How To Easily Add Technorati Tags and a Digg Button To Your Blogger Posts

There are many people using Blogger.com and 1 of the disadvantages until recently has been not being able to use social bookmarking for their individual blog posts.

Even with the newer version of Blogger.com, there was no easy way to add Technorati tags or a Digg button to a blog post. If you wanted Technorati tags, you had to create them yourself and put them at the end of your article. If you wanted a Digg button, you could put 1 on your blog but not on each separate article.

Today I'll share my secret of how I easily put Technorati tags on every 1 of my postings and the code I put in my "New" Blogger template that automatically produces the Digg button.

How To Add Technorati Tags To Your Blogger Posts

I hope you're using either Windows XP or Mac OS X because those are the 2 operating systems this tool will work on.

1. Go to http://www.qumana.com/download.htm and get the download. They have instructions on installing it and using it at http://www.qumana.com/help.htm.
   


2. Use this blog editing tool to write your articles.
   


3. Before you post your article, use the "Insert Tag" button at the top to insert your Technorati tags.
   


4. Publish your post with the "Publish Post" button.
   


5. Log into Blogger and edit your post to add your blog labels for your post and to make any formatting changes necessary.

While doing it this way may sound like more work, I think it's easier than trying to format Technorati tags correctly and adding them myself.

How To Automatically Add A Digg Button On Your Blogger Posts

1. Login to your Blogger account and go to the Template - edit HTML page.


2. Download a copy of your template to your PC. (This is in case you make a mistake and need to undo what you're going to do.)


3. After you've save a backup copy of your template, click the "Expand Widgets Templates" box.


4. In your template, find the line of code that looks like:
   
   <p class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-3'/>
   
   (In my template it's a little more than half way down.)


5. Insert this code after that line:
   
   <a expr:href='"http://digg.com/submit?phase=3&amp;url=" + data:post.url' target='_blank'><img src="http://digg.com/img/badges/80x15-digg-badge.gif" width="80" height="15" alt="Digg!" /></a>
   
   (NOTE: When you copy this line of code, put it into a text editor and remove all the line breaks before you paste it into your template.)



6. Preview your blog and see if it worked. If it did, you should see a Digg button at the end of your postings and you can save your template. If it didn't work then you can either try again or go back to your unchanged template.



7. Once you have a Digg button on your posts you can change the button image if you want. You can see the ones available at: http://www.digg.com/tools/buttons
   
   To use a different button image just replace the part of the line that starts with <img and ends with /> with the image code for the button you want.
   
   Example:
   
   Replace
   <img src="http://digg.com/img/badges/80x15-digg-badge.gif" width="80" height="15" alt="Digg!" />
   
   With
   <img src="http://digg.com/img/badges/85x10-digg-link.gif" width="85" height="10" alt="Digg!" />

There are many social bookmarking sites and although I don't use as many as I should, you can use the methods I've used to put these 2 social bookmarks on all your Blogger posts.

To Your Success,
Susan

P.S. If you found this tip useful, please leave a comment.

Tags: add digg button to blogger post, add digg button, add technorati tags to blogger, add technorati tags, social bookmarking

29 Cpanel Training Videos

Last month I wrote a tip on how to build a squeeze page and included a video by Liz Tomey.

2 comments were posted for that tip and both stated:

1. Training videos are the way to go.
   

2. Some training videos on the use of a Cpanel would sure help.

In case you're not sure what a Cpanel is, it's the type of administration panel used by many hosting services and looks like the picture below.

This week I am pleased to tell you that I've found a place that has free videos on the use of a Cpanel and here's the list of what they've got:

1. How to login to CPanel
2. How to create a POP email account
3. How to create a default (catch-all) email account
4. How to create an auto-responder
5. How to create a subdomain
6. How to create custom error pages
7. How to password protect a directory
8. Using Hotlink protection
9. How to setup email forwarding
10. How to change your CPanel password
11. How to setup a Cron Job
12. How to create additional FTP accounts
13. How to backup your website
14. How to install and uninstall FrontPage extensions
15. How to keep your contact information up to date
16. How to manage URL redirects
17. How to create a MySQL database
18. Using File Manager
19. Using the Disk Usage Viewer
20. How to use the IP Deny Manager
21. How to park a domain
22. How to create an add-on domain
23. How to use the Raw Log Manager
24. Using Index Manager
25. Becoming familiar and navigating around in CPanel
26. How to use webmail from within CPanel
27. Managing MySQL databases with PHPMyAdmin
28. How to trace an email address
29. An introduction to using Fantastico

Now I've watched a few of these and even though I've been using a Cpanel for administering my web site for more than 4 years, I learned some things.

However, before I tell you where they are I have to tell you:

1. There is no audio - little popup boxes with text and arrows are used to guide you through the instructions. But if you can read short sentences you'll be able to understand what's going on.

2. The Cpanel training videos are included in a free private label rights membership site.

Now before you start throwing wet noodles at me for pointing you to a site where you have to sign up to get the information let me defend myself by stating that I looked for other Cpanel videos. And although I did find some, none of them had this extensive a list and several of the above videos were not found on any of those sites.

In addition to the 29 Cpanel videos there are 18 videos showing how to use 6 different FTP tools:

* 3 Videos showing how to Configure your website, Upload files and Manage files/folders in CuteFTP

* 3 Videos showing how to Configure your website, Upload files and Manage files/folders in WS_FTP

* 3 Videos showing how to Configure your website, Upload files and Manage files/folders in SmartFTP

* 3 Videos showing how to Configure your website, Upload files and Manage files/folders in FlashFXP

* 3 Videos showing how to Configure your website, Upload files and Manage files/folders in FTP Voyager

* 3 Videos showing how to Configure your website, Upload files and Manage files/folders in LeapFTP

Plus there are lots of PLR videos, articles and products and an affiliate program for the membership site and other products.

So my tip this week is:

Go here and claim your free membership so you can watch some good Cpanel training videos. And since they're in the download section you may as well pick up some things for your business while you're there.

To Your Success,
Susan

P.S. You won't see the training videos listed on the signup page but they are in there - I promise.

P.S.S. If you found this tip useful please leave a comment.

Tags: cpanel, fantastico, cpanel video, mysql, subdomain, redirect, ftp, pop email, cron, file manager

Server Side Includes (SSI) For Beginners

Unless you're a web programmer, learning HTML or learning how to use your HTML editor is 1 of your first tasks in order to create your first web site. Then after that first page is up and available, you start working on the second, then the third and so on until you have several pages built on your site. And because you want all your pages on your site to have the same look and feel to your site visitors you hopefully have created a page template.

Then, after you've gotten several pages up, you decide you need to add or change something. Maybe it's the copyright information, the contact information, a new menu link, etc. but whatever it is, it's something that appears on every or almost every page of your site.

It's at this point when you are faced with going in and modifying many pages on your site that you will become painfully aware that you really should have learned just a little about Server Side Includes (SSI) before you started.

What are Server Side Includes and why do you need to know about them?

Server Side Includes allow your web host to perform copy and paste actions on your web pages as the page is being loaded in the site visitor's browser. In other words, as your page is being loaded, your web host reads the code for your page, gets the instruction to find another file and include it on the page, follows the instructions, finds the file and merges it onto your page before showing your page in the visitor's browser.

Why do you care about Server Side Includes? Because they make it extremely quick and easy to change things that are common on many pages of your site. Instead of going into every page that has your navigation menu to add or change a link, you simply change 1 file and that change appears on every page! And, if used properly, Server Side Includes can help make your pages more responsive.

Now before you run off because you think you're not ready for doing complicated "techie" web programming, let me tell you that the hardest part of using Server Side Includes is ... drum roll please ...

You need to make sure your web host allows the use of Server Side Includes.

Because Server Side Includes have been around for a long time and because using them has become more popular, most web hosts do support them. However, Server Side Includes are a Linux/Apache specific feature, so if you're on a Windows server you'll need to find a Windows equivalent of SSI. (Sorry, I can't help you with that one.)

There are 2 ways to find out if your web host supports Server Side Includes:

1. Ask them.




2. Perform a simple test.
   
   Insert this line of code
   <!--#echo var="DATE_LOCAL" -->
   into 1 of your web pages and rename the file, "test.shtml"
   
   Upload the file to your server.
   
   Display the file in your browser.
   
   If you see the current date where you inserted that line of code, your host supports Server Side Includes.

Using Server Side Includes is just as easy as performing the above test and the only hard part is remembering to use the ".shtml" extension for your web pages.

You can use Server Side Includes to include just about every file type like; html, htm, php, jpg, gif, txt, etc. I actually use text files without the ".txt" extension for most of mine because that's how I first learned to do it. I also usually put the file to be included in the same directory as the pages that include it for the same reason. However, you are not restricted to either of those things.

So how do you get your host to paste 1 of your files into your web pages?

If you're a beginner, here are 5 easy step:

1. Create or open your web page in your HTML editor.
   

2. Select the section of your page that you want to appear on other pages.




3. Copy the HTML code for that section and paste it into another file. (I usually use Notepad and create a text file without the ".txt" extension) Name and save your new file.




4. In your web page file, replace all the code you just copied and pasted with the following:
   
   Put your file's name in place of "xxxxx". And if the file is in a different directory than your web page be sure to include the full path to the file starting from your root directory.




5. Upload your files and check them out.

Just like many other web programming techniques, there are other ways to use and write Server Side Includes. Also, it isn't necessary to use the ".shtml" extension for your web pages if you know how to modify the code in your .htaccess file. But if you're a beginner and just getting started, using the above directions will get you started and may save you a lot of time in the future when you want to make modifications to you site.

To Your Success,
Susan

P.S. If you found this tip helpful or have more information you would like to share, please feel free to leave a comment.

Tags: server side include, ssi, web site design, make changes to web site, shtml, navigation menu