Guides on How to Do Stuffs

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noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 14:02:00 +0000

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Burn Your Feed with Feedburner

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 20:16:00 +0000

What is Feedburner and why should I use it?

Feedburner is a feed enhancing service by Google. There are tons of advantages of using Feedburner than the just the classic Feeds, few things I could enumerate are:

1. Republish your feed as HTML using BuzzBoost

2. Offer feed updates via email

3. Notify web-based feed reading services with PingShot

4. Publish automatically post updates to your Twitter account

5. Enable Flares

6. And you could even put adsense inside your feeds

To know more about Feedburner, visit http://www.google.com/support/feedburner/bin/answer.py?answer=79408

Burn Your Feed with Feedburner

1. Login to your Feedburner Account. If you don't have a feedburner account, you can create one at http://feedburner.google.com

2. Burn your feed with Feedburner. Simply put your Feed address or blog address on the text box, then click Next.

3. Good thing about Feedburner is that it will automatically detect your site's RSS, then click Next

4. Give your feed its title and feedburner.com address. Feedburner will give a suggestion usually.

5. Now, your Feedburner feed is now live. Click Next.

6. In the Get More Gusto From Your Feed Traffic Statistics page, you can select other options or simply click Next.

7. You're done burning your feed with Feedburner

That's it. I hope this post is informative enough. Don't hesitate to hit the comments.

Post to Twitter your Blog Posts

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 15 Feb 2010 19:23:00 +0000

For bloggers or site owners who have a solid following on twitter, you may want to notify your followers for any updates on your site, that is, when you have posted a new content. It's a great way of driving traffic to your site, as well as a great way of giving your twitter followers updates of what you have been doing lately.

If you have tried to promote your site using twitter, you may have already added services like Tweetmeme or Twitthis etc. which allows your site's visitors to publish to their twitter accounts your contents that they may be interested at, and they would like others to check out. In fact, you may have also used the same manual method to promote your newly added blog posts to twitter.

One disadvantage of manually twittering (submitting to twitter) your new blog posts is that you may left out some new ones especially if you have a lot of contributors to your site or when you simply felt lazy clicking that Share this to Twitter button.

So how do you automatically Post to Twitter your Blog Posts? Or simply, how do you automatically notify your twitter followers that you have published a new content in your blog or site?

Things that you need:

1. Your site's RSS feed or Website URL

2. Feedburner Account

3. Twitter Account

In order to automatically promote your posts in twitter, you need to burn your site's feed first in Feedburner. To do so, you can simply follow these steps: http://guidesonhowtodostuffs.blogspot.com/2010/02/burn-your-feed-with-feedburner.html

Publicize your Feedburner Feed and Activate the Socialize Service

1. Login to your Feedburner Account

2. In your feeds list, select the feed of the site you want to promote in Twitter.

3. Once you are in your feeds dashboard, select Publicize, then Click on Socialize.

4. Activate the Socialize service.

5. Click on Add a Twitter Account. You will be redirected to Twitter Login Page, simply enter your username and password. You will be taken back to Feedburner after a successful connection to the Twitter application.

6. By then you have activated your Socialize Service.

7. You're done.

Whenever you post a new content in your site or blog, the Title and link of the article will automatically be posted in your Twitter account. Great, isn't it? It's amazing how this interoperability of applications can save us precious time and effort.

That's it. I hope I was able to help you with this post. Feel free to hit the comments.

How to Add Paypal Donate to your site (e.g. Blogger)

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 13 Feb 2010 16:19:00 +0000

What is Paypal?

PayPal is the safer, easier way to pay and get paid online. The service allows anyone to pay in any way they prefer, including through credit cards, bank accounts, buyer credit or account balances, without sharing financial information. You can use it to purchase in Ebay, Amazon or any site which supports Paypal.

If you don't have an account yet, I encourage you to you get one by clicking on the image below:

Why should I add Paypal Donate to my blog?

Adding the Paypal donate button to your blog or site is one way of getting encouragement and feedback from your site's visitors and readers, and not just a way to monetize your blog. If readers donate through your blog, it simply means your site is doing great and you are posting/sharing things that are of certain interest to them. It gives you a challenge more than just an indication that you should keep if not surpass the standards of the things that you are offering in your site.

How to Add Paypal Donate to my site?

1. Login to your Paypal Account

2. Click on the Merchant Services Tab

3. Scroll down the window, and you will see the Donations link in the Key Features

4. Click on the Donations link.

5. Fill up the details of your Donation button

6. Save your button.

7. Copy the HTML that will be given to you.

8. Add the HTML to your site's HTML. If you are using Blogger, you can add a Javascript/HTML widget, then paste the code

That's it. I hope this post can help. Feel free to hit the comments for questions and suggestions. No spamming please. :)

Create a Page in Blogger

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 12 Feb 2010 09:11:00 +0000

What are Blogger Pages?

Blogger Pages lets you publish static information in a stand alone page in your blog, that is, your page will not be included in the series of posts you made and displayed in your homepage. Instead, pages will be given separate links in your sidebar or as tabs on top of your blog whichever way you choose it to be displayed. (As of this writing you can add up to 10 pages in your blog.) There are a lot of information you can add in your pages, and that depends on your needs, but most of the time, published in static pages are About Us page, Privacy Policy Page, Terms of Use Page etc.

Adding static pages to Blogger has long been a requested feature, especially for individuals who were familiar with other blogging platforms like wordpress. In fact, bloggers have been hacking their Blogger templates to add static pages to their blog. With the addition of this powerful feature, Blogger has made another leap, getting better and meeting the demands of bloggers around the globe.

Checking your template for support of the Pages Feature

Before you can add pages to your blog, you need to check first if the feature is support in your template. (Download template backup first)

1. Go to Layout -> Edit HTML

2. Check the checkbox next to Expand Widget Templates

3. Look for the following lines of HTML

<b:section class='crosscol' id='crosscol' showaddelement='yes'/>

</div>

You might need to change showaddelement='no' to showaddelement='yes', depending on your template.

4. Save your template.

Adding Your Pages

To add a page to your Blogger blog, here are the steps:

1. Login to your Blogger account, go to Posting

2. Click on Edit Pages, then New Page

3. When the page editor appears, add your Title and contents then Publish Page.

You can add more pages if you like.

4. To display your pages, go to Layout->Page Elements

5. Click on Add New Gadget, then add the Pages gadget

6. You can change the order of the pages if you like. When done, click SAVE. You can reposition your Pages gadget to change its appearance, either drag it to the the sidebar or tabs under the header.

7. To view your pages, you can go to your homepage, and the link should be displayed on top or at the sidebar.

That's it. I hope this post helps. Hit the Comments if you find it useful or you find it lacking and needs improvement or you simply have questions or comments. I'll be glad to hear from you.

How to insert codes and scripts in your blogger posts

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 09 Feb 2010 15:00:00 +0000

If you have been trying to publish code snippets in your blogger posts, and you simply copy-pasted it directly to your post, you must have been into disappointment as your code will not display as regular text.

Even the regular html tag <code>Your code goes here</code> or <blockquote> Your content HTML code goes here</blockquote> will not let you display code in your blogger posts.

Escaping the HTML Code
In order for the code to be displayed as a regular text in your blogger post, you have to do a process called "escaping" the HTML code.

Escaping the HTML code is a process of substituting the characters that make up an html tag with their corresponding character entities.

Character Entities
A character entity is a sequence representing a character that has special meaning in HTML.
Examples of character entities:
< for the less than symbol ‘<’
> for the greater than symbol ‘>’
Please refer to this list for a complete guide on character entities: Reference Page

Basically, character entities are made up of three parts:

1. An "ampersand" (the & symbol)
2. Either a descriptive phrase, or a # followed by a number
3. A semicolon (the ; symbol)

How about if you have a hundred lines of html code? Should I escape all the html code?

The answer is YES. But escaping all the html code manually will be a very tedious and time -consuming task. Luckily, great tools and cool stuffs exists today to make life a little easier.

So, to automatically escape(parse) your html code and correctly display code in your blog:
1. Visit http://www.blogcrowds.com/resources/parse_html.php
2. You are presented with two textareas. Paste your code into the lower textarea, then press PARSE button at the bottom.
3. Copy the resulting escaped html code at the top textarea.
4. Paste in into your blogger post.
5. Publish your post, and you will see your code just like ordinary text. Then, you're done.

That's all. I hope this helps.