Blog Setup: 40 Practical Tips

From here

One of our readers, Max Pool, was kind enough to send a guest post with 40 practical tips to setup and optimize your blog. All the tips are actually links to previously published articles on Daily Blog Tips. Enjoy!

WordPress Setup

1. Do your homework first and read about others’ mistakes
2. Choose a reliable web host
3. Choose a good domain name
4. If you need inspiration, check this list
5. Register and keep your domain name with a registrar
6. Always install WordPress in the root directory
7. Update your ping list

Themes & Design

8. Choose a professional theme
9. Remove unnecessary information from your theme
10. Add a favicon
11. Place an RSS icon at the end of single posts
12. Create a functional footer for your blog
13. Organize your categories
14. Optimize the “About” page
15. Speed up your site

Check & Validate

16. Make sure your blog works in different browsers
17. Check the load time of your site
18. Test the SEO aspects
19. Validate your website
20. Keep a maintenance checklist

Plugins

21. Install Akismet
22. Install WordPress Database Backup
23. Install Subscribe to Comments but leave it unchecked
24. Install Chunk URLs
25. Install Related Enteries and consider setting it to 3
26. Install Custom Query String
27. Install Jerome's Keywords
28. Install sig2feed

SEO & Analytics

29. Install Google Sitemap Generator
30. Install Enforce www Preference
31. Optimize your Meta Description Tag
32. Setup an optimal URL structure
33. Make category pages display excerpts
34. Setup any needed 301 Redirects
35. Create a robots.txt file (and here is a collection of different ones)
36. Modify your title tag to be optimal
37. Remove the hyperlink from the single post titles
38. Offer email subscriptions
39. Install the Feedburner Replacement plugin
40. Add the Google Analytics plugin and track your stats

Max Pool is a software engineer by day - aspiring SEO expert by night. More ideas can be found at his blog codesqueeze.com.

Blogger Feeling Lucky Widget (Random Post)

from phydeaux3

I wouldn't have thought many people would think something like this would be useful, but a recent post on Techcrunch goes ape over wordpress having a 'random post' widget now. I figured if wordpress has one, New Blogger should as well.

With that in mind, here is the Blogger Feeling Lucky widget. Since we are in the Google family, I thought using the 'feeling lucky' nomenclature was appropriate. It's a silly little widget that adds a link to a random post on your blog. It is available in one-click add a widget to your Layouts template, or for classic templates the raw code is available to add that works as well. Also, a slightly tweaked version of the code also allows FTP Blogger blogs to join in the fun. All the things you need to install are explained on the setup page, although it's pretty simple. Currently I have it installed under the sidebar search box, via the manual code provided for exact placement.

Blogger Feeling Lucky Widget Install Page

Ricardo Santos has made a Portuguese translation available at Widgets para o blogger - Phydeaux3

Notes

For those that may be interested, here's how it works. Nothing really earth shattering going on. In the initial page load, the scripts make a json call to the feed url. Here I'm only interested in getting the total number of posts in the blog, so the call is made to the summary feed (to keep load time minimal) and with only one entry returned. The total number of posts is returned in New Blogger in the openSearch:totalResults field, so take the total number of posts and then use standard means to generate a random number within that range. Then the link is created using that number as it's variable.

Now at this point we don't have a valid url yet, just a number. So when the link is clicked, another quick json call is made, using the random number generated as the start-index parameter to get that entry in the feed only, a quick parse of the results to grab that entries url, then good old document.location (Thanks to Pete changed to window.location and a few other small tweaks to keep the back button working) to switch to it.

Old Blogger did have a similar tweak by Mario Brhemenz, but like a lot of our Old Blogger stuff relied on an outside service (del.icio.us)to work. I don't know that I've seen one for New Blogger before.

I think everything works as it should, but if you find any issues lemme know.