Tips for Bloggers

These are few suggestions for those who write blogs. It would help more people to read your blogs.

• Setup E-Mail subscription by using feedburner. Not everyone uses feed readers like Google reader. Having email notifications is a good option to reach all your readers.
  

• Enable Feeds with full content for posts as well as comments, unless you clearly know what you are doing. Eventhough this is the default, still I am explicitly saying because I know few people, who think that giving least permissions is more secure, and they disable it for that reason.

  
  

• Don't post in bulk, because you had not posted for a while. Use the options of schedule post and post it uniformly. If you are planning to post after a month, and you have 4 posts now, then schedule to post one a week. That would be useful for your regular readers. If I see 4 posts from one person, I would be tempted to read them later. But, if it is single post, then I read it immediately. For more than 90% of my posts, I schedule to post in future.

  
  

• Enclose your text in between <p align="justify"> and </p>. By that, your text is aligned. Unfortunately, blogger does not align the text by default. We can add this in the template to apply to all posts. But, if we change the template to use other theme, and afterwards if you do any template changes, then the previous changes may go away.

  
  

• If your post is a generic one and is a solution for a particular problem, then try to use what users search for that problem, as the title of the post. By that, search engines give more preference to your post for that problem.

  
  

• If you are having tables in your post in blogger, then you may find significant extra space before the table. It is because, for every new line in between <table> and </table>, blogger adds one new line <br>. By that, there would be new lines before the table. Remove all the new lines in the entire html between <table> and </table>. If you keep everything in single line, then there will not be any extra space before the table.

Hide the top navigation bar (banner) by doing the following.
1. Log in to blogger
2. On your Dashboard, select Layout -> Edit Html. Under the Edit Template section you will see you blog's HTML.
3. paste the CSS definition in the top of the template code:

...
<b:skin><![CDATA[/*
-----------------------------------------------
Blogger Template Style
Name:     Rounders
Designer: Douglas Bowman
URL:      www.stopdesign.com
Date:     27 Feb 2004
Updated by: Blogger Team
----------------------------------------------- */

#navbar-iframe {
   display: none !important;
}

/* Variable definitions
  ====================
   <Variable name="mainBgColor" description="Main Background Color"
             type="color" default="#fff" value="#ffffff">
   <Variable name="mainTextColor" description="Text Color" type="color"
             default="#333" value="#333333">
   ...

Remove the code to show it again.