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Save Wetlands and Wildlife

2010-05-04T10:24:00.001-05:00

For those that don't know, I live in New Orleans. I just bought a Katrina-blighted property that I'm renovating. I am a huge advocate for New Orleans in general, and the city has endured more than her fair share of hardships lately. Now we are facing a man-made disaster just as we are beginning to move beyond defining our city in terms of Katrina. I wanted to pass along information on

Optimizing Text, Links & Images - HTML for Garden Geeks

2010-04-29T12:00:00.097-05:00

Poncirus trifoliata 'Flying Dragon' Image courtesy of Landscapedia.infoWhen last we left our floating island of text, it was starting to come together. We had an image. It had a border. There was some text. All in all, it was coming along quite nicely. In our final lesson, we are going to work with optimizing our text, links and images. Now there are 2 ways to work with formatting text. You

Formatting Our Island - HTML for Garden Geeks

2010-04-28T12:00:00.001-05:00

Previously :: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 When last we left our draft blog post, we had managed to display a picture and some text. However, we hadn't quite gotten it to look like we wanted. We also didn't have text flowing around it. In fact, it was little more than an island of content that sat there more like a desert island instead of the tropical paradise we envisioned. (I need a vacation if

Displaying Text & Images - HTML for Garden Geeks

2010-04-27T12:00:00.048-05:00

Poncirus trifoliata ‘Flying Dragon’ Image courtesy of Landscapedia.infoPreviously :: Part 1 |Part 2 Now in our previous 2 lessons, you learned about the basics of HTML structure. Today, we are going to create a basic version of our example to the right. If you recall, we first have to set up our island of text that all other text is going to flow around. To set up a new island, we start with:

Tags - HTML for Garden Geeks

2010-04-26T12:00:00.010-05:00

Poncirus trifoliata ‘Flying Dragon’ Image courtesy of Landscapedia.infoBefore I start, I want to acknowledge all of those IT pros who are going to roast me for oversimplifying things. However, I promised you that I'd show you just enough without making your head hurt. If you digest this and want more, then at the end, I'll suggest a few excellent resources to take my simplistic explanations to

HTML for Garden Geeks

2010-04-23T12:34:00.004-05:00

Poncirus trifoliata ‘Flying Dragon’ Image courtesy of Landscapedia.infoThe web has been made so "consumer-friendly" that my friend Alyson, who is a web producer for a major media company, told me that the new web producers don't even know how to edit basic web pages to create the image to the right. Holy crap! So if web professionals don't know Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), then what are

Facebook and Google Own the Web

2010-04-22T11:05:00.000-05:00

I've spent some timeplaying with the latest announcement from Facebook, Open Graph (http://developers.facebook.com/docs/opengraph), which lets websites integrate the "Like" feature into their web pages. Let me say it clearly for those of you who do not yet know. Facebook and Google own the web and allow the rest of us to play in it. I've heard a lot lately that structured content is the next

More than a Pretty Picture

2010-04-21T12:00:00.000-05:00

Pretty much every garden blog includes information about plants. They put in pretty pictures and leave the reader to fill in the rest. Pictures are great, but they don't really give your reader any details. Now, RSS isn't a solution, though I do fall back on RSS quite a bit. What you need is a way to include the information without having to do it all yourself for each and every plant. Enter

Why You Can't Get Ahead

2010-04-15T11:50:00.000-05:00

Want to know why your blog has such a hard time getting noticed on the internet? At a conference this week, I saw this video, and quite frankly, my first thought was, "Wow, that's a hell of a lot of blogs and websites!" My next thought was "And Facebook is soaking up time people could be on my site!" Ok, so I know that my blog and site aren't any competition to Facebook, but still . . . Check

Temporary Absence

2010-04-09T15:23:00.000-05:00

Sorry gang for my temporary absence this week. I'm working a super cool new feature for Landscapedia that has completely absorbed my time. Plus, I'm buying a new house. Plus, my employer has wanted me to earn my paycheck (and then some). I promise that I have not forgotten about you. I'm traveling next week, which will be the perfect time to pop out a few blogs. Until then, let me know if

Leveling Your Productivity

2010-04-02T12:30:00.025-05:00

My electric company is always pushing me to sign up for leveling, that feature that supposedly makes your electric bills more predictable throughout the year. I never do. I like to know how much I'm paying every month so it makes me work hard to keep my bills under control. Now when it comes to blogging, I'm a whole-hearted proponent of leveling. You see, I go through productivity spurts. Some

Feedburner + Twitter = Fritter . . . . mmmm

2010-03-30T12:00:00.027-05:00

So, you've spent countless hours researching, writing and editing that perfect post about your favorite type eggplant. You very proudly click Publish waiting for the flood of people to say, "Holy cow! You're a genius!" And you wait and wait Chances are good that they didn't know about it right away. Now, you have to go from one social network to another telling people of your brilliant

Cultivate a Garden of Incoming Links

2010-03-25T10:32:00.001-05:00

In the SEO post, I mentioned that you should be building relationships to get incoming links to increase your rankings and traffic. As a site owner where people are consistently asking for links, I think this is a perfect time to discuss how to build those relationships the right way. Getting those incoming links requires building a relationship with various site owners and bloggers. How you

Local Garden Calendars for Blogs

2010-03-22T18:15:00.000-05:00

When I taught you about RSS, I used the event calendar from Landscapedia to show you how to add a garden events calendar to your blog. That's great if you run a blog without a geographic focus. What about those blogs that focus just on a specific locale? I'm going to show you a quick way to filter events so that you only get the ones for your location (and I'm going to try to do it without

Analyze This - Tracking Your Readership

2010-03-20T11:00:00.005-05:00

Here's a question for you. How many people read you? How do you know? I bet you use the number of comments, right? More comments mean more readers. Or at least that's a popular myth. In fact, there are several highly read blogs that have very few comments. If those bloggers used comments to judge their success, they'd have quit. If you use counters, you are doing slightly better but not much.

Online Garden Hoarding with Google Reader

2010-03-18T19:09:00.074-05:00

In the RSS Primer, I mentioned Google Reader (http://www.google.com/reader) as a way to keep up with RSS feeds from your favorite blogs all in one place. Google Reader is more than that, it's a way to track lots of things like keyword alerts. Let's take a quick look at how it can help you with your blogging. What Up G First and foremost it's an RSS reader. If that is Greek to you, then go back

SEO for Garden Bloggers

2010-03-18T13:00:00.008-05:00

I am one of those guys who puts in a ton of work on my website and then complains because I don't get a lot of traffic. My friend Alyson has been trying to teach me about search engine optimization (SEO) so that search engines like my site and she doesn't have to endure the constant moaning while I check Google Analytics. I thought this would be a great thing to pass along. As a blogger, a lot

Add the Latest Garden News

2010-03-15T15:54:00.000-05:00

If you read the RSS Primer for Garden Bloggers, then you know that you can add pretty much any content to your blog that has an RSS feed (and for which you have permission). If you have a non-commercial website, you can add a stream of garden news to your site giving your visitors a glimpe of what's happening on your topic around the world. There are several sites that let you do this, but I'm

RSS Primer for Gardens Bloggers

2010-03-13T22:50:00.000-06:00

No doubt that you've seen this graphic somewhere . Maybe you've seen it on a webpage or on a blog you read. Maybe it's even on your blog. Ever wonder what it means? It's the symbol for an RSS/XML feed of content from that site. Really Simple Syndication (RSS) is an eXtensible Markup Language (XML) formatted document. There's a lot of technical jargon associated with the format, but what it

Showcasing Content for Garden Blogs

2010-03-13T10:56:00.001-06:00

I have been looking for places to showcase some of the content from Landscapedia for other bloggers, but hours of Google searching yielded . . . well, nothing. So, I'm changing the direction of this blog to demonstrate the best free content for garden blogs. I occasionally hear of really good free content for bloggers when people contact me through Landscapedia. So I'm going to test them and