Where is MyBlogLog Top 50 Box

When I opened MyBlogLog today, I found something strange there. The Box which shows Top 50 community on the community page of MyBlogLog was not there.
I think Eric and folks have removed it, or may be it is down due to some other reason.

Anyways Am not happy with that. Because my blog community Technical Bliss was among Top 50. :(

I wish that it comes back soon.

Edit: Its back now. I think that was temporary. :D (11/Feb)

Related Post: Technical Bliss is in Top 50 at MyBlogLog

Labels: mybloglog

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By Arpit On Saturday, February 10, 2007 At 10:42 PM

23 Tips to Good Blogging. Part 2

This is part 2 of the series 23 Tips to Good Blogging.
Read 23 Tips to Good Blogging here.

11. RSS is must.
Do have an RSS feed for your blog. Feedburner is the best option to burn your blog feed. A tech savy reader always prefers to subscribe the feed of blog. You just can’t ignore this feed thing.

12. Place RSS button at right place.
Don’t slip the RSS button at the end of your page. Even providing it on your ‘About us’ page or on subscription page is not enough. Keep it in the side bar or some prime location of your blog. Instead of going for that single orange RSS button, you can provide buttons to some major RSS readers in the side bar of your blog. Also you can write a post about RSS, explaining what it means and how to use it and link it near the RSS button(s).

13. Offer email subscription of your blog.
Not everyone is comfortable with RSS. Give the option to get your blog feed through email to your readers. FeedBlitz is one such popular service which provides such service. Also ensure your readers that their email address will be 100% safe and their privacy will be maintained if they choose to subscribe the service.

14. Full feed or partial feed?
This is the question of your personal choice. You can provide an option of full feed with RSS ads supported in it, or can go for partial feed where readers will see the small snippet of your post and have to visit your blog to read the complete post. Choose whatever you feel better. You can also provide both options. Also if you are option for partial feed, make sure your readers click the link to read full post. Provide a snippet with good interest generating description.

15. Give relevant title to your post.
The title of your post should be very relevant to the content of it. A reader should get a complete idea of what the post is all about just by reading title of it. Don’t forget that title creates the first impression about the post, and that counts. Also use titles like ‘100 Adsense-tips’ rather than just ‘Adsense tips’. Such titles always perform better.

16. Create a better URL of your blogpost.
A good URL can help you a lot to rank better in search engines. Generally the post URL has format like http://www.blogURL.com/2007/02/10/blogpost_title. You can customize the blogpost_title part easily. Make sure you have your main post keyword is stuffed in the post title. Also avoid special characters like $ or % or = or & or + in the URL. Sometimes search engines spiders ignore the crawling of the pages whose URL contains these special characters.

17. Give proper credits.
If you are quoting someone else, do provide proper credits. You can also give the links to the posts form other blogs, which are similar to your blogpost. This will help your readers to get better information over the topic. And trust me, if your blog is helpful to a reader, he/she will automatically return to it.

18. Link smartly.
While providing a link in blogpost or side bar give good ‘Anchor text’. Suppose you are linking to someone’s post (or even you own post) about Adsense tips, then do not use text like click here or read it here. Instead use a descriptive text like ‘100 Adsense-tips’. Also you can use HTML tags like ‘target blank’ which opens the page in new window. Use such very wisely. You have to decide which page you want to get open in same window and which one in new window. Always remember that opening the link in same window will take the reader away from the current page. So be smart while linking.

19. Ping other sites.
Whenever you update your blog, don’t forget to ping the other sites like technorati, icerocket Feedburner etc. The option of automatic pinging is available in many blog hosting platforms like Wordpress and Movable type. You can also use the services like Pingoat and Ping-o-matic to ping various sites on the net.

20. Tag you post properly.
While posting on blog, always add your post to two to three relevant categories. Many search engines and services like technorati treats your categories as tags. Also adding technorati tags to your post is a good idea. Some nice technorati tags can bring a good deal of traffic to your blog. Don’t be over enthusiastic while tagging your post. Tag you post only with relevant tags. Over tagging may be considered as attempt to spam.

21. Provide bookmark options.
Your blogpost must have an easy option to bookmark by the readers. Create the options like ‘digg this post’, ‘add to del.icio.us’ or ‘Furl it’. Also you can provide the same options for your entire blog (i.e. homepage) in the side bar.

22. Interact with your readers.
Give a sincere and honest try to interact with your readers. After posting, just don’t sit back and wait for comments to flow in. Try to answer the readers’ comments. Sometimes a curious reader may like to mail you about some issue or some doubt, so give him/her an option to do so by providing your email id (do take some primary precautions while doing so).

23. Manage the comments.
It is always advisable to turn on the comments moderation in your blog posts. It means that comments will always be published in blogpost after the approval of blog owner. Don’t tolerate a spammy comments, or comments intended for the purpose of promoting some other blog or sites. If you are hosting a blog on your own domain and webspace, add nofollow tag in you comment space and declare it properly on your blog. This will discourage the backlinks obsessed commenters. You certainly don’t want Google and other search engines to look at you blog comments space full of spam.

Read 23 Tips tp Good Blogging. Part 1

Tech Tags: blogging tips blogging blog tips blog tips good blogging how to blogging tricks help

Labels: Blogger tricks

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By Arpit On At 6:16 PM

23 Tips to Good Blogging. Part 1

According to Technorati, there are more than 55 millions blogs registered on it. Your blog may be one of them. Now what makes the difference between handful of good blogs and remaining others?
Here are some tips to good blogging. Mind you that these tips will not convert your blog into those best one. But still it will give you a good start.

1. Forget the default template. Looks matters.
Try to customize your blog template. Don’t use one of the default templates provided by your blog host. It is always favorable to hire a professional designer for your blog template. But if you can’t afford to hire one, just take advantage of free templates available on net. Download them and give it a bit touch of yourself by adding some images, favicon, logo and colour scheme.

2. Mind the colour scheme of your blog.
Just give a second thought to the colour scheme of your blog. Keep yourself in the shoes of your readers and then decide what colour you should opt for your blog. A shining bright colours may look attractive to teenage folks, but it may irritate some grown up mature readers. Also if you are blogging about some serious topic like politics, a simple eye-friendly colour scheme is suitable.

3. Optimize your post length.
Avoid writing a long post. A standard blog post has 250-300 words. A very lengthy post always creates a chance to loose reader’s attention and hence affects the readership of your blog. If the post is long, try breaking it in parts. Instead of writing a long post titled ‘100 Adsense tips’, you can go for posts like ‘100 Adsense tips- Part 1’ and ‘100 Adsense tips- Part 2’

4. Avoid spelling and grammar mistakes.
Always use spell check in your browser and have a proofreading of your post before publishing to avoid any spelling mistakes or grammatical error. Am not telling you to be hysterical about it, occasional typo or slips are ok, but a chain of errors may irritate your readers. You can use Microsoft word to type your posts, as it has a powerful inbuilt spell and grammar check.

5. Mind the fonts.
Use simple and universally available fonts in your blog post. Everyone do not have all the custom fonts installed on their computers, so if you are using some whacky custom fonts in your post, what they will see is a standard font such as Arial or Times. Also choose the size of your font according to readership of your blog. If the readers are young or lower middle aged, you can use a small font size, but for upper middle aged or grown up readers, large font size is must.

6. Provide easy navigation.
Encourage your readers to check the other posts of your blog. This will not only increase the page view count of your blog but also will lead you to get some loyal readership. Always provide links of some real good posts in the side bar. Also you can give ‘related posts’ links in the end of every post. Remember that people are lazy enough to explore a site or a blog on their own. Go up to the extent of spoon-feeding. Anyhow you have to make sure that they click other links on you blog.

7. Create a relevant Meta Data for your blog.
Always create a relevant and well describing meta data (i.e. meta description, meta keywords etc) for your blog. Create separate meta data for you blog’s main page and post pages. Meta data helps in better indexing of you blog and blogposts in search engines. Also optimize you blog’s meta keywords for relevant one.

8. Page loading time.
Try to decrease the loading time of your blog. The best way to decrease the loading time of the page is to check the widgets. Popular widgets like MyBlogLog and Flickr makes your blog look fancy, but they increase the loading time of the page. So optimize them properly. You can decrease the loading time of MyBlogLog widget by decreasing the number of visitors it shows. Also avoid embedded flash and multimedia elements in the page.

9. Post regularly.
A regular update of your blog will attract Google bots and other search engines to your blog. Google loves the pages that are regularly updated. Its simple ‘Feed the bots’. This will certainly results in good search engine ranking. Also every time your readers visit your blog, they expect to find some new content in it. Don’t disappoint them.

10. Create unique content.
The very basic rule of blogging is ‘Content is the King’. If your blog lacks good helping content, you will never get a long term readership. So try providing some original story. If there is some good news, try to be the first one or among the firsts to blog about it. Also keep your post focused on the topic. If you are blogging on a common topic, try providing atleast a point or two which appeals as new to the reader. Also if you create some real good new content, your chances of getting linked by other bloggers increase many folds. This will certainly bring a good deal of traffic to your blog and offcourse Google and Technorati juice.

Read 23 Tips to Good Blogging. Part 2

Tech Tags: blogging tips blogging blog tips blogs blog tips good+blogging how to blogging tricks help

Labels: Blogger tricks

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By Arpit On Friday, February 09, 2007 At 11:02 PM

Gmail is now open to all.

Till now Gmail was freely available in some countries like US.
In other countries you needed an invitation from a pre-existing Gmail user to have your own Gmail account. Gmail is now offering a free signup in the countries across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, as well as in Brazil, Australia, Russia and Japan.

So if you are from any of the above country you can create a Gmail account by signing up here.

via [BBC]

Labels: News and announcements

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By Arpit On Thursday, February 08, 2007 At 2:24 PM

Googlefights

Googlefight is a fight between two terms on Google. The term which gives more search results on google.com wins the fight. For example in Googlefight between Arpit Agarwal (that’s me) and Harry Potter, Harry Potter wins. This is because when you type Arpit Agarwal in Google search box and hit enter, it returns 32,000 results, while Harry Potter returns 60,000,000 results.

Lets have some interesting fights.

1# Good vs Bad
Good: 1,200,000,000 results and Bad: 592,000,000 results
So Good is better than Bad.

2# Love vs Money
Love: 979,000,000 results and Money: 679,000,000 results
So Love is powerful than Money.

3# Aishwarya vs Sushmita
Aishwarya: 4,240,000 results and Sushmita: 723,000 results
So Aishwarya is the Queen.

4# India vs USA
India: 343,000,000 results and USA: 637,000,000 results
So here too USA is leader.

5# Life vs Death
Life: 952,000,000 results and Death: 400,000,000 results
So Life is Beautiful

6# Blog vs Website
Blog: 1,030,000,000 results and Website: 773,000,000 results
Yessss Blog. :D

7# Loser vs Winner
Loser: 26,400,000 results and Winner: 147,000,000 results
Winner wins again.

8# Angelina Jolie vs Brad Pitt
Angelina Jolie: 6,110,000 results and Brad Pitt: 4,880,000 results
Jolie rules.

9# Google vs Yahoo
Google: 787,000,000 results and Yahoo: 786,000,000 results
Google is the Boss

10# Google vs God
Google: 787,000,000 results and God: 404,000,000 results
What to say??