Lost in the Blogosphere

[PenDragon]

Hi fellow Bloggers (he said after two whole days as a Blogger).

Thought I'd just say hello. There's such a lot to Blogging it's hard to know where to start Tags, HTML, getting it to look nice, to Addsense or not to addsenese, and that's before deciding what to write. I'm sure I'll figure it out what I need to as I go along.

Anyway, hi!

Cheers,

Lee

[L M Ashton]

Welcome to blogging, PenDragon. :) It can be a fun ride. :tongue

Do you have any specific questions? If so, please feel free to ask, although I would also suggest browsing through the threads here as we've covered a lot of ground. Especially check out the Templates, Tags, and Techie thread - we don't make eyes glaze over too too often!

[KAM]

Hi Lee :welcome:

Love the title of your blog! Kim

[PenDragon]

hi Kam and quidscribis, thanks for the welcome.

I have loads of specific questions, no doubt you've heard them all before, or they are well covered topics here. I'm in no hurry to learn everything I need to know, happy to pick bits up here and there, reading the odd blogspot help article, searching the threads here, etc.

For now though I'd love to hear people's opinions on Adsense, is it worth having on your Blogg? Does advertising turn some potenial readers off? I don't even know if I have any readers!

[bsolah]

I use AdSense, but I'm still undecided about it. A while ago, I was against it, but I'm poor and that changes a lot of ideas ;) Please feel free to look at my blog and tell me if the ads are in the way or not. I'm not making a lot of money from them, so there not really important.

[PenDragon]

Hullo Benjamin,

Nice Blog, I wandered around your site for a bit. I voted on the poll (Mostly first person btw) Read a couple of your posts. Glad you've got a handle on the Block., and the adds are very unobtrusive.

I see You like Horror, on my second Blogg post there's a link to a Horror story of mine called Mis-en-place.

I've been looking at a few Bloggs now and see lots of features I quite like the look of like Polls and other flashy stuff like that that make a Blogg more interesting to mull over. Will Wheaton's has all sorts of fun stuff going on.

I noticed some Technocrati Tags at the foot of your posts Ben, I'd be interested to hear how they work (I take it they're all about flaging areas of interestest relevent to each post).

Cheers,

Lee.

[Thomma Lyn]

To keep up with how many readers you have, consider installing a sitemeter. Go here:

Site Meter (http://www.sitemeter.com/default.asp)

These are free, work well, and are easy to install - heck, you put in the name of your blog, its host (i.e. Blogger, Live Journal) and the site meter installs automatically. There are a number of styles you can choose from as well, and you can set the privacy level (whether or not you want readers to be able to access your stats when they click on the site meter icon on your blog).

It's a handy tool. You get all kinds of stats like total number of visitors, where they are from, which urls referred them, and projections for future blog traffic based on what you're currently getting. You can also keep Site Meter from adding your own visits to your blog into the totals (which gives a more accurate picture of your blog traffic, if you're one to check your blog for comments multiple times a day ;) ).

Welcome, and good luck with your blog! I paid it a visit, and it looks nice. :)

(edited for clarity - my morning coffee is still taking effect)

[bsolah]

Thanks Pen,

The technorati tags are used to index posts into the technorati search engine. People type in the tag in the engine and posts around the Blogosphere with that tag show up according to the most recent posts. I used a wordpress add-on to do mine by here (http://www.technorati.com/help/tags.html) is a handy guide to adding your own tags.

[razibahmed]

Pen, Adsense is a good thing but you should not expect too much from it. Adsense wont make you rich but if you can some visitors then it will give you some money every month. I also suggest that you get a Sitemeter as soon as you can.

[KellyC]

Welcome PenDragon!

I agree with Razib about Adsense. It's really easy to integrate into your site and you can customize it to look like your blog, but until you have some decent traffic, you'll barely get pennies from it.

It is a way to monitor the improvement of your traffic, though. And every once in a while I have a good day (translated - $1.25 from Adsense;))

And of course, folks like Dooce (http://www.dooce.com)earn a living this way.

[ChaosTitan]

Welcome to the Blogger's Board, Pendragon!

[PenDragon]

Hi, Thanks for the input guys. I've added site meter and addsense.

Quick addsense/html question. Now that I've added adsense it seems to have pushed my sidebar links halfway down the page. How do I get the links back where they were? Bearing in mind my HTML-Fu isn't so much weak, as non exsistent.

[KellyC]

It sounds like the ads you chose may be too wide? Maybe you can change the pixel width in the adsense selections. That happens to me sometimes when I put a really long link or wide pic.

I just looked at your site and the sidebar looks right on my computer. YOu could choose an ad that is the same width as your post column though. I'm not sure which one that is, but you can play around a bit. It might be one of the horizontal banner choices.

[PenDragon]

Cheers, for looking Kelly, yeah since posting the above, I've changed the add to one that doesn't mess with sidebar, but I don't like the new add as much as the old one. Ha. I'll mess about with it until I find something that works.

I must say you lot are all very friendly and very helpful.

Cheers,

Lee.

[DTKelly]

Welcome, pendragon.