Okay! I meant to get to this earlier, but…life, it gets in the way. At any rate, I have answers for everyone.
Becky:
Bloggy awards are nice, aren’t they? There’s not a lot to “passing them on” – just list the 4 or 5 blogs you’d like to pass the award to, and link to their sites so others can find and read them. If the blog award comes with a graphic, you can put it in the post as well.
As for the HTML code, I see you have a Blogger blog. In your blog’s dashboard, click “Layout” in the Manage menu. This will take you to the “Page Element” section; click on “Add a Page Element” – a new window should pop up. Find “HTML/JavaScript” and click the Add to Blog button. Give your page element (which will show on the sidebar of your blog) a title, then copy (CTRL+C) the HTML code you were given and paste (CTRL+V) it in the large box provided. Click “Save” and you should be all set!
Carol:
Some blog formats allow you to check a box that will have all the comments to a particular blog post sent to the email you provide when you comment. In the absence of that, subscribe to the RSS feed for the post you want to track the comments for. There are a multitude of RSS readers to choose from; most free email services, such as Yahoo and Google, have RSS readers. All you have to do is open the reader and any comments from the blogs you’ve subscribed to will be there.
An excellent – and simple – explanation of RSS subscriptions and readers can be found here. It’s a video, so make sure your sound is on.
Ann:
If you’re going to use WordPress for your self-hosted blog, you’ll find that themes are really easy to install. If you can find a free theme that you’re happy with, great! There are some really wonderful free themes out there. If not, there are web designers who will create a custom blog theme for you very inexpensively (I’m one of them). If you need help setting up your self-hosted blog and want to discuss a custom theme, I’ll be more than happy to help you out. I can also help you get good, inexpensive and extremely reliable hosting if you need it. Email me at jpooh22(at)gmail(dot)com.
Duchess:
I see you’re using WordPress. If you’ll navigate to Design > Widgets in your administration panel, you’ll see “RSS Links” – add that to your sidebar, and it will give your visitors simple text links with the options to subscribe to all of your posts, or all of your comments. If your blog is self-hosted and you’d like something that you have more control over, there are numerous plugins for RSS feeds you can install.
As for finding out which words and/or phrases people are using to find your site in search engines, that depends. I check my stats with a simple program called AwStats, provided by my webhost. If you don’t have access to something similar, there are statistic plugins you can install for WordPress that will let you know all of that.
If you’d like some help with any of this, just let me know. Again, my email is jpooh22(at)gmail(dot)com.
Marue:
You have NO idea how many books I have on PHP. When I began learning PHP and MySQL, I found this book to be very helpful. It is not at all “text-bookish” and is very easy (and sometimes amusing) to read and follow. However, you’re going to want to do this locally, on your own machine – you can screw up a site pretty quickly if you’re just learning; don’t try modifying the PHP on your blog until you know what you’re doing – so you’ll have to install an Apache webserver, PHP and MySQL on your computer. It’s not hard if you know what you’re doing – Apache2Triad is a great tool to use for this purpose, as it bundles all of them together, along with some other very useful development software.
That being said, if you know CSS and want to design your own WordPress Themes, you don’t really have to know PHP at all. Download the Sandbox Template, designed by Andy Skelton and Scott Allan Wallick. It is fully customizable with just CSS – you’ll never have to touch another file except for the stylesheet.
Allison:
Trackbacks are simply a way of linking back to another blog. An excellent explanation of trackbacks and how use them can be found here.
Unfortunately, Blogger has trackbacks disabled, because comment spam is mostly generated using trackbacks. However, this can be gotten around by installing and using Haloscan.
If anyone else has any questions, just leave leave a comment! Again, if I don’t know the answer, I’ll find it out (for instance, I opened a Blogger account to answer some of these questions). And since driving traffic to your blog seems to have the most interest, my next article will be about that!
Have a great week, y’all.
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