Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Add Your Blog to Twitter

1. If you haven’t already done so, head over to Twitter and create an account.

2. The next step involves logging into Twitter Feed. If you already have an Open Id then you will be able to just log in but if not you will have to spend some time creating an ID.

3. Once logged in to Twitter Feed you’ll get a screen with a link to create a new Twitter feed. Just click on that to get to the Feeds page.

4. Click on the Create New Feed link. You should now be on the Create New Twitter Feed page.

5. Complete the fields on this page as per the following:
  • Username – Enter your Twitter username
  • Password - Enter your Twitter password
  • RSS Feed URL – Enter the RSS Feed URL for your blog. If you’re not sure what that is just head over to your blog and look for an RSS image. Just click on that and you will be taken to your RSS feed. Just copy the URL for that page and paste it into this field. (To test it just click on the ‘test rss feed’ link next to the field.)
  • Update Frequency – This depends on how often you update your blog. One of our blogs is updated every 7 hours so I just leave it at every hour. If you update your blog once a day then you might select every 24 hours.
  • Include Item Link – I leave this one checked.
  • Shorten Link Through – I leave this one as TinyURL.
  • Post New Items Based On – I have this one set at pubDate.
  • Prefix Each Tweet With – I haven’t tried this but assume it means you can add some text that will automatically be inserted at the beginning of each Tweet. This might be useful if you want to let your readers know that this is a blog post so you might add “Today’s Blog Post” to the beginning of each Tweet.
  • Filter by Keywords – This is handy if you only want specific posts to go up on Twitter. So you can add keywords that will ensure that only posts with those keywords will be displayed.
  • Active – Obviously you will want to leave this one checked.

6. Once you have completed each of the fields click the CREATE button and you are done. Your blog posts should automatically start posting to Twitter.

Add Your Blog to Facebook

Firstly you will have to create an account if you do not have one. Anyone can join Facebook. After registering with a valid email address you can join the networks you are interested in to connect with people of similar interests. You can customize your profile to show only what you want and keep the rest private.

PUT BLOG IN PROFILE
Flog your blog on Facebook. Add your blog Feed URLs and set how much of your blog posts you want to display. Save the settings and now your blog posts will be seen by everyone looking at your profile on Facebook.

PUT BLOG LINK IN PROFILE
New applications are being developed every day. To promote your blog and search for new applications type in the word 'blog' in the search box above the 'Applications' link in the sidebar. Click on the application you want and then click 'Add Application' to set the settings and add it to your profile. There are applications to add a screenshot of your blog as well.

Monday, September 7, 2009

Editing a Google Site

When you are starting out with Google Sites, there are some simple page edits that you can apply to make your site work smoother. Here we go over three tips to use when editing your own pages.

Insert links in a Page

Open the page that you want to add links to. Click the Edit selection from the top menu bar. Next select the text that you want to add a link to, highlighting it, and then click the Link button from the top menu bar. Insert the URL information for your link and click the Save to secure your link.

Enable Comments for a Page

In Google Sites, when you want to allow comments, you will have to enable them on each page. You cannot enable comments just for the site and have them show up on the corresponding pages.

Open that page that you want to enable comments on, and click Edit on the top menu bar. Click on the More Actions button and a drop down will appear. In the drop down menu, click on Page Settings, and check the box that is next to Allow comments. Once the box is checked, click on Save and comments will now be enabled for that page.

Link to Sub-Pages

You can enable links to your sub-pages on a particular page of your site for easier site navigation. In order to link to your sub-pages within a page, first open your page, and click Edit on the top menu bar. Next click on More Actions, and select Page Settings from the drop down menu that will appear.

In the drop down menu, check the box that is next to Show links to sub-pages. Once the box has been checked, click Save for the setting changes to take affect. Your page will now have the sub-pages links enabled for your site page.



Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Google Sites is the Best

There’s an unlimited amount of hosting websites where you can create a free website. You can visit Freewebsites.com, Webs.com, Weebly.com, Wix.com, and Geocites.yahoo.com just to name a few. However, Google is one of the easiest to use if not the easiest. Google Sites is a free and easy way for you to create and share webpages. You can create rich web pages easily, collect all your informatio nin one place, and you can even control who can view and edit your website. Google Sites is powerful enough for a company intranet, yet simple enough for a company intranet, yet simple enough for a family website.

One Google Sites user said, "I am a climate scientist and I use Google-Sites to present the research of me and my collaborators. It allows me to maintain a personal presence on the web that I can take with me wherever I go. I particularly appreciate that it is low maintenance, yet has high flexibility through the large variety of Open-Social gadgets available."

Example Sites: