e-tips-rss-feed

Facebook Comments for Yola Blogs

Wed, 02 Mar 2011 21:18:41 +0100

Blogging in a Yola website is an easy setup and despite some minor drawbacks a very good system and appeals to Google blogs bots. This of course depends on content but inclusion in the Google index is often within the hour.

Some bloggers are concerned that there is no facility for keywords and from my experience this simply doesn't matter. A good descriptive title with a follow on text re-inforcing the title or rather the title re-inforcing the content allows for accuracy in both on-site searches and SE searches. The use of categories and tags to a large extent act as keywords. This certainly suggests that the system is able to deliver to the downstream services information that allows searchers to find stuff on your site.

The comment system as mentioned by Yola techs is below par. This is in part due to the fact that the comment facility can't be seen until you actually select a post even though a complete post maybe seen. This does cause many readers confusion. A way out of this is to give a brief instruction on your page of the method of accessing the commentary sytem. This is very much a compromise as an experienced blog reader won't expect to have to read instructions for commenting and is likely to overlook this.

The most commonly used commenting system by Yola bloggers is the Disqus sytem. An excellent and very powerful facility which is easy to log into and has many options. The problem is with the Disqus installation. Unfortunately the instructions are simply wrong and this has been the cse for the last three revisions. The number of queries hitting the forum on this is very high and some users give up in frustration instead installing simple HTML comment boxes, a system which will offer nothing wrt SEO, and the ability to get the comments out to a broader audience.

Recently Facebook has made available facilities to install on websites and blogs. The "Like" facility is almost a signature of Facebook and one which is familiar to millions of people. There is also a "Comments" which works well for blog posts. It is more familiar than Disqus simply because it's Facebook and more responses are noted in the Facebook comment facility than the Disqus facility. The comment is left on your blog and subsequent follow-ons display as a thread. The comments also go onto your wall of your Facebook page and subsequently to the walls of your "Friends" this then has a secondary viral effect which the Disqus system doesn't have.

For people who are tossing up the whole blog comment issue I would suggest considering Facebook for the reasons mentioned.

Adding a Facebook Like/Recommend Button to each Yola Blog post

Fri, 26 Nov 2010 01:03:12 +0100

This is very easily achieve through the Settings facility of the Yola blog. The "Like<=>Recommend" title is selectable from within the next facility by selecting one of the two verbs: Like or Recommend

It requires collecting the Code from Facebook and then Pasting it back into the Settings of the blog.

Go to the Facebook page Like

Don't add a URL to the "URL to Like" field. leave this blank. Any other fields are configurable.
2. Click the "Get Code" button and you will see the next screen:

3. We select the XFBML code and NOT the iframe code. Copy this code.
4. Go to your Settings Management of your blog and paste the code at the top of the window. This will display the FB like/Recommend Button just beneath the post. If you post it at the bottom the code will appear below the Disqus comment and can easily be overlooked at that position.

This process places an interactive Like/Recommend button on every post. It does not require you to nominate the post URL to be effective as the iframe code does.

DISQUS. I "Like" it

Tue, 05 Oct 2010 00:58:14 +0100

DISQUS has put a lot of effort into their product for the convenience of their users and subscribers. DISQUS is a commentary system that's independent of blogging platform and can be installed into blogging facilities or in fact into standard web-pages.

With good design and development the DISQUS facility appears almost seamless and integrates well with most pages. I probably should say all pages as I feel the unsuccessful is probably due to a less than optimal selection of an option.

DISQUS has allowed integration with various "social networks" and has done for quite a period. It also has its own standalone social bits and pieces and these were implemented way back when. There's a fairly good vision within the company of DISQUS.

Facebook just gets bigger and bigger her facilities are almost as effective as brands and the simple function of "liking" an artilcle or a page or whatever is always presumed to be a Facebook kind of thing.The Facebook"Like" badge can be installed within the DISQUS commentaries and the DISQUS "Like" can also be switched on. Then we have an over-supply of buttons and facilities.I thought about this and feel that the Facebook "Like" is the winner because of penetration so simply for that reason I removed the DISQUS "Llike" and immediately noticed the cleaner appearance of that part of the real estate. In this case I think that less is more and familiarity just wins out?

Yola Blog and aspects of its RSS Feed

Tue, 05 Oct 2010 00:37:25 +0100

All the templates offered by Yola have a default background colour or pattern and a default text colour. There are also default font types, styles and sizes for the various 'h' tags and the 'body' itself.

Using the default colour for text produces that colour text on screen but a black text on a white background in the feed. Something that's most important for readability. If you change the background colour or pattern the RSS feed background remains white. Once again a convenient aspect. If however you change the font colourby selecting the font colour option ( the T with the colour wheel behind icon) the screen print appears as the new selected colour and so does the RSS feed text. Here's a problem. If you are using a light font on a dark background, the program changes the background to white for the feed but retains the font colour. If the font colour is light then you cannot see it in the output or are likely to have difficulty and your readers will definitely advise you of this.

This issue defied my abilities for nearly a year and I was supported by Yola staff to try and work out the solution. I syndicate my feed through Feedburner and this I was hoping was an option for correcting my problem of a dark background with a light text postings. )Great on the screen and dead in the feed) Reviewing the support forum with Feedburner it soon became apparent that others were having the same problem from up to 4 years ago and no solution forthcoming. many suggestions but nothing effective. So tweaking with Feedburner wasn't going to solve the issue.

I tried many alterations of the CSS style sheets for the site text and the blog text but nothing was effective the font colour remained the golden brass of the screen. If I reverted back to the default text colour it worked perfectly irrespective of the background. In this observation had to be the answer.

What about changing the default text colour within the CSS Style sheets? I tried this on Monday the 4th October and it worked. I posted 4 new posts of varying size and complexity and it always worked.

So now I have the text colour and background onscreeen I want and a readable black print on white background, still with the full-colour images as setup in the post. I'm very thrilled with this and can only be grateful for the serendipitous solution.

Now I only have two other issues: To remove the hardwired small phrases regarding the Category of the current post at the bottom of the expanded post to upload the blog database back to the server after successfully downloading it and manipulating the content to extract data on the basis of multiple variations and make corrections of tags as outlined previously.

I'd like to thank Sanja Wirch for her interest, encouragement and suggestions at various stages through this quest.

Caution. Non-discoverable and irretrieveable Tags with Yola blogs

Fri, 26 Mar 2010 23:24:07 +0100

Despite the fact that Yola denies this is a problem and it doesn't occur I can guarantee that it does.

There are a couple of aspects of this:

Misstyped ' or " in a Tag will be added as typed and will be displayed in the Tag list. Similarly non-Roman Characters will be added and displayed. An expample would be the +, the - and the / characters. They cannot be searched for.

Subsequently doing a search on Tags containing these characters will not produce a result. The displayed results will simply state there are no Tags with "". It seems as if the accepted characters are invalid within the ability of the Yola blog recovery process. This is not highlighted in any note or instruction anywhere. In fact Yola state that it is not a problem and that these can be recovered as any normal Tag.

These characters until recently were valid.

The next issue is removing these characters. You have to go through each record one by one to find these invalid tags, and manually remove them. Quite a tedious process for 600 or more records.

Issues with Anchors in Yola blog posts.

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 15:30:40 +0100

Setting multiple anchors in a blog post may show a problem.

The problem apparent is that it seems to jump out of the current post and out to the route page of the blog. There it sits…. Forever!

Contact with Kershnee at Yola Support resulted in a solution. It appears that the blog setup uses a "base ref" tag. Thus

<base href="http://krooclub.com/http://{www.example.com}/{app}.php" />

An article reference that Kershnee gave me explained the effect of this:
Ref: http://www.ilikespam.com/blog/using-base-href-with-anchors

There are a couple of points that I would like to highlight from that article:

"The purpose of the <base/> tag is to specify the base location for resolving relative urls. It was only ever meant to be used for viewing a page where the document root is not available (for example, from an email) and should technically point to the actual document location, rather than the homepage. However, there are two significant advantages to the latter:
1. Your site can be easily ported to a new location; and
2. Your web applications can be built without any reference to the location they are installed."

But…..

"Unfortunately, there is one downside - it breaks anchor links."

So identification of the problem was made. The solution: to include the path to the blog post either as a relative or an absolute URL.

Relative URL

Absolute URL

Broken:

#anchor

http://www.example.com/app#anchor

Corrected:

page#anchor

http://www.example.com/app/page#anchor

I chose to use the absolute URL fix and it worked immediately.

I would very much like to thank Kershnee for her support and accuracy in solving this issue. As always her communication is top notch and she is always timely in her responses. A very professional responder.

Adding a banner to Yola blog posts

Wed, 18 Nov 2009 18:39:06 +0100

The addition of images to blog posts is a great way of enhancing noticeability and particularly if you are using your blog to market and advertise products. A picture.......
The RSS facility associated with yola blogs transmits images faithfully and completely without degradation. It's a great feature.

There is another way also to add images to blog posts. This method allows automatic insertion in every post. It is only seen if someone clicks the post so there is no "fatigue" aspect of monotony and repetition. It's a once only addition. It is most suitable for logos adn info banners such as website banners.

You just add a line of code to the "Settings" of the "Blog manager". There may also be some code sitting there and it doesn't seem to cause a problem either o the image or to the existing function of the previously added code.

The banner or logo would be uploaded into your file manager either directly in the root file manager or into a folder that you may wish to use. The image needs to be correcly sixed before it is suitable for this use. Something like "MeasureIt", a useful add-on for FireFox is ideal. Measure the height and width of the image as you wish it to be placed in pixel units. Edit you image with some kind of image editor and store it in your file manager for use.

Insert this code into the "Settings" of your "Blog Manager" in the site builder:

<img src="http://krooclub.com/resources/{optional folder}/{image}.jpg" style="margin: 4px; padding: 0px; float: center;">

If you add this as the first entry in the settings area, the image will be the first apparent immediately under the post content.Good luck with this and you can be confident that it will work..... I think! You can see the effect by clicking on the title bar of this post or any other post. You will notice the Krooclub banner immediately under the post and before the DISQUS section.

Talking about duplicate content on my website.

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:35:11 +0100

Is this a formal definition? Does duplication harm my site noticeability? Should I do something about it?

The same material published two or more times on the one website is at least duplication. A single small paragraph, statement or diagram is not considered a problem but entire articles, lists, extracts of tables are. Duplication hinders categorising websites for the sake of various indexation , ranking etc.

At the moment duplication is not doing any harm to your site. The strategies are being developed currently as a collaborative effort by a number of website related organisations and companies. Google is undoubtedly well up there and they have released an informative video with Chris Coutts discussing the issue. Well worth the watch if you have an interest. Chris has reassured web-authors that there most definitely is no panic to remedy duplication and that information will be released in a timely manner as the processes are finalised and methods for deployment are agreed upon. There are current methods available with surprisingly simple lines of code. You can view this on Google's resource pages somewhere??

As mentioned there is no panic or urgency to act yet. It's probably worthwhile just getting your head around it. Examining your own sites and identify signifiacnt duplication of content. I'm sure various Q&A's will emerge if tey haven't already and specialist panels and forums will be seen to advise.

Subscribing to the "feeds" on this site

Wed, 04 Nov 2009 00:16:29 +0100

RSS has been promoted as the hands off method for subscribing to all feeds. It's a once only process and thereafter you don't need to do anyhting to keep it functioning. RSS subscription has been advocated for the last few years with the knowledge that it will become part of the status quo very quickly.

But there's a hold-up. People are not subscribing through RSS as much as presumed. The reason given is that it is too complex to set up. Many have tried to simplify the process and give good explanations but still only some subscribe by this method. Now the SEO consultants are promoting a dual hand approach allowing subscription by RSS or by email. They have become so adamant about this style of doing it that their analysis programs that some have eg: http://www.websitegrader.com will penalise you site ranking by their algorithms if an eamil subscription ad an RSS feed is not available.

A product by Feedburner allows you to use the XML or Atom feed for subscription by email. It's a free service and one recommended as soon as you can.

A clear process for adding attribution to images

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 19:01:13 +0100

With the generosity of subscribers to Flickr for example who allow others to use their images free of charge, we users have a huge resource of excellent images at our finger tips.
The only requirement is compliance with the conditions of the CC license and attribution or referencing the creators work back to them somehow.

It maybe easiest to show the information that is associated with each CC licensed image and work from there.

This image has been taken from Flickr. I simply searched on "Japanese temples" then in the advanced tab I selected "Creative Commons" Licensed images and from the shorter list this was one. I downloaded the image as is and kept the Flickr name. Normally I rename it to something intuitive but for this exercise I am keeping the same.
The next step I took was to scroll down a little on the page and located the "Additional Information" There are some symbols and in blue writing the phrase: Some rights reserved. Clicking the blue writing then opens a page on the Creative Commons site and in the second section under the heading: Under the following conditions:
Within the section "Attribution" there is an easily seen box which when clicked will highlight the attribution conditions and the license details. Copying this and pasting it into Notepad or some non-formatting text editor displays the content contained. This in fact is our data to work with. Don't be put off by it. We don't need all of it.

<div xmlns:cc="http://creativecommons.org/ns#" about="http://www.flickr.com/photos/24443965@N08/2370768914/"><a rel="cc:attributionURL" href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/24443965@N08/">http://www.flickr.com/photos/24443965@N08/</a> / <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/">CC BY-NC-SA 2.0</a></div>
If we break it down a bit we can begin to see what is useful to us.
Let's look at the about: http://www.flickr.com/photos/24443965@N08/2370768914/
The http://www.flickr.com/photos/ is the Flickr site and the general folder for all photos stored.
The next part: 24443965@N08 is the so called "photostream" of the owner of this image. The following number (2370768914) is the image ID within the photostream
The next part of the information: http://www.flickr.com/photos/24443965@N08/ is the display if we placed it in an HTML holder. This is the important attribution data and something we can use directly.
Following on we can see <a rel="license"href=" http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/"> Creative Commons don't keep a register of licenses and the license which the owner elects to use with their image is one of a few options. The owner for this image has nominated the license "by-nc-sa" which is explained in the creative commons site.
The requirement for attribution is to link to the owner's photostream and to give the license class plus the details of the conditions of the license by providing a link.

So for the above image we need two key pieces of information:
The owner's photostream address and the Creative Commons License class.
In this case:
Photostream address: www.flickr.com/photos/24443965@N08
CC License Class: by-nc-sa
That's really all we need to annotate the image.

I think very few of us really like additional details on our pages things like Photostream addresses so the way we can reduce this is to place it as a link within the image. That fills the requirements of the license as I read it. I also have found that to include this in a tooltip is a very convenient way of highlighting the fact that it comes from a licensed source.

At this time I am placing the CC license as a badge under the image directly. This highlights again that there are conditions associated with the use and in fact another person who may copy this is required legally to follow the same conditions. Maybe I will change the way I do this in time. For some reason the small badge doesn't get under my skin. I use the badges provided by Creative Commons and each of the badges are hot linked to the CC page describing the conditions of the license.

So:

If you mouse-over the image you will see a tooltip displaying the photostream address of the image, this can be clicked to take you to the collection. If you click the CC badge you will be taken o the specific page for the license conditions specified by the owner. These things are in compliance with the CC license fully.

The code for the work is in two parts. The image with tooltip including the link to the photostream and secondly the badge and CC license.

1. The image coding:

<a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/{photostream}/"><img style="border:0;" src="{folder}/{sub-folder}/{image}.jpg" onMouseover="ddrivetip('www.flickr.com/photos/{photostream}/','{hex code for tooltip bkgd colour}', {tooltip width in pixels})"; onMouseout="hideddrivetip()"></img></a>

This is the specific code for the image above:
<a href=http://www.flickr.com/photos/24443965@N08/"><img style="border:0;" src="http://krooclub.com/resources/flickr_tutorial/2370768914_4ec1424c96.jpg" onmouseover="ddrivetip('www.flickr.com/photos/24443965@N08/','#013565', 200)" ; onMouseout="hideddrivetip()"></img></a>

2. The CC badge

You need to create a folder where you store images and then copy the CC buttons from the Creative Commons Downloads page. Name them by the License class, ie the characters on each button. This allows for easy assignment.

<a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/"><img src="http://{domain where button image is filed}/{folder}/{sub-folder}/{button image file}.png"> (In this case: BY-NC-SA.png)

Finally because the tootltips is a javascript code you need to place the CSS style and the code in an HTML placeholder at the top of your page. This then allows the Tooltip to function.

The link to this code is here
<style type="text/css">
#dhtmltooltip{ position: absolute; width: 150px; border: 2px solid
black; padding: 2px; background-color: lightyellow; visibility: hidden;
z-index: 100; /*Remove below line to remove shadow. Below line should
always appear last within this CSS*/ filter: progid:DXImageTransform.Microsoft.Shadow(color=gray,direction=135); } </style>

<div id="dhtmltooltip"></div>

 (please delete this when pasting into your site. It's part of protecting the code for display)

If you have any queries then please don't hesitate to post back here.