to something shorter if you wish. At the bottom of the form, if you do not already have a FeedBurner account, this is the time to create one. Simply fill the fields and then click Activate Feed » to put your feed on FeedBurner.

Now, your blog's feed is on FeedBurner. You will see this screen which has your feed's address, which you will need for integrating with Blogger. Also, you now have the option to add in stats to your feed, or move directly to managing your feed. I'd just go ahead and click Next » to add in the stats, so that you don't have to go back and do it later.

This is the Enhance Your Stats page - here, you can add in options for tracking how many clicks you're receiving on your feed with Clickthroughs. Note that this will change the formatting of the address in posts from "http://yourblog.blogspot.com/2007/" etc. to "http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/FeedTitle..." etc. You don't need to worry about the enclosure downloads section unless you're a podcaster. Also, and this is something new for FeedBurner, the Pro functions are now free, so you can add them or not. What you choose on this page is up to you, but when you're done click Next » to move on.

There's a lot more that you can do with FeedBurner; feel free to check them out. You can change pretty much whatever you want - how your feed's page looks, get the code for the RSS button you see all over the web. This is something that I'd recommend you do right away - it's under Publicize, then Chicklet Chooser. You'll be able to add it directly to your blog from FeedBurner if you're on Blogger or Typepad.
Right now, however, what we want to do is integrate it with Blogger, and it's a fairly simple process. From your Dashboard, go into your Blog's settings, then into Site Feed.

Now, you will see the screen below. If you've worked on your feed before, you will be familiar with the Allow Blog Feed and Feed Item Footer items. What we're looking at now is the Post Feed Redirect URL line. All you need to do now is paste or type in your FeedBurner address in the line and click Save Settings.

And that's it! Your Blogger feed will now be redirected to your FeedBurner feed.

Important note: Any of your readers on bloglines might notice that your feed will start to go nuts - I don't know why that happens, but it has been happening. Hopefully they get that problem sorted soon. Otherwise, everything will be good to go.

Update, 2nd August: There is currently an issue with the integration that is causing some major problems. Blogger are aware of the issue and have issued a work-around -

The workaround for now is to add an “?alt=atom” parameter to the feed URL in your FeedBurner settings.

Essentially, that just means that, in my case, the feed URL I am now using for Feedburner is - http://www.sephyroth.net/feeds/posts/default?alt=atom - you just add the ?alt=atom to the end of your feed's address.