TOP 10 TECH

I have a lot of friends and contacts that write about blogger, how to use it, how to use it better, tips, tricks and everything.  That said, I’ve never seen anyone do a more comprehensive review, coverage, build, tutorial what ever you want to call it than the site called Blogger Buster.    If you are using blogger today, and want to take your blogger blog to the next level, I highly recommend this website. 

For the record as a person that blogs on Blogger and WordPress, I still recommend WordPress sites hosted on your own account, but there are times when you must use blogger and/or when you just get stuck there.  The tips and guides on Blogger Buster might just make you forget about your Google Woes. 

I’m going to cover this site even more after the holidays, and I’m primarily just writing this article so that I don’t lose track of it!

Back in 2006, I established a ‘junk’ blog.  It was supposed to be something that I would use primarily to practice creative writing or just to use to un-block writers block.

I initially kept the site anonymous because I didn’t really care about it, didn’t expect anyone to read or visit it and only wanted to use it for selfish reasons.

Almost 3 years later the site is  (by no credit to myself) weirdly popular.  I have no idea why. 

If I were to say that I care about the site today, well that could jinx the success it has had, so I will say that ‘I do not care about it at all!’

Running a popular blog from blogger however is a big pain in the but.  Comment management on blogger alone, flat out sucks!  I can never tell when I receive a comment on blogger, what article the comment is directed at.  Which makes it kind of hard to reply to that comment afterwards on a blog with over 1600 articles.

So for that reason and several others, I finally broke down and move it to its own domain and set it up on my long time friend WordPress. 

The blogger site is located at http://somethingaboutharry.blogspot.com and the NEW wordpress site is located at http://something-about-harry.com.  The look of the new theme of the site is intended to be similar, as I wanted my readers to feel comfortable in the new digs.

That said, I knew there were two areas that I might lose people. 

• The Feed
• The front page

I get a lot of subscribers, even though my subscriber count always seems to be woefully incorrect.  So I had to go into Feedburner where I manage the feed, and update it to grab the feed from http://somethin-about-harry.com/feed/ instead of the old blogger atom xml location.

Once I had that done, then I could also fix one of the problems with the front page on the old site, but first I should explain a problem with blogger blogs.  When you transition from a blogger blog there is no clean way to do a redirect.

You can’t do a 301. 

You could do a meta tag auto redirect, and have the page automatically change to the new location, but that makes a lot of visitors/readers uncomfortable.  I have too much traffic going to the old site to chance pissing (technical web term for aggravating and upsetting someone terribly) someone off like that.

So instead, I’m using a feedburner trick that I developed a long time ago (and have used here at top10tech on the home page).

I created a buzzboost section of code on feedburner for the new site.  I then pasted that code into my old blogger template, just above the content of the blog articles.  Now on the blogger site, those blog articles in blogger will never be updated again.  all the content is going to the new site.  But my readers that land on the homepage that have not learned that yet may not know.

The key to the code is adding this snippet of code after the generic code given by feedburner

<script src=’http: //feeds.feedburner.com/TheresSomethingAboutHarry?format= sigpro&amp;excerptFormat=full&amp;excerptLength=100 @amp;nItems=5‘ type=’text/javascript’/>

So they will now see the full html versions of the posts from the new site displayed on the old site.  The links are from a feed, so if anyone clicks on the title or something it will take them to the new site.

Plus, I’m putting to large disclaimers at the top of the site to help get them to the new location.

On top of all that maybe in 3-6 months when traffic dies down at the old site, then maybe I will do a meta tag redirect to the new site, but not till the traffic drops or I find an even better method.

After that, it won’t really matter what happens to the old site so much as long as people don’t get lost and can find their way out of the forest if they do.  Maybe I’ll even monetize the old site a bit with some affiliate ads or Fentraphen reviews or maybe just let the thing go dark.  Since I didn’t care to begin with and say that ‘I don’t care now’ maybe that will make it so! 

So you have graduated from Blogger to your own domain but you do not want to lose all those readers coming to your old blogspot address.  How can you establish a simple redirect so they will automatically be sent to your new site?

Well, the new blogger code makes the redirect slightly less than straight forward if you are unfamiliar with xml.  Most html redirect tips you will see will tell you to use the following code

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="2;url=http://www.my-new-domain.com">

However, with the new blogger you are working in xml and you will get an error stating that you can not save your template as the xml is malformed.

Its simple, you just need to ad a slash before you close out your tag code for xml so that it looks like this.

<meta content='3;url=http://distributionbusinessarticles.blogspot.com'

 http-equiv='refresh'/>

Told you that was easy!

Here is a tip for blogger bloggers. 

When you have a blogger template, the defaults often times come with images in the template that are hosted on blogblog.com or some other site provided by Google or the maker of the template.  When you use these images, you are missing out on an opportunity to provide one of your own sites some incoming link action on every page.

Copy those images down, and post them up onto your own folder on a domain that you own.  Then update the code location url in the template to point to your domain where the image exists.

Below you can see one image that points to my site at softduit.com (this one has been updated).

You can also see another image that has not yet been updated pointing to blogblog.com.

NOTE. above I also placed the image in a directory that had the same name as my blogger blog, distribution business articles.   This also helps to give a bit of a file name association and contextual aspect to the image article as it then points out to the blog of the same name or title.  So if your site is about royal caribbean, then put the directory as royal caribbean as opposed to some generic name like image-file-xyz.