I’ve fallen off the radar a bit, but today’s April Platform Challenge is to put the things we’ve learned in the past couple of challenges together and create an effective blog post. For me, this meant I had some thinking to do. In the past, this has always been a vanity blog. Sort of a “look how clever I am” or, more to the point, “look how clever my children are!” To turn this into a social platform for, in my case, writing, I needed to make some changes and start taking things a bit more seriously.
I'm using the Aspire template as the skin for this blog. I had to update it and it's been giving me fits, so bear with me while I get the kinks ironed out. The Share buttons now work, please feel free to give them a whirl. Hey, the email links now work, as does the RSS and Atom feeds. Now if I could only find content.
There is an SEO hack over at The Tech Site that may (or may not) help increase your visibility. Tell you what, if each of you will visit my “Cookies” and “Dry Spell” posts a thousand or so times apiece, I’ll report back and let you know how I’ve faired.
Right now it’s for Blogger sites only, but I’m sure a clever fellow (which immediately disqualifies me) can port it to other blogging templates. The Tech Site hack is almost complete; on the meta tags it should be:
<meta name='description' expr:content='data:blog.pageTitle + " – your blog description here (up to 200 charaters)"' />
<meta name='keywords' expr:content='data:blog.pageName + ", Keyword 1, Keyword 2, Keyword 3, Keyword 4, Keyword 5"' />
<meta name="author" content="Author Name Here" /> On the social networking side, there is an interesting site called dlvr.it. Post to an RSS feed (say to your PlusFeed on your Google+ account) and it will automatically propagate to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.
I post to my blog and it automatically (with Blogger) posts to Google+. dlvr.it then picks it up and posts the notice of a new blog entry to my linked accounts. It will take some playing around with get it just so, but it sounds like a pretty cool idea.
Check out dlvr.it and The Tech Site and see if what they offer will meet your needs; in-between clicking on “Cookies” and “Dry Spell.”
