[Pro] Blogger Questions

Freeway
1

We are putting together our web site (which we never seem to get time to finish) and we were thinking of adding lots of information, but I thought it would be better to do that on a blog. People could respond, easier to continually add articles.

I watched the Freeway Cast about the blogger actions and it seems pretty easy. Is it really that easy to create a Freeway styled blogger blog?

Has anybody done that and could share their experiences?

Thanks.

Bob

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2

Hi Bob

I’ve put together a few blogs using the Blogger actions and, yes, it can be quite simple depending on your layout and how you manage things.

Here’s some links to blogs I’ve created:

http://ltbuses.blogspot.com/ (still under construction)
http://dmoft.blogspot.com/
http://macvalley.blogspot.com/

I generally create the blog using a new file rather than try to add it to the file containing the rest of the website pages. If you use the CSS Menu menu action then you need to be careful with your links so that the correct element is highlighted when you visit the blog. You will also need to create a ‘redirect’ page so your template for the blog isn’t revealed when that link is clicked on.

I have found that copying the code from the Freeway page to Blogger doesn’t work for me as I alway get an error messages about the code for non-breaking spaces not being recognised. So I take the code from Freeway and paste it into a TextWrangler document, use search & replace to change all the ‘& nbsp ;’ entries to ‘& # 160 ;’ (I’ve added spaces between the quotes so that the code hopefully survives this posting but you’d do it without them). I then copy the edited code into Blogger and it usually works well.

If you want to add additional elements such as Labels or Contributors then things get a bit more complicated as you need to add them via the Blogger interface and add/edit styles for them yourself but you’ll soon get the hang of it.

I never thought I’d manage to get a blog to exactly match the rest of my site until the Blogger actions came along so, for me at least, they have been a great addition to a great program.

All the best

Gordon
http://www.gordonlow.net/

On 6 Jan 2011, at 2:31pm, Robert B wrote:

We are putting together our web site (which we never seem to get time to finish) and we were thinking of adding lots of information, but I thought it would be better to do that on a blog. People could respond, easier to continually add articles.

I watched the Freeway Cast about the blogger actions and it seems pretty easy. Is it really that easy to create a Freeway styled blogger blog?

Has anybody done that and could share their experiences?

Thanks.

Bob

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3

Thanks for the info, Gordon.

I have a few more questions.

If I wanted to add AdSense and Amazon Affiliates to my blog, woulod I do that through Blogger or can I add them in Freeway?

If I wanted a photo gallery is that added in Freeway or Blogger?

And…can I host my blog on my domain?

Thanks.

Bob

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4

Hi Bob

I’ve included Walter’s FreeCounter and also the StatCounter code in the blogs and just did it in Freeway.

As long as you didn’t want to use the blog to change the photo gallery then it could be added via setup with Freeway.

The only downside… no you can’t host the blog on your own domain. It may be possible to make it look as though it’s using your domain name if your domain registrar offer cloaked web forwarding but this may stop you accessing/viewing unique links for each post.

I’ve generally tried to go with a mix of a mainly static Freeway website for pages that don’t change much and used the blog for posting regular updates. Don’t know if this would work in your case.

All the best

Gordon
http://www.gordonlow.net/

On 7 Jan 2011, at 12:32am, Robert B wrote:

Thanks for the info, Gordon.

I have a few more questions.

If I wanted to add AdSense and Amazon Affiliates to my blog, woulod I do that through Blogger or can I add them in Freeway?

If I wanted a photo gallery is that added in Freeway or Blogger?

And…can I host my blog on my domain?

Thanks.

Bob

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5

This is completely trivial to set up if you have access to your DNS
records (probably through your domain registrar, or a separate company
if you’re paranoid like me).

http://www.google.com/support/blogger/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=55373

Walter

On Jan 7, 2011, at 11:45 AM, Gordon Low wrote:

The only downside… no you can’t host the blog on your own domain.
It may be possible to make it look as though it’s using your domain
name if your domain registrar offer cloaked web forwarding but this
may stop you accessing/viewing unique links for each post.

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6

Hi Walter

Thanks for pointing me in the direction of being able to change the way a blog’s domain name can be displayed.

I’ve followed the instructions in the link you posted and now http://ltbuses.blogspot.com hopefully has now become http://news.ltbuses.com which looks much better.

I think I must have been confused about the requirement to have the blog hosted directly by blogger and not realised the address of the blog could be changed.

After I had set up the CNAME though my hosting company’s cPanel there was a short delay before this was recognised by Blogger which had me worried for a time but then it all resolved itself.

I have all my domain names registered with DomainMonster and hosting via HostGator which I guess makes me ‘paranoid’ as well.

Now all I need to do is work on changing the other blogs!

Thanks again

Gordon

http://www.gordonlow.net/

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7

Hi,

I am having spacing issues with my blog. I have a problem with the spacing between the body and the Authors name. Way too much space! Can you provide me a way to decrease the excess space? Here is the link:

http://bodycreationsinc.blogspot.com/

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