blog comments

I did a little bit of housekeeping on my blog. In the sidebar you'll still see everything that was there before, but I've added a widget that shows recent comments that have been added to posts on my blog. I know that not everyone can receive emailed follow-ups to comments that they've made--this means that unless you remember to stop back by and specifically check, you might not find out your answer or even know if your comment was acknowledged. That would be one way to follow up. Here are a couple more:

• I've added a link to a feed that you can subscribe to via the RSS reader of your choice--this feed will be solely for follow-up comments that have been added to posts.
  
• If you prefer email, I've added a link for an email subscription to comments, too. Like the email subscription to this blog, it would be a single daily mailing of comments, if there were any comments made.
  

So basically I've added a few ways to keep up with comments that are made on this blog. The comments can be very helpful and so many readers come up with such great ideas that I hate for them to go unnoticed. This is the best solution for now, I think. :-)

adding a favicon to your blog

As I was reading through my blog subscriptions yesterday, a post made via Twitter/Blogger caught my eye. It had to do with favicons. A favicon is that small graphic that you often see up near the address bar on your browser. For example, when you're looking at a Blogger blog, you'll often see the orange icon with the white B. That's a favicon.

The note that I saw had to do with making your own favicon and installing it on your blog or website. That sounded neat! You have to keep things fairly simple though. These graphics are only 16 x 16 pixels. That means that you can't put a whole lot of detail into them. Still, you can make your site look just that little bit more unique. I added one to this blog. Hopefully you can see it. It should look like this....Okay, I take that back. When Blogger uploaded this, it changed. My ink splat is not really that sickly greenish color. It's supposed to be gray, and I hope that gray is what you see when you land on this blog. Yikes.

Anyway, if you want to give it a try, here's the blog post that was recommended by Blogger. It's on a blog called, Rose DesRochers - World Outside My Window. She describes exactly what you need to do. It's really fairly simple and straightforward. You do need to have a site to host your favicon image though since Blogger doesn't let you upload .ico files--that's the filename for favicons.

Lastly, this worked for me just fine using Firefox and Internet Explorer. Apparently with Safari I'll have to figure out how to clear the old favicon out of my browser cache before it'll upload and recognize the new one. So, if you're browsing via Safari, that's why you probably still the orange and white Blogger favicon.

Just thought I'd post another way you can make your blog even more unique. :-)

hitching a ride

I think I posted a similar photo last year. :-) The big dragonfly is a decorative yard ornament, part of a sprinkler actually. It seems to attract the real dragonflies though, which is a fun sight to see.

In similar fashion, I've hitched my blog to a couple of others. Okay, it's not all that similar, and it was a stretch as a segue, but I've done some tweaking and I want to give credit where it's due.

I recently updated my blog template. Rather than going with another set template, I decided to tweak Blogger's Minima template--basically it's a bare bones template that gives you a head start on the coding instead of starting from scratch. I'm tempted to add a third column, that is, a second sidebar, but I'm content for now with the new background and bigger real estate. The design is fairly simple, but it's mine. :-)

A few things that I've done in the interest of making things easier:

• I've tried to make subscribing easy by having not only links to feeds but I've also added the option to subscribe via email. I really like subscribing to blogs. It's just more efficient, especially if you follow a bunch of them.
• I've made my header image clickable--it links back to my main page. That's something that just makes sense to me. If you've followed various links and want to get back to the main page, that's a quick and easy way to get there.
  
• I've added a link at the end of each post so that it can be printed out. You don't see the printer icon on the main page. It's just on the individual post's page. Now I've noticed that this is one of those things that varies depending on the browser you use. You should be able to print out the post, any pictures, and comments without the blog header and sidebar. It works in Safari and in Internet Explorer for me. Firefox handles it in a weird way and only "sees" the first two pages for some reason. Just FYI.
• Tonight I added the comments box to the end of individual posts--these are called embedded comments. Again, you don't see these on the main page, but if you click to leave a comment, you'll be taken to the dialog box at the end of that post on its page. I like that Blogger will be making this an option for users. It's nice to be able to look back at the post when making comments, rather than the box being on a separate page.

Here are the two main resources that I used for my tweaking:

Blogger Buster
Dummies Guide to Google Blogger Beta

Both have loads of information and have some great step-by-step instructions and tutorials. If you're thinking of tweaking, these are a couple of super places to get ideas.

Edited to add: I thought that my list of labels was rather long and bulky. Still, I wanted to be able to find things easily, even if that meant dealing with a large number of labels. My compromise was to turn that list into a drop-down menu instead. It's in the sidebar, closer to my lists of tutorials etc rather than at the bottom of the page. I think this might help the main page load faster, too.