Tuesday, July 9, 2013

Help for Blogging

image: Pixabay | Pexels.com

Good morning friends. In this post, we'll cover some of the most common misconceptions about blogging/web posting. Sometimes what we think words mean is incorrect, which can make it difficult to ask for help in the Blogger forums. Sometimes it is something we are just not doing correctly. Here are some of those common issues:

● "html" does not stand for "hotmail". It stands for "hyper text markup language". This is the code that the web uses to form text and images. The html coding itself is not displayed. All coding must be correct as well as in the correct form in order for the web to read [interpret] the coding. ALWAYS BE VERY CAREFUL WHEN EDITING HTML!

● RSS stands for rich site summary or really simple syndication. This is the real-time news feed for a blog/site. Its symbol is usually an orange square with white waves beside a white square. The feed keeps us current on a blog/site's posting chronologically in real-time. From our Blogger dashboards, we can choose Full or Short Feed. Short Feed will display text only (no images). Atom also displays text only. A Reader or Aggregator compiles our Feeds for us. Google Reader closed in July. We can choose from other RSS Feed aggregators, such as Feed Burner and Feedly.

● The blog background image is often missing or too small due to several reasons:
1. The place the image is stored is flagged as Suspicious or Dangerous. Many of those free image storage sites are riddled with viruses and such. Internet security systems will likely block them. Many of those places also will not store the image in its full size.
2. In the New Blogger Designer, your background image is not tiled. Tiling is simply that the image repeats horizontally and vertically.
3. The person who stored the background has deleted the image or changed its storage url.
4. The blog background image (especially for the old Minima template) is not large enough in width to fill most browsers. Tiling will not fix this because the image has a center background with the "fancy" part on the right and left sides.
5. In the New Blogger Designer, your background image is too heavy of a file. It must be 300kb or smaller. You can optimize it [making it lighter] at: EZgif.com.

● The blog takes forever to load on the web:
Related to the above, optimizing your images will make their file size smaller [lighter], which will help them to load faster. They can be optimized at that link above to Dynamic Drive.
Having too many gadgets such as animated images and text will also slow many browsers down, and often cause internet security systems to flag the blog as being Suspicious or Dangerous.

● The image has a box around it on a blog background that is colored, ie not white. The image must have a transparent background. You can do that at: PIXLR.com

I hope this info will help you all. Prim blessings.

Blessings, Danice G.

5 comments:

Primitive Stars said...

Thanks, need all the help I can get, :) Francine.

My Colonial Home said...

Hi Danice,
Great information.
I have often mentioned that blogs with MOVABLE objects tend to load slower and sometimes not at all...those little floating snowflakes and hearts or whatever just keep the page from scrolling when you put your curser on the scroll bar...it's so frustrating. They may look cute but they certainly are a pain!
Blessings,
Karen

Raymond Homestead said...

It all sounds complicated to me! Thanks for always helping me when I have some questions, I really appreciate it! :-)

Unknown said...

All good to know! Thanks!
}}Hugs{{
Vicky

JoAnn SweetPepperRose said...

Hey Danice, boy am I glad you posted about all this! Clarifies so much for me. Extremely helpful. Thanks! And boy, even remodeling "on the cheap", it is truly expensive. Thanks for visiting ;-)