Social media optimization is a big right now. There are a lot of sites that want to be featured on Digg, Del.icio.us, Facebook or one of the many other social networks. However, getting there isn’t always that easy. The first steps though is ensuring you have social media links on your blog to make sharing that content easy. My favorite tool of the moment for this is ShareThis.

ShareThis use to be a plugin for Wordpres that injected social media icons, and an email this, link into your posts. It worked very well but was Wordpress only until recently. It’s since been re-launched as a service that’ll work across any blogging platform or website.

Signing up for a ShareThis account is really easy. They just ask for your email address and a password. This information is then used to track the ShareThis button performance on your site. It’ll keep track of who’s clicking which options, your most popular content and other visitor information. However, the reports are not yet available for the public but should be by the end of the year.

Getting the feed for a particular label in Blogger is much harder than it should be. Really, Blogger should just give them to us, but instead, they send us to help documents that may not help.  To make it even better, just because your label feeds use to work, they may no longer work as I found out the other day for a client. I did my research and here is how you can get your own label feeds on Blogger blogs.

If you have a Blogspot blog:
http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/labelname

Just be sure to change blogname to match your blog. The labelname is what appears in the URL of your blog label page.

Example URL: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/search/label/personalization
Example Feed: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default/-/personalization

If you host your own blog:
http://www2.blogger.com/feeds/blogid/posts/default/-/labelname

The trick here is that you need to find your blog id. To do this, login to your Blogger dashboard and click on the new post link. In the URL bar your blog ID will show up and it’ll look something like this:
http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=1234567980123456789

Example URL: http://www.yourblog.com/label/personalization
Example Feed: http://www2.blogger.com/feeds/1234567980123456789/posts/default/-/personalization

If you have spaces in your label, your feed URL would look like the following.

As blogs become more and more mainstream, issues are coming up that blog software is not quite ready to take on. One of them is formatting issues created by copying and pasting content from Microsoft Word, Explorer, Outlook or even from Firefox!

The issue is that users are creating or finding content with other programs, then copying and pasting it into the WYSIWYG editor in their blog software. When that happens, the editor does it’s best to keep the same formatting including fonts, font sizes, line spacing, colors and much more. Any content copied from a Microsoft document will also come across with hidden, Microsoft only, tags such as the <o:p> and [endif] tags. This formatting then overrides the blogs default font, size and formatting tags giving your blog an inconsistent look and feel.

Here are a few examples:

The first one is what the code looks like when copied from Word. Can you tell what it says?

The second one is what the code should look like in Wordpress’ WYSIWYG editor. Much nicer.

Here are a few of the inconsistent layout options that can result. There are different fonts, sizes and use bolding.

Wordpress.com is all the rage, but Blogger has been around for quite a while and there are a few perks to using it. Here are a few I could come up with.

1. Editable Templates - No extra fee here, you can customize your Blogger templates to meet your needs.
2. Easier Widgets - This one comes from Anthony who feels that the ability to add widgets (or page elements) to Blogger is easier than over at Wordpress.
3. AdSense - Blogger makes adding ads quite easy. Before you know it, you’ll be making a quarter a day!
4. Video Upload - Currently in draft mode, but Blogger is going to allow direct video uploading into your post. The functionality is much like you already do for images. Sadly it doesn’t also publish to YouTube from what I can tell.
5. FeedBurner - FeedBurner functionality is built right in now that Google owns FeedBurner. More integration is probably coming too.
6. Publish via FTP - This is a big one, the ability to FTP your files to a directory on your own site is great. This means you can host your own blog, on your own site, regardless of your server setup.

If you missed the announcement just before the Fourth of July holiday weekend, FeedBurner Pro is now free. That’s one of those good things about a Google acquisition; things become free. All users now get Pro stats and MyBrand for feeds.

Honestly, I never quite saw why the Pro features were so great. MyBrand is a cool thing, but I prefer to promote and use my own feed URL that has been redirected to the FeedBurner version.  I do this with the FeedSmith Wordpress plugin from FeedBurner.

The two additional stats items do sound nice though. Reach estimates the number of users that interact with our feed (including feed search engine or news filter sites) and we get better click though stats.

Now everyone is a Pro at FeedBurner thanks to Google.

[tags]FeedBurner,Google[/tags]

Safari 3, now for Mac and PC, recently came out in beta form. Included in this release was the ability for users to use visual editors also know as WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editors. No longer do Safari users have to know code to make basic formatting in blog posts.

Safari 3.0.1 Beta on Windows XP

I’ve tested it in Wordpress 2.2 and it works great.* As far as I understand, previous versions of Wordpress don’t support Safari’s rich text editing. Testing it out under 2.0.10 confirms this.

I also tested out Blogger and had no issues. They seem to be on board with the Safari 3 crowd too.

TypePad however didn’t seem to support rich text editing with Safari yet.

With Safari 3 being so new, and brand new to the Windows world, blog software creators are working in Safari support as they feel the need.

If you use TypePad, or other software that doesn’t support Safari’s rich text editing yet, drop and email to their support so they know your interested.

This tutorial will run though the basics of posting to a Blogger blog. It’s intended for newbies and should give a quick overview to get you started.

Step 1: Login

There are actually two steps here. Since Blogger recently upgraded their services, they now have two different types of logins. One for all the new accounts that have been merged with Google accounts and one for all the original Blogger signups that haven’t converted over. If you don’t know which one you are, ask the person that setup the blog for you.

Once you have chosen New Blogger or Old Blogger you will be presented with the login boxes. Enter your username and password and hit Sign In.

Step 2: The Dashboard

This is the starting point for all Blogger accounts. It will list the blogs that you have the ability to post to and give you a few other options. Lets click on the New Post link to create a new blog entry.

Step 3: The Post

Yesterday I discussed options when installing Wordpress isn’t an option. Quite a few included domain mapping and phydeaux3 informed me that Blogger is now offering domain mapping for free.

Domain mapping allows you to buy a domain and have it show content that is hosted someplace else. Basically, you’d buy a domain and then map it to your BlogSpot account and it’d appear that you’d have a fully hosted website. No one would see http://you.blogspot.com anymore, they’d see http://www.cool-domain.com.

The plus side to this is that you don’t need to buy hosting. Just keep using Bloggers webspace and resources. All you’d need to do is buy a domain, usually $9.99 a year, and work with your registrar to map that domain to your BlogSpot account.

Domain mapping Blogger blogs must be inline with Google’s hosted applications idea. You just need a domain name and you can map your website to your BlogSpot account, your email to your Gmail account and keep everything organized with Google Calendar.

Has anyone tried domain mapping with Blogger yet?

[tags]domain-mapping[/tags]

Not every host has the ability to install and run Wordpress. Some hosts use Windows servers where PHP and MySQL are not usually included. So then what? What is the next best blogging software?

My first thought is Blogger. Since the new version was released, it’s back in the running. It has the ability to post to an external site in a directory which is a plus. I’d rather stay away from sub-domains if possible. Blogger also has labels (aka categories), editable templates and enough features for most bloggers. Plus it’s free. The downsides is that Blogger isn’t realy seen as a professional platform and when they have problems, you won’t be able to do much about.

Another one is TypePad. It has a domain mapping feature but I don’t think it can map to a folder. It has to be routed to either a domain or a sub-domain which is unfortunate. If I’m wrong, someone please tell me. I’d love be wrong in this case. Either way, to get domain mapping you need at least a Plus account ($8.95/m) and access to update your DNS records though your domain registrar. Other than that, it’s a pretty decent choice.

Blogger beta is now Blogger new and Blogger is now Blogger old. Confused yet?

Basically all the new features that were in the Blogger beta have been launched and everyone is encouraged to switch over. They aren’t forcing you just yet, but they will be eventually.

So what do you get with the new Blogger?

First off, drag and drop template designing. This is far superior to the old way where you just got the HTML source. It makes it much easier to add, remove or edit items on your blog.

Second, you can now set permissions on your blog. That way only those you allow access to can see it. Great for group blogs that you don’t want public.

Third, Labels. Yes lovely labels. They are the same as tags or categories, but Google calls them labels. You can finally keep your blog organized. However, the more labels you put in, the bigger your label navigation gets. It’s not perfect, but it’s much better than before.

Fourth, and best of all, no waiting for publishing. Yes, the dreaded spinning publishing sign is going away. Personally, I hated that thing. The bigger your blog, the more you probably disliked it. No more, instant publishing from here on out.