This book actively immerses you in going beyond the default Blogger blog. Descriptive tutorials help you take action and learn to customize Blogger templates, add and create your own widgets, use social bookmarking tools, optimize your blog for search engines, attract more readers, play nice with other bloggers, understand Google Analytics, and make money with your blog.
As a bonus, you will also learn many delicious fruit recipes and have access to a rich array of images, code, and tips for your blog.
Chapter 1 will help you start by comparing a default Blogger blog with top blogs. You will meet Georgia and her organic fruit company Fruit for All. Georgia's blog will be our example throughout the book. Developing a wish list of the features and design elements for her blog will include an overview of the many types of features and online tools used by bloggers.
Chapter 2 will help you plan and customize your Blogger template to give your site its own look. This will include the blog post, sidebar, header, and footer areas of the blog. Tweaking the template will include quick fixes such as fonts, colors and background images and then cover more complex tasks, including adding a third column to your design.
Chapter 3 covers the types of social bookmarking and network tools, along with the most popular sites. Promoting your site using social bookmarks and using related widgets adds interactivity. You will use social bookmarking techniques with your blog and apply them to different parts of your blog. Blogger and third-party tools are customized and integrated into your blog.
Chapter 4 is all about being an active citizen of the Blogosphere. You will set up Blogger link backs, use tools to make it easier for other bloggers to link back to you, and learn ways to attract other bloggers to your blog.
Chapter 5 covers the best widgets for Blogger. Widgets are small, self-contained programs that can help you build a community, provide rich content, show and sell products, and make money. They give you more choices for how you can use your blog. You will not only add Blogger and third-party widgets to your blog, you will create your own custom widgets. Picking the right widgets for your blog is covered by widget type and function.
Chapter 6 will help you make the most of Blogger's feed syndication. You'll learn how to make it easy for people to subscribe, use tools like Feedburner to promote, measure and share your feed, and go beyond basic feed syndication with widgets and optimization tips.
Chapter 7 covers advertising as a source of revenue for your blog. Using Google AdSense and other popular programs, you will select ad formats, customize widgets, and place ads on your blog. Rich media formats including YouTube AdSense units are explored.
Chapter 8 covers the ways to measure the performance of your blog using Google Analytics. You'll start with installing Analytics code on your blog and learning how Analytics is useful for Blogger blogs. This chapter is full of active tutorials on getting the most out of Google Analytics, including how to use regular expressions to create custom filters. Understanding and analyzing the reporting features of Analytics is also explored.
Chapter 9 focuses on optimizing your blog for search engines. Create site maps, understand the cryptic syntax of robots.txt, and learn tips specific to how search engines crawl and rank blogs. Taking action with checklists and techniques designed to get you started in five minutes or less.
Chapter 10 integrates your blog with your main website or any other site or blog you already have. You will add dynamic universal navigation, match the fonts and colors of your blog to other sites, add content from your blog to an external site, and learn multiple ways to use a custom domain for your Blogger blog.
The book is aimed at current users of the Blogger platform who want to get the most out of Blogger, and people who use a different blogging platform and are planning on switching to Blogger. Blog owners who promote their own services, expertise, and products, and want to increase their blog's success by pushing the limits of what Blogger can do will get the most out of this book.
This book doesn't require any specific knowledge of Blogger or the related technologies: RSS, CSS, HTML, and XML. Everything you need to know to grow beyond the basics is covered in this book. The companion website to this book, http://bloggerbeefedup.blogspot.com includes free resource images and content.
In this book, you will find a number of styles of text that distinguish between different kinds of information. Here are some examples of these styles, and an explanation of their meaning.
There are three styles for code. Code words in text are shown as follows: "Every link used within the Blogger template begins with <a expr:href."
A block of code will be set as follows:
#navigation ul
{
background: none;
width:400px;
padding: 0;
margin: 0;
float:right;
font: bold 80% Verdana;
}
When we wish to draw your attention to a particular part of a code block, the relevant lines or items will be made bold:
h2.date-header
{
color:$datecolor;
margin:1.5em 0 0.5em;
}
New terms and important words are introduced in a bold-type font. Words that you see on the screen, in menus or dialog boxes for example, appear in our text like this: "clicking the Next button moves you to the next screen".
Note
Tips and tricks appear like this.
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