• 7 Scientifically Proven Ways to Get “Shared” on Facebook via Fast Company. Dan Zarella of HubSpot tracked 12,000 articles to see when they were posted, how they were shared, and what information they offered. He’s compiled the data to show you how you can get your articles shared on Facebook.

• Do You Feel Like You Don’t Belong as a Blogger via ProBlogger. Darren wrote a great article about what it means to “belong” online. The fact is, we’re all people, we all have insecurities, and we’re all a little surprised to find where we are right now. There’s room for everyone.

• Understanding the Like Button and How It Affects You and a Website via BrandCraft Inc. More than a few people are unsure about the new Facebook Like button. Tommy Guns of BrandCraft Inc. provides a written explanation and a video about what the Like button is, how it can help you, and why you may want to drink the Kool-Aid.

• HOW TO: Disable Facebook’s “Instant Personalization” [Privacy] via Mashable. Not everyone is thrilled about Facebook changing how long apps can keep your info. Mashable shows you how to easily turn off this automatic feature. Now would be a good time to check your child’s Facebook account settings as well. I’m sure they’re keeping track of these changes and what they mean the way you are.

• Common Misconceptions About Web Designers via SixRevisions. I love this article because I have many friends who are web designers and I see them disrespected on a daily basis. Readers, I adore you, but please listen to me when I tell you design is not something just anyone can do. It takes time and talent and it’s expensive. More than that, though, it’s worth the cost and the wait. So on behalf of my designer friends, please read this article and try not to complain when they can’t get to your request yesterday. kthxbai

photo credit: lumaxart

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• Increase Blog Traffic with Email Strategies via Blogging for a Living (part of the Freelance Writing Jobs Network). So many bloggers wonder how to increase their traffic. I stand by the fact that it takes time to build a loyal audience and there’s no magic formula, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t things to do! Try Jennifer’s tips on using e-mail to build your traffic.

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• Facebook Fan Pages, Community Pages, and Privacy Updates: What You Need to Know via Web Success Diva. This week was the F8 conference (the Facebook developers conference) and there were lots of Facebook changes announced. This article will help you figure out how these changes may affect your Facebook presence.

• 3 Alternatives for FREE Ning Customers via Technofriends. It was announced this week that Ning is getting rid of its free service and all communities will either have to pony up the money for a premium account or find a new home. If you’re on Ning, you may be interested in these three alternatives for you community.

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Reader Question:
I have trouble with formatting recipes and getting the columns lined up. I usually do several lines of ingredients and amounts and hit return.  Then I will highlight the ingredients and amounts and click on the bullet feature and then un-do it.  Then is when the ingredients come together, but they are not aligned!  What am I doing wrong?

Melanie’s Answer:

It doesn’t sound like you’re doing anything wrong. There just isn’t a great way to format some things without specific HTML (like that for a table, which I’ll show you in sec). Since you want to format the ingredients of recipes, I think you have a few choices.

1. Instead of trying to format the list with a bulleted list, you can simply type the amount of the ingredient, hit the space bar, then type your ingredient (which is how most recipe sites I’ve visited do it). Example:

10 roma tomatoes
1 yellow onion
1 lime
1 bunch fresh parsley
1 jalapeno pepper

2. If you like the simple typed list above, but want it indented, you can do that without a bulleted list. Just type your list, highlight it, then click the blockquote button in your editor. It looks like this: Your list will look like this:
   

   10 roma tomatoes
   1 yellow onion
   1 lime
   1 bunch fresh parsley
   1 jalapeno pepper

   It’s a very subtle difference from the list in #1 above, but you should notice it’s indented a little. NOTE: Your blockquotes will likely look different than mine because my template automatically adds the gray color to the text and the line to the left as part of the formatting. Your template will likely just indent your text.

3. If that’s not what you want, you can implement an HTML table. I’ll be honest with you: the method above is easier, especially if you don’t have experience with HTML. Putting a table together with HTML is easy, but you have to keep track of what you’re doing or the cells won’t line up properly. Here’s what your ingredients list might look like with a simple table:

1	can tomatoes
1	bunch parsley
1	yellow onion
1	lime
1	jalapeno pepper

The HTML for that table looks like this (notes in red just tell you what the HTML is doing and shouldn’t be used in the HTML you write for your table):

<table> signals the beginning of the table
<tr> signals the beginning of a table row
<td>1</td><td> cantomatoes</td> <td> signals the beginning of a table cell; </td> signals the end of that cell. You can have as many table cells (<td></td>) on a row as you like.

</tr> signals the end of that table row
<tr><td>1</td><td>bunch parsley</td></tr> (repeated from above)
<tr><td>1</td><td>yellow onion</td></tr>
<tr><td>1</td><td>lime</td></tr>
</table> signals the end of the table

As you can see, there’s not a lot of difference between a basic table and simply typing your ingredients. You can adjust the padding of each cell (the white space around the cell; it makes it appear there is more space around each table cell) to get the table to look just right, but it takes some tweaking and experimenting to figure out what works for you. To learn how to make an HTML table, please see the W3 Schools Tutorial on HTML Tables.

photo credit: Leo Reynolds

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• How to Use Video to Jump to the Top of Google Search Results via TechCrunch. “Google has given over more and more of its search results real estate to “blended” search results, displaying videos and images towards the top of the first page, and pushing down—and sometimes off the page—traditional web results that would have otherwise competed for top rankings.”

• Design a Prettier Web Form with CSS 3 via Nettuts+. “By following this tutorial you will not only end up with a lightweight and beautiful form, you’ll also learn and understand new CSS3 techniques, such as box-shadow, gradients, opaque colors, and rounded corners.”

• Web Resizer Shrinks Your Photos to Bandwidth-Friendly Sizes via Lifehacker. “Upload a photo to Web Resizer and you can not only resize the image to smaller dimensions, but tweak its appearance and image quality. You can round the corners or leave them square, add a border, crop, rotate, sharpen and adjust the image quality to push the image size down even further.”

• 5 Copyright Steps to Take Before Launching Any Site via Plagiarism Today. “If you value your content, its worth taking some time before launching to make some adjustments and make sure that your work is protected. Doing so will not only help you enforce your copyright, but also track where it appears on the Web, legitimately and unlawfully, letting you better understand your audience and reach.”

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• Tutorial: How to Create an E-Book Cover with Photoshop via Standout Blogger. I always wondered how to do this and now I know. Beware, though, the instructions assume you have Photoshop and know how to use it. Design skillz not included.

• Small Biz Social Media Summit in Hutchinson, KS! My friend @DebWorks has put together an opportunity for small businesses to discuss how to use social media effectively. It’s going to be phenomenal. You won’t want to miss it. Make plans now to attend June 5-6!

• Money Will Flow Like Aquafina If You Can Come Up With A Better Idea Than Pepsi During SxSW via TechCrunch. Get your marketing thinking caps on. If you win, it could mean big bucks for you.

• The Definitive Guide to Choosing a Topic for Your New Blog (Pt. 1) via Skelliewag. I’ve been a Skellie fan for a long while. In this article she explains that choosing the right niche is important because your niche will “play a significant role in shaping the content you create, the people you communicate with, the readers you gather and how you reach out to your target audience.”

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Yep, I’m still busy writing that book I told you about, TypePad for Dummies. Although I’m loving every.single.minute of it, I don’t have much time to write new content for you right now. So I’m cheating (a little) and sharing some good stuff I’ve already written.

What would the web be without freebies? If you are just starting to make your own buttons and banners and buying graphics software is too spendy, you can definitely find some free options to get you started.

(I’m going to point you to places where you can download free software; however, please understand that I am not personally endorsing any of this software–except Elements, which I own–or any of the downloads. As with anything online, please use caution when downloading.)

• About.com has a list of free graphic software that will jump-start your creative juices. They give mini reviews and screen shots of 10 free software applications.
• Gimp is a brand that I have heard of, but have not personally used.
• FreeSerifSoftware
• I think most operating systems come with some sort of Paint program. You probably have a free graphics program on your computer right now! You can definitely see what you can do with that.

As you become more comfortable making your own buttons and banners, you may want to go ahead and buy software.

• Adobe Photoshop is amazing, but unless you’re a professional graphic artist, I don’t think you need to have it. Besides, it’s very spendy at about $700.
• Adobe Photoshop Elements is the answer for those of us addicted to making our own graphics and fiddling with our photos, but want something less expensive than full-blown Photoshop. Elements retails for about $100. However, I’ve found it for less just by searching various sites online. I received Elements 4.0 (I think they’re up to 6.0 or 7.0 now) bundled with the Bamboo tablet for Christmas and I think it was about $80. As an aside, I’ve found the 4.0 version to be great for me.
• Corel PaintShop Pro is another program that is popular.

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One of the questions I’m asked most often is How can I use graphics effectively in my posts? or some variation thereof. Many beginning bloggers want to use the biggest picture possible in their posts, more seasoned bloggers know to use smaller pictures but still want to know how make those pictures load faster. That’s what I want to tell you about today: optimizing your graphics (whether those graphics are photos or not) for the web.

Why include graphics in posts?

In Elise Bauer’s article How to Build Blog Traffic – Content she suggests bloggers incorporate graphics simply because “. . .people want them. Graphics and photos can help to accent or illustrate your points. They also break up the monotony of text, and give relief to eyes tired of reading online.” Regardless of what your blogging niche is, at some point you’ll want to include graphics of some kind. When you do, you’ll want to make sure those graphics are optimized for the web.

What do you mean by ‘optimize’?

Optimizing a graphic for the web simply means compressing its data so the file is smaller and will load faster. When you take a digital picture, for instance, there is a lot of noise that is included in that digital file that isn’t necessary for the picture to be viewed. You can clean out that noise, and thus make the file smaller, simply by choosing “Save for web” in your graphic-editing software (e.g., Photoshop Elements or Gimp). If you don’t have that option in your software, save the file in the appropriate format–JPG, GIF, or PNG (discussed below) and choose the smallest file size in that format. By optimizing your graphics, you’ll be optimizing your site’s download time (i.e., it will load much faster). Your readers will thank you.

What size should the file be?

Back in 1995 when I was designing web sites, we tried to keep the file size of each graphic to under 26k. Of course, back then, most people were using dial-up connections to the web. These days, with broadband so prevalent, it would be acceptable to keep each graphic to less than 50 kilobytes. I understand that sometimes that’s not possible. In some cases it may be worth it to post a larger file. One option would be to make a thumbnail of the image (perhaps 300 pixels by 300 pixels or smaller) and link it to the larger image.

Should I use JPG, GIF, or PNG? And what’s the difference?

The three most common formats for graphics are JPG, GIF, and PNG. Each of these file formats is best used for a specific kind of graphic: JPG is used for photographs, PNG or GIF is used for everything else. Why? Because a JPG file can contain millions of colors, but GIF files can only be saved as an 8-bit image which means it contains up to 256 colors. PNG files were created to replace the GIF format and can be saved as 8-, 24-, or 64 bit images and are about 20% smaller than a GIF image. You can read more in Benefits of the PNG Image Format.

Further Reading:

• 8 Excellent Tools for Optimizing Your Images
• Optimizing Images For The Web With Photoshop
• Optimize Images for Web Development

A version of this article was posted at BlogHer.com.

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Last year, at BlogHer 2008 in San Franciso, I appeared on a panel with four other women called FAQs for Beginning Bloggers. Our panel was flat-out amazing. We met fantastic bloggers and answered many beginner questions.

Below you will find my notes from my portion of the panel. In addition, you can find Nelly’s notes at WebGrrrls.

How do I find basic html resources to help me remember how to do things like strike-thrus etc.?

When I research information for Blogging Basics 101, I start with a Google search of key words. I also go to each of the three main platforms (Blogger, TypePad, and WordPress) and search their help files with those same key words. More often than not, I find what I’m looking for.

The following five sites are excellent resources for all bloggers to refresh your memory on how to do things like strike-throughs or add a button to your sidebar.

• Blogging Basics 101: This site starts from the beginning and walks you through everything from choosing your blog host and choosing a blog name to figuring out how to do a strike-through and customize your sidebars.
• Blogger Buster: Blogger users should have this one in their bookmarks. Everything you want to know and then some about how to manage and customize your Blogger blog.
• Edublogger: This site is specifically written for people who design, develop, and use educational blogs. However, the information spans niches and is valuable to all bloggers. The author uses many screen captures to make instructions especially easy to follow.
• BlogWell: This site offers everything from theory and design articles to HTML and CSS instruction for WordPress. It is targeted to small businesses and non-profits.

What are and how do I create permalinks?

A permalink is the link to an individual blog post. These are important because if you ever need to link to an exact blog entry (e.g., for a carnival or an archived post), you use the permalink as your link. It’s poor blog etiquette not to use the permalink.

If you don’t use the permalink, you’ll just be linking to your main blog page. The problem with that is that, as you post new blog entries, the newest entry appears at the top of your main blog page and the other entries are pushed down on the page. The entry your readers are looking for may be down at the bottom of the page or already in the archives; your reader has no idea where to find the entry! If they click over to your site expecting to see a post specific to a carnival and they see a different post, they may not take the time to find the “real” post they’re looking for.

You can find the permalink link under any blog entry. However, not all blog hosts/designs handle permalinks the same way.

• Typepad: There’s a link that actually says Permalink under the entry.
• Blogger: The link varies. It’s usually the time stamp of the post or the title.
• WordPress: Has a link at the bottom of the post named Permalink and/or the title of the post.

What kind of basic sections should I have in my blog?

I take this to mean What should I place in my sidebar? Your sidebar is your list of things you want to keep handy for your readers and for yourself. Your sidebar is offering your readers something in addition to the day’s post. However, too many links in the sidebar can clutter your design and overwhelm your audience. Keep things clean and orderly.

• Recent Posts/Most popular posts/Archives: You don’t need all three. Just choose one of these.
• Categories or Search: I find that search works well for my blogs, because I have a long list of categories.
• About Me/E-mail/Contact information: This is your opportunity to explain your blog. E-mail or other contact information should be readily available so your readers (or PR and marketing people) can contact you.
• RSS subscription button: Blogging Basics 101 has an entire section on RSS and installation and you can review Nelly’s notes at WebGrrrls as well.
• Blogroll (if you choose to do one)

Hosted vs. Non-Hosted?

Hosted: A blog that resides on the host’s server (e.g., Blogger or TypePad or WordPress.com).

Non-hosted: A blog that resides on the user’s (yours) server. You pay a third-party to host your blog (e.g., Moveable Type or WordPress.org).

Hosted Pros: Easy to get started because you don’t have to worry about server issues.

Hosted Cons:

• Blogger blogs can appear to be less professional
• Platform limitations (e.g., archiving can be less than
  user-friendly; TypePad can have issues with comment spam and trackback
  spam; difficult SEO)
• Less control over HTML and CSS
• WordPress.com does not allow advertising.

Non-Hosted Pros:

• Control over permalinks (articles aren’t randomly named) which can help with SEO
• Control over how archives are managed
• Control over CSS/HTML

Non-Hosted Cons:

• WordPress.org only supports one blog per installation; however, Moveable Type supports multiple blogs per installation.
• Moveable Type isn’t as malleable as WordPress.org.

How do I make a custom header?

• Using GIMP (free to download) to make custom blog banner (via Simply A Musing Blog)
• How to use PhotoShop or PhotoShop Elements to design a custom blog header (via DesignMom)

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Photo attribution: photo credit: larskflem

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