Buzz Marketing with Blogs: Adding a Blogroll and Other Questions

Adding a Blogroll and Other Questions

Here’s a question I got recently from new blogger Stan DeVaughn:

Hi, Susannah: It’s day-1 for my blog experiment. I’m following your guidance and trying out hosted solutions, starting with blogspot. Problem here is that I want to include a blogroll and have some additional pages for details about me, my background, etc. Can’t seem to do it with blogspot. Is Moveable Type hard to use? Thanks! sd

And here’s my answer:

Adding elements to your blog sidebar is a pretty basic modification—at least in terms of wanting to do it! When I’ve seen people set up a blog for themselves, after writing their first couple of posts, the very next question is about putting things in the sidebar.

The “how to” on this varies from one blogging tool to the next. With Blogger, you must actually go into the blog template (click on the Template tab). Look for the Edit-Me tags inserted by the default template and add your own links to create a blogroll. HTML links are formatted like this:

<a href="http://www.buzzmarketingwithblogs.com">Buzz Marketing with Blogs</a><br>
<a href="Full URL Goes Here">Text that is clickable goes here</a>

Other blogging tools, like Typepad for example, have built-in tools that let you build a blogroll without going into the templates or writing your own HTML.

One final tip: some newsreader applications let you put the list of blog feeds you are subscribed to on your blog as a blogroll. I do this myself using Bloglines, and I find this especially handy because my blogroll gets updated automatically when I subscribe or unsubscribe to a feed.

By the way, a blogroll is a list of blogs that you read yourself. Putting this list on your blog is a reader service because it lets your visitors see where you get your information and lets them go there themselves.

Creating pages that aren’t part of your blog, but that you link to from your blog, is also another common request. Typepad lets you build an About page that is separate from the blog using the admin tool; other blogging tools, like Wordpress, have a built-in function that lets you add several pages. With a little HTML know-how you can create the page yourself and link to them. There is one common cheat that works pretty well, however: Put the content you want on that page in a blog post, and then link to the permalink URL from the sidebar of the rest of your blog. (This is pretty much the only way to do this in Blogger.) The page will look just like your blog since it is part of your blog; it’s simply in how you are linking to it that it functions more like a standard Web page.

And finally, to answer your question about Movable Type being easy to use: Opinions vary, of course. I find Movable Type pretty easy to use if all you want to do is post a new blog entry, but as soon as you want to customize it things do get a little more complicated. Installation is also a bit of a bear for the technical novice, but you can get it pre-installed with some Web hosting accounts. Expect a bit of “culture” shock if you go directly from Blogger to Movable Type!

Posted by Susannah Gardner on 07/26 at 12:10 PM • Blogging Tips