Successful Blogs

The April 2007 rehash of Successful Blogs removes some of the advertising from the blogging blog. I have also created three content blogs - for motorhomes, property, and writing. Three of my main passions. And these latter three will be monetized.

From Liz Strauss’s Blog comes a report from SOBCon07. First on the list of guest speaker Terry Starbucker’s “5 things I look for in a blog” -
Fine Style – The look and the “feel” of a site on first glance sets the tone for the reading to come; if the presentation is messy, than the writing probably is too..

It’s interesting to look at the others, and see how your blog matches up. Terry’s own blog is >> here <<.

After thinking about monetizing, and where to put ads and stuff, I decided I needed a 3 column layout, with both sidebars on the right.

I did a lot of work, looking at themes, and then trying to adapt them so I could get my banner in. Eventually decided on this one, and I played around with the php and CSS until I got it looking OK. I also reduced the height of the banner from the original 200 to 150.

I still need to look at the overall width, and the right-right sidebar (as opposed to the right-left sidebar), which still doesn’t look brill. I’ve also got to make new graphics for the links, and I think I can reduce the banner a little more so I get more content into the main window, “above the fold”. The calendar seems to be left-aligned, and the links texts center-aligned. I’ll change one or other of them.

But overall, I’m pretty pleased. It’s getting to the stage when I’m fed up of looking at it, and it starts to look worse and worse the more I fiddle with it. So maybe one more day, then it’ll be linked in to my sigs, wherever I’m loitering.

Post tomorrow about www.bloggst.com

I don’t know. It took a bit of work to get Blogdesk working with this blog - mainly because I was including the “www” at the start of the blog URL. So I know not to do that in future. I think I like the interface better than w.bloggar, and the post text is bigger and in the Verdana font. It actually looks quite a lot like the Wordpress interface. We’ll see.

Since I’m going to be using a few blogs, I have started using w.bloggar, which is a desktop blogging tool. I’ll let you know how it goes.

After a long time, I’ve managed to get the banner designed, and uploaded. See? It’s up there, at the top of the page.

It’s still not truly what I really want, but it’ll do for the time being.

This is the start of the Successful Blogs group.

For a while, I’ve been blogging in various hosted and non-hosted blogs and this, that and the other. I must have about 20 or more blog domains registered to me, so for the first time I’ve decided to group them all together in one place - SUCCESSFUL BLOGS!