Sunday, January 04, 2009

Blogger Features

I was playing with bloger features today. On the settings page, there is an Import/Export feature that allows people to back up their site. I am not sure when that appreared. I looked for such a feature in the past and did not find one.

The layout manager has a feature for adding RSS feeds in the side bar. Not knowing which community site to favor, I added the feed for the main CommunityColor.com site.

If only I could coax a few people into adding the feed for their town on their blog; it might be enough to salvage the community directory project.

Adding the feed is simple. One simply selects the RSS Feed gadget in the blogger layout manager. The wizard asks for the address of the feed. If you wanted to add the Boulder feed to your site, you would use the site URL followed by "/rss.php" as follows:

http://BoulderColor.com/rss.php

The Provo Link would be:

http://provoutah.us/rss.php

etc..

The RSS feeds simply highlight a site from a given town each week. The goal is to create community awareness. The selection of sites is basically random. If there was someone who was eager to promote businesses in their town, I would be happy to set them up so that they got to choose the reviews.

After adding the RSS feed to this site, I decided to shorten the titles of the feed items.

Friday, January 02, 2009

Re-inforcing Pages with Microstock

One interesting use of MicroStock is add images to older web pages that are central to your site or your site's message.

For example, the Community Color blog index is important to my work building community directories. So, today I spent a Microstock credit and slapped an image to the page. All of the different programs that crawl the web will note the addition of content.

After adding the image, I used the LinksAlive Microstock crediting program. The image on the page links to a page with the graphic design credit and back to the index.

With this trick of re-inforcing content, I am now tempted to go back through my blog and add relevant stock images to pages of import. Assuming, I can find some.