I eagerly awaited the promised new blog categories at BlogRush. Now I’m really disappointed! The new categories have really hurt some of my blogs. As bad a fit as some of the overly general categories used to be, some of my blogs no longer fit into the new BlogRush category scheme at all!

Why Should We Care About BlogRush Categories?

BlogRush now apparently filters your posts and decides whether or not to sydicate them. So if you categorize your blog as being about, say, Painting, and you make a post that is mainly about drawing (which of course is an important aspect of most paintings), your post may not be syndicated (listed in the BlogRush widget). As near as I can tell, it would now be considered to be off topic!

By getting too specific with categories (and get rid of general categories as an option), they are crippling the more general blogs and also the specialized blogs that do not fit into BlogRush’s new, very narrow specific categories. Following are examples from my own experience.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

Blogs that are high on text and low on graphics can be visually boring. If you don’t have relevant photos or art for your blog, you might want to consider adding visually interesting widgets.

Some are useful. Some are just fun. I try to select (or edit) them to get the look I want. Widgets are easy to move around or replace as needed to help your blog layout, too.

In Wordpress, I sometimes remove a widget and park it for awhile in the available-widgets area of the Widgets page in the Wordpress admin area. Later, when I need something that particular size and shape, I can just drag it back into a sidebar.

Blog Design with Whatever Works

I know this goes against the advice of hip, trendy blogging, but it can work. The theme of this Wordpress blog is feature-laden, intended for monetization—and visually boring. It came with Alex Sysoef’s wonderful Web 2.0 Wealth blog-authoring package, and that’s why I use it.

I tweaked the colors a lot, but still the original theme needed something. I started adding affiliate ads partly for visual interest. (Some have since been removed.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Choosing blog colors often takes a backseat to choosing a good theme, installing widgets, writing posts, and all the other work involved in building and maintaining a blog. But colors are much more important than they may seem.

Here’s why:

1. Color is the first impression people have of your blog. Before they read a word or recognize the image in your header, color affects them. The effect can attract or repel them.

2. The colors of the text, type, and mouseovers on your blog have the most affect on two things:

Readability (whether your blog is easy and pleasant to read)

Legibility (whether it is possible for most people to read, without hurting their eyes)

Trust me, if it hurts their eyes to read your blog, they won’t.

3. Enhancing or cancelling your message. If you blog about business, and your blog is pink and frilly, guess what? Unless you’re Mary Kay Cosmetics, you’ve got a problem. You just won’t look business like.

4. Up to date? Or faddish? Yes, your color schemes should be up to date. But if you use the current favorite fad colors of today, guess what happens tomorrow? That’s right, your site looks outdated and boring. And that makes your ideas and offers seem outdated and boring, too.

5. Getting lost in the crowd? Go your own way! Better to blaze your own path with a classy/classic color scheme that creates a distinctive, memorable image.

6. Know your audience, and choose colors that appeal to them. In the U.S., older guys often choose supposedly macho colors (tan, gray, black, rust, orange) no matter who they are trying to communicate with. But what are they conveying? Is rust a good color if you’re selling cars or precision metal instruments? Does gray appeal to your market? Find out! Design your site to please your audience, not yourself.

Is it just me, or has this blog widget thing just gotten completely out of control?

It seems like every site that offers any kind of service these days requires that you put their particular giant, gaudy widget on your site.

I don’t mind inserting snippets of javascript or PHP code. I don’t even mind having to paste code in specific spots in the theme pages.

I can live with small, discrete badges and other backlinks on my pages. But I’m sick and tired of being required to install big, ugly widgets that clash with my site.

Now, because everybody and his dog is creating and mandating their own widgets, a lot of them don’t even work properly. They seem to be just dashing them off and making me beta test them. That is really annoying!

If anyone from any of those sites ever reads this, here’s some advice. If you’re going to require that people put your widgets on their sites in order to do business with you, make sure they work properly and make sure they are resizable or very small—or at least can be customized to blend into the site.

While you’re at it, make sure your online widget-generation application works well with all major browsers on all three major operating systems (and not just the latest version, please?). And make the customization easy!

BlogRush may have a big widget, but at least you can change the colors in a couple of seconds at their site. You don’t have to cut and paste the code into your blog every time. Now if only they were not trying to dictate where you can put it, their widget would be almost perfect. (A resizable widget with completely customizable colors and typefaces would be perfect.)

How do you feel about the new Technorati widget? I cannot get it to work properly. (You can just deselect options all you want to on their site, but when you paste it into your site, it still displays as the full, giant, ugly monster that clashes with everything.

What do you think about the whole widget proliferation thing? Good? Bad? Ugly? Feel free to vent by leaving a comment.

It’s not enough to design and write a great blog. You still have to promote it. Preferably you should promote it in as many cost- and time-saving ways as you can, as long as they are legal, are search engine safe, and they work.

One of the best, proven ways to promote your blog is by writing and placing articles on the blog’s topic in free article directories. If you do that already, you know how much time that can take.

If you simply place the same article on several directories, Google filters them out, negating some of their value. If you rewrite them in your own words, and change the bio box, that can take a lot of time.

Generally if you use article spinner software, you get a mishmash that does not sound like any real human being wrote it. That isn’t going to make people want to read your blog.

What to do? You might want to take a look at a free service that makes things easier, called JetSpinner. You enter pieces of your article in your own words, in phrases or paragraphs called “snippets” in several variations. So you might break up a 500 word article into 100 pieces.

But then JetSpinner automatically reassembles the snippets (all of which *you* wrote) into a new article anytime you want. Best of all, the service is free! So you might want to give it a try. Multiply your article submission power with Jetspinner

By now we all know that blogs that are hosted on your own domain tend to get better readership and rank higher in the search engines. But where to host?

The company that hosts your blogs can make life easy—or miserable. If your blogs are off line, no one can read them. So if your business is based on blogs, you lose income.

Equally important, if your service is set up in a nonstandard way that makes it hard to get important scripts to run, your blog business can be crippled, or you can spend way too much precious blogging time wrestling with things that ought to be simple.

And because the future of the web and of blogging is interactivity, you need to be able to run scripts, especially large sets of PHP scripts. WordPress is one example of a large set of PHP scripts; there are many others that can enhance your blog and your business. A hosting service that doesn’t let you run many scripts or that makes it hard can be a big problem.

Plus, it’s supremely frustrating. Who needs the aggravation?

Read the rest of this entry »

Blog design is my priority, but let’s face it. We all have to be constantly on the lookout for good ways to promote our blogs. Especially quick, easy and free ways.

So I was thrilled with the idea of BlogRush.com, and I told you about it a week or so ago in a post called Promote Your Blog Instantly With BlogRush. No Charge!

At the time, the service had no track record. But I was betting on the brilliance of the concept—and of the founder, John Reese, who has made many millions on the Web. The results are in. It works! It is especially good for younger, less-well-known blogs, like this one.

The only thing I didn’t like was the widget itself, which was ugly. It really clashed with some of my blogs, but I used it anyway.

Early on, John promised colors, or “flavors” of widgets, and I could hardly stand the wait. Now they’re here! And they are beautiful, well-chosen colors.

I’ve chosen a conservative dark blue to blend with this blog, and various other colors for my other blogs. (Feel free to go look, please.) Talk Like a Texan got Ice (pale gray) to go with the colors of oaks, bayou and spanish moss.

New Health Ideas got a Plum widget. Art Fun Cheap got a Watermelon (emerald green) widget to match the accent color of the WordPress theme. And so on. It was so much fun.

And here’s (almost) the best part. You do not have to cut and paste any code/scripting/whatever to change the widget Flavors. Let me say that again: No cutting and pasting. No wp-admin.

Once you’ve registered and added your blogs, you can just go to the BlogRush site, log in, and apply whatever flavors you want to. Anytime. It all happens remotely.

Sheer blog design bliss! It’s my favorite new toy!

And the widget works with other blog engines. I have put one on a Blogger blog, Tengsha.com, and it works great there, too, including changing widget colors.

As far as the service itself goes, I’m delighted. There have been problems with cheaters lowering the overall click-through rates, but I’m confident that those will soon be sorted out.

BlogRush is truly a fantastic service! And it is free, quick and easy—three of my favorite things.