No doubt that a lot of blogging platform like Blogspot, WordPress, etc has its own built-in feed feature. But why should we even border to “burn” our feed? Because you can customize how your feed content be presented to your subscribers and you can get more benefits like getting your feed stats.

I hereby pinpoint some great features you can get once you add your feed to FeedBurner:

• Easy-to-remember feed URL
• Get number of subscribers
• Get live hits statistic (readers geographical location)
• Know your readers preference via popular item (blog post) listing
• Show feed count widget on blog
• Allow email subscription
• Customize how your feed content look like in feed reader
• Customize how your feed content look like (color, styling) in email
• Associate your Google Adsense account to monetize your feed
• Make it easier to promote your blog (will talk about this in the next upcoming post)
• and many more..

Ready to burn your feed? What are you waiting for? Get FeedBurner now, it’s FREE. Also check out the quickstart guides on how to setup your blog feed with FeedBurner.

The most common place that you will see OpenID enabled is a blogspot.com blog. Just imagine if you have an OpenID account, you can just post comments with that single identity that represent you. Maybe you think this is not neccessary, but OpenID will come in handy when you want to sign up an account in a site that supports OpenID.

There are nearly ten thousand sites from different categories that support OpenID.  You can check out a list of sites that support OpenID here or here. You may even already have an OpenID if you are using the following services:

• AOL
• Blogger
• Flickr
• LiveDoor
• LiveJournal
• Orange (France Telecom)
• SmugMug
• Technorati
• Vox
• Yahoo
• WordPress.com

Sign up for a FREE OpenID and with a single identity, you can login to many web services! Doesn’t it sound great? To find out more about OpenID or how to get an OpenID, please visit OpenID official website.

There are many Firefox add-ons to enhance your browsing as well as blogging experience. Here is a list of 8 useful Firefox add-ons which I think every blogger should have them installed in their Firefox browser.

One of the important elements in the blogging world is social bookmarks. You can promote your blog posts through social networking sites, share your interest, as well as getting information from others (blog authors), and also it’s one of the source for you to get blogging inspiration. Among all those many social bookmarking sites, I would love to introduce StumbleUpon and Del.icio.us.

So, you must not miss out these social bookmarking Firefox extensions.

[1] StumbleUpon

This is not a stranger in the Web 2.0 world. Sign up a StumbleUpon account and start stumble good blog posts that you think worth sharing or bookmarking. Registration is FREE.  It’s a great site for you to wider your blog network, make new friends, stumble similar interest articles. If your article is being stumbled by someone, it means higher chance for you to gain more blog traffic. Isn’t it just nice?

After installing the StumbleUpon extension, you can customize where to locate it in your Firefox browser. If you like a site, just click on the blue thumb up icon (to rate it, bookmark it) and vice versa. Notice the number in red? That means someone in my contact list is recommending me an article which he or she finds interesting and would love to share with me.  So, by using the same method, you can also recommend your own blog post to your StumbleUpon contact. There are many more features to be discovered by using the StumbleUpon add-on.

If you happen to have a StumbleUpon account, please feel free to add me to your contact as well.

[2] Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us is another bookmarking site. Among all the social bookmarking site, I find that Del.icio.us is the best tool to bookmark anything I found useful from the Internet; easy to use, nothing fancy about the interface, straight to the point. You can find out more on why I like to use Del.icio.us as my bookmarking tools.

After installing the Del.icio.us Firefox add-on, you can customize your toolbar to show your Del.icio.us short cut, so that whenever you see an interesting article, you can easily bookmark it by clicking the TAG icon. Oh, in order to use Del.icoi.us, you need to sign up for an account, it’s FREE.

[3] Wizz RSS

It’s a web base RSS reader. I always encourage people around me to use RSS reader to read their favorite blogs. Some argue that they prefer blog hopping, but when your network expand, you may really want to switch to a feed reader. You can really get benefits from using a feed/RSS reader to get any updates from your favorite blogs. If you dislike installing extra feed reader application or sign up for an RSS account like Google Reader, you can try this Wizz RSS Firefox plugin. No registration needed, just subscribe to any feed you like. However, if you read blogs in different computer most of the time, it’s better to stick with a registered RSS reader account like Google Reader.

After installing this add-on, the Wizz RSS will appear on the left panel without disturbing what you are currently browsing. You can make your feed subscription more organized by creating categories by right clicking any where within the Wizz RSS tab and choose “Add Category“.

To add a feed, do the same thing by choose “Add Feed“, make sure you get your favorite blog’s feed URL. You can do that by searching the feed subscription link and right click on it and choose “Copy Link Location“. Next paste the link to the Feed URL field.

At the end you will have something that looks like this. You get a list of feed updates. If you click on any post, you see a summary of the post, for further reading, double click on it, and the content will show on the right panel.

[4] ScribeFire

Say, you want to have something all-in-one. ScribeFire is just for you. With ScribeFire, you can blog anything you find interesting right away within a few clicks. You can also add blogs/articles to your Del.icio.us bookmark. Or even share what you found in social networking sites like Propeller, Reddit, Facebook, Digg, StumbleUpon, etc…. ScribeFire integrates with several blogging platform, check out a list of supported services to find out more.

[5] FireFTP

This add-on is one of my favorites which I think it is an essential Firefox extension for bloggers who have their own domain. It’s very useful when you need to upload files to your host. You do not have to install extra FTP client, FireFTP work the same way like almost any FTP client. Learn how to use FireFTP to upload files to your host.

[6] Web Developer

Very often, when I need to customize my blog theme or helping friends to mod a little here and there on their blog theme, I will depend a lot on this Web Developer extension. Most of the time I use this to view the source code. This plugin is for intermediate user who at least knows more on web development like HTML, CSS, etc.. It’s a great tool for all web developers.

“The Web Developer extension adds a menu and a toolbar to the browser with various web developer tools. It is designed for Firefox, Flock and Seamonkey, and will run on any platform that these browsers support including Windows, Mac OS X and Linux.”

[7] Screengrab

Sometimes it’s tedious to take a full screenshot of a page by just using the PrintScreen key on your keyboard. Screengrab can do all the job for you. Who and why need this extension? It’s an essential toolfor those who always make tutorials on the web, when you need to take lots of screenshots to show your reader. I often do that too. Find out more about Screengrab.

[8] ColorZilla

When it comes to customizing the theme color of your blog, you must be digging a list of colors available, searching for it’s 6 digits hexadecimal codes. You can install some free color picker software, but won’t it be nice if you can do it just within your browser? ColorZilla is the answer. After installation, there will be a tiny icon on the bottom left of your browser, click on it to activate and click on any color on the screen that you want, in order to get the 6 digits hexadecimal codes. Click that icon again to deactivate, just as easy as that. Find out more here.

So, that’s the 8 Firefox add-ons which I think is really useful for bloggers. Hope you can benefit from this list.

Happy blogging.

Most hosting plans include a bundle of pre-install scripts in your control panel (eg. CPanel, DirectAdmin). There are several script library like Fantastico, Installatron, etc. (depends on your host provider). To make life easier, you can always install your WordPress blog via the script installer. Learn how to install WordPress using Fantastico. It’s more or less the same for other script installer.

Now you have WordPress installed, and you probably don’t want to stick to the default K2 theme, which looks so plain and not attractive. Although content is the king, first impression is also very important. What to do next? Search for your desire WordPress theme! There are plenty of free themes available. But please beware of free themes provided by less trustful source. (hacker can encrypt codes in the theme and easily access your blog.)

After you find your favorite WordPress theme (mostly come in compressed format like .zip or .rar), extract it and you will have to upload it to your host. How to do that, you wonder. It’s very easy. You can either upload the whole theme folder via your control panel but that will be kinda slow, so I highly recommend you to upload your theme (any files) via FireFTP (Yes, you need Firefox to do that).

Next, you have to navigate to the correct directory to upload your WordPress theme. First you have to look for your WordPress folder, the folder that have all your WordPress files. Normally it will be in WWW or public_html folder.

Take this as an example: www.yourdomain.com/blog

The /blog is your WordPress folder. The folder name defers, as you are the one who determine the name earlier during WordPress installation stage.

To upload your WordPress theme (the whole theme folder that you have downloaded and extracted), navigate to the following directory (in FireFTP or your control panel):

Your wordpress folder (eg: blog)/wp-content/themes

After uploading your theme, you will be able to see your uploaded theme in the “Design” tab in your WordPress admin panel. Just click on the theme you want, and you have successfully change your blog theme!

To add your sidebar, just click on the “Widgets” and have fun adding (available only for widget-ready themes).

Tip: You can use the same method to upload plugins to your host (WordPress folder).

If you have any questions regarding this topic, do not hasitate to ask in the comment section.

You can search of almost all of the possible Blogger hacks there in a Wiki style, from A to Z. Oh, what is Blogger hack? It’s the changes of source code that enable your blog to have extra functionality rather than the default ones.

Are you running a Blogger / blogspot.com blog? Are you interested in:

• Expandable Post Summaries
• Converting to 3-column template
• How to show latest 25 of your Recent Comments or Posts
• many more….

Get all your answers at Blogger Hack Wiki.

Note: These hacks are available for the new blogger or known as Blogger Beta or xml Blogger.

Happy blogging.

Blogger’s Hideout is a brand new blog that acts like a blog directory, but with pseronal reviews done by the admin. This is a good start for promoting your blog and also gain traffic to your blog, specially amatuer / part time bloggers like us.

Why Blogger’s Hideout?

1. Expose your blog
2. Increase blog traffic
3. Get opinion from readers
4. Making new friends in the community
5. Discover new blogs

Who need Blogger’s Hideout?

1. New bloggers
2. Bloggers who want more exposure and traffic

Are you interested? It’s free to get a review from Blogger’s Hideout. How?

Then Jason, the author fo Blogger’s Hideout, will write a review for your blog.

Posting up your email for readers to contact you is the most basic way of letting your readers contact you besides leaving comments/feedback in your blog (comment section or chatbox widget). However, it will be much more easier if you can provide a “contact form” feature in your blog.

This will facilitates your readers to contact you just by filling the contact form.

Why Contact Form?

[1] Readers can contact you easily.

[2] Ensure the message is successfully delivered to you.

[3] Having a more professional feel (impression wise).

Adding a contact form nowadays is not difficult at all. You don’t need to have HTML knowledge to have this done. There are free services or plugins available to help you add a contact form to your blog.

How to Add a Contact Form?

For WordPress user, you can install the Enhanced WordPress Contact Form plugin. Once you activate this plugin in your WordPress blog, you can set the configuration under the “Settings” tab (for WordPress 2.5). The settings is quite straight forward. Take a look at the sanpshot which is quite self explained below.

Then you will have to create a Page, and add in the following code and publish your page.

For more support on this plugin, click here.

For Blogger (Blogspot) user, you can add a contact form to your blog too! No, you don’t need to code the contact form yourself. All you have to do is to sign up for a FREE account at WebFormDesigner. Follow the instructions and you can get a simple yet functional contact form like this:

I will not go into detail on how to generate a contact form like the above. Instead, you can read read this detail tutorial on adding a contact form in your Blogspot blog.

Do you have a contact form in your blog? If you haven’t, try to add one now.

Last Update: 24th September 2008

When you click on the icon below a blog post, provided you are signed in to your Facebook account, that particular blog post link will be added to your Facebook Mini-Feed. Now, everyone in your network will be able to see your posted link. If they are interested and click on the link, you gain traffic to your blog!

Yes, of course you can click on the icon at your own blog post. Haven’t got the social bookmarking icons / buttons? Try Sociable for own hosted WordPress or AddThis for other blogging platforms. If you don’t implement such social bookmarking buttons, you will have to post the link to Facebook manually.

Adding a post link to your Facebook account with the icon is easy.

First, look for the post that you want to share with your Facebook friends and click on the icon. (I’m using my other blog as an example)

If you already login to your Facebook account, you will see something like this:

When you are done with the setting, just click on the Post button below that page. The post will then be posted to your Facebook profile. If you want to send this link to your friend instead, choose the Send a Message and follow the instruction.

Go to your profile and now you can see the post. When someone click on the post link, he/she will then be directed to the orginal blog post. Anyone can leave comment or share with others.

Easy, isn’t it? This is how you can boost some traffic to your blog. Try it out.

Oh, you can add me in Facebook too!

The “long” home page phenomenon occurs when:

(1) Too many long posts appear on the first page.

(2) Too many widgets along the sidebar.

Such problems can be solved by implementing suitable blog theme / template and arrangement of the blog contents.

For long sidebar content, keep only the essential widgets as too many widgets can also affect the loading speed of your blog. If you must include all the existing widgets that make your home page “long”, it’s time for you to pick another blog theme / template. For instance, switching from 2 columns layout to 3 columns.

For long posts, you can set the number of posts to be displayed in the front page, say 5 to 7 posts per page. Another method is to use the “Read More” or “Click to continue” feature.

If you are reading this post from the index page, you probably have clicked on the [...more] to continue reading this post. That’s the built in <!– more –> tag in the WordPress platform. This is really a great feature which I strongly encourage bloggers to use it whenever you are posting a long post.

For those who blog in Blogger (blogspot), it’s not the end of the day. There are several Blogger hacks that allow you to have similar feature. In Blogger, it is also referred as “Expandable Post Summaries“. If you are using the Blogger Classic template, you can refer to this tutorial for further explanation. And if you are using the New Blogger (XML Blogger Layout), you can refer this very good tutorial with detail steps and explanation on adding the “Read More” feature to your blog posts.

Why should you use “Read More”?

(1) Neat & Tidy
The “Read More” feature will definitely “cut off” long posts and leave a more tidy feel to the overall blog interface. Hence no more untidy long posts in the front page of the blog.

(2) Encourage Further Reading
You want your visitors to stay longer rather than come and go. If you have interesting extract (summary post) as the beginning of the post, it is more likely to encourage your visitors to continue reading your posts, which you have put in lots of effort.

(3) Increase Post/Page Views
This point is similar to the previous one. When you successfully get your readers to read further, at the same time, you are encouraging more page views. It’s another tactic of indirectly getting more hits for your page.

(4) Sort Out Interested Topics
Not every post you write is something that your readers want. Instead of “forcing” your readers to read every single long posts you have at your index page, when you implement the “Read More” feature, your readers can easily sort out the posts that they are interested in. Save up their time to get what they really need.

(5) Stimulate Creative Writing Skills
You start to learn how to write in an interesting way. The starting of a post must be eye catching or at least be able to attract your readers to read further. Writing an interesting abstract of your long post is the key.

What is the measurement of a “long” home page?

I personally think that, a page that require us to scroll down for a long time is considered a long page. It also depends on your blog layout. If your blog content is longer than your sidebar, or the other way round, which cause the audience to scroll down for some time before reaching the bottom of the page – that is a LONG home page.

Do you use “Read More” feature in your blog posts? Share your experience with us.

If you don’t wish to download any FTP program and want to use a web-base FTP instead, you can install FireFTP. FireFTP is a free FTP client for Mozilla Firefox. Means, you will have to use Mozilla Firefox browser.

Note: The current FireFTP version is not supported in Firefox 3 yet, by the time I’m writing this.

This post will guide you on how to use FireFTP to transfer files to your host. First go to FireFTP Firefox Add-on site to install FireFTP. Click on the “Add to Firefox”.

After that, a window will pop up, click on the “Install” button.

Then the installation will begin.

Click on “Restart Firefox” once the installation is complete.

After restart Firefox, you will be able to find the FireFTP option under “Tools”. You can also add a FireFTP shortcut at your Toolbar.

When you open up FireFTP, the firs thing that you need to do is to setup your FTP account. (Click the image below to enlarge)

1. Click on the “Manage Accounts” and choose “New”
2. Give a name to your account, it can be any name but make sure it’s easy to identify. (if you have more than one ftp account)
3. Type in your exact FTP address, normally it will be something like ftp.yourdomain.com
4. Type in your FTP account login ID, normally will be the same as your control panel login ID.
5. Type in your FTP account password, normally will be the same as your control panel password.
6. Click on OK to finish the account setting.
7. Choose your account and click on Connect.

If your setting is correct, by now you will be able to connect to your FTP server. And you can start uploading/downloading files to/from your host. (Click the image below to enlarge)

1. When you want to upload files these are the steps that you want to perform:
2. On the left panel, browse to the directory of the files that you want to upload.
3. On the right panel, browse to the directory where you want your files to be uploaded.
4. Select the file(s) in the left panel that you want to upload to your host.
5. Click on the green arrow (pointing to the right) to start the upload transaction.
6. You can monitor your transaction status at the down panel.

Note: The green arrow pointing to the left means download.

When you finish everything, you can click on the “Disconnect” button and close the FireFTP window.

That’s all. Easy, isn’t it?

Try it yourself.