The benefits of right sizing your pics

Today, I wanted to discuss with you the size of the photos you upload to your posts.

If you have a camera with lots of mega pixels and upload photos from it straight into your post, the pics will be large in terms of pixels.  This means they will look nice BUT

1                   They will tend to make your post load more slowly for your readers – who may not have unlimited bandwidth; and

2                   They will count towards Blogger's photo limit.  This means that some day, maybe quite soon, you will find yourself unable to upload photos unless you organize to pay more!

You can avoid both these consequences simply by resizing your photos to be under the size that gets counted for Blogger's photo limit.  I resize to 500 pixels but I understand the limit is 800x600.  Here is a link to an article that discusses this issue.

How to find out how many times your post has been pinned

Linda from With a Blast has posted about how to find out how many times one of your posts has been pinned.  This is the link.  Good one, Linda!

Another article link for you ...

Here's an article called Top 5 Comment Tips for Bloggers from Diana Rambles.  It's a goodie.

Do you want more readers? Here's an article that may help

Today I have a link for you to a great post by Kelly of Blart called 5 tips to increase your website traffic.  It was all good but the last tip in particular about putting in alt text for pics was quite new to me and I'll be doing that from now on.

10 ways to stand out as a blogger - link to article

This is a link to an article called "Ten Ways to Stand Out as a Blogger" - I'm not sure I agree with all of the 10 but you might find the article interesting.

Do you need to declutter your home page?

Fairly soon after I started blogging I realised that my home page was getting very long because of the list of Blogs I Follow - which is one of the standard Blogger gadgets.  It is nice, of course, to give recognition to the blogs you follow but when there gets to be a long list I think it loses its effectiveness and just becomes a source of clutter.

What I did was instead of having a full list, I created several different short sidebars.  One lists the  Food Blogs that I am featuring that month.  The others list featured 4 Book Blogs and 6 Personal Blogs - those I refresh only every 2 months or so.

All you then have to do is remember to choose the blogs to add/remove each time you review your lists.

For the newbies, this is how you created a Featured Blogs List:

1. Delete your Blogs I Follow gadget (if you have one0 - you can always put it back later if you want to.  To delete this you need to be on the Layout section of your dashboard.
2. Click add a gadget.  Don't worry where it is at this stage because once you have created it you can always drag it to where you want it and drop it there.
3. Then select Blog List - give it a suitable title, choose whether to sort it by last updated or alpha (I chose alpha because that's the sort of train spotter I am).  Leave it at showing all blogs - since you will only be adding a few.  And lastly choose how to display the blogs I chose Icon and title of most recent item only.  You could choose a bigger display but I like to keep things as simple and uncluttered as possible.
4. Then you have to add the blogs you want in the list - you can either add by copying and pasting their url's in or you can click from your blog list and choose from there.
5. Finally, don't forget to click the orange save button right at the bottom of the gadget window otherwise all of your hard work will have been for nothing!

You can do sidebars for lists of your own posts a similar way but you use the Link List gadget instead of the Blog List one.

Happy blogging.

You can kill the spam too!

You know how I don't like the word verification stuff - and so don't have it turned on, on my blogs.  But on my main blog, Carole's Chatter, I was getting quite a lot of spam comments.  I think this is because some of my posts have been submitted to StumbleUpon and Reddit and this seems to attract lots of page views - and spam.

Finally I figured out how to kill the spam - without having to use word verification.  All I did was go into my dashboard in Blogger and click Settings.  Then click Posts and Comments. You will find a question "Who can comment?".  I changed from anyone to Registered User - and that doesn't let anonymous comments through.  Don't forget to click on the orange Save Settings button towards the top right or else nothing will change.

I was a bit worried that some legit comments would be stopped - so I changed my little spiel about comments to ask anyone who had trouble to email me - but all the normal comments seem to be coming through just fine.  I'll probably remove that part of the comment stuff soon.

So if the thing stopping you killing the "prove you are not a robot" thing is the spam - I think this might solve your problem.  And it really is in your blog's best interests to change to no word verification - it does put so many people off from commenting on your blog.

Good luck.

To ping or not to ping...

My blog friend Bonnie Franks from A Little Unhinged has done a post on pinging your blog.  I haven't got into this yet.  Click here to see her post.

Do you back up your blog?

I never knew just how easily you could back up your whole blog in Blogger until I read this post by Spilled Milkshake!  Do pop over and see how it is done.

Spilled Milkshake has now also done how to back up your blog on Wordpress - so click here for that.