These 2 topics tend to confuse people the most.  Not knowing the difference between when people subscribe via rss (which is done through feedburner) or to their Newsletter.

Essentially, these are 2 different databases and are entirely seperate from each other and would require 2 separate subscription forms.

RSS Email Subscribers:

If someone is subscribed to your blog via rss, they will receive emails every time you do a new blog post.  The covers your entire blog, so no matter what category you put a post in, they will receive this update in their inbox.  In some cases that can be different, but in the majority of all cases, this will cover the entire blog.

Newsletter Subscribers:

This is when readers/clients subscribe to your newsletter client.  This is usually done through companies like Constant Contact, Mail Chimp, or YMLP.  When someone subscribes this way, they will only get a newsletter that you specifically send out to your subscribers.  This has to manually done within your newsletter client.

Well, can people who subscribe via rss also be subscribed to the newsletter?

Yes and No!  No, in they can not just complete 1 form and be subscribed to both.  They would need to specifically enter their emails in 2 separate subscription forms to be subscribed to both.  However, you can access the emails for your subscribers via rss in your feedburner account and manually enter them in your newsletter client.

How do I access the emails from my RSS subscribers?

Login to your feedburner account.
Click on the feed that has all your subscribers.
Go to Publicize.
Select Email Subscriptions.
Select “View Subscriber Details” (at the bottom of the page)
This will then drop down and show you all your subscribers email addresses.

I don’t have email subscribers to my rss feed. How can I get some?

Follow the same steps above, but after you click Email Subscriptions, you will need to hit Activate to turn this feature on.
Then you’ll copy and paste the “Subscription Form Code” into a widget in your blog for readers to begin subscribing.

Have a question on this that I didn’t cover? Leave it in the comments and I’ll come back to add it!

I get asked this question… A LOT!!! So being the sweet person I am, I’m going to tell you. This is for blogger only though, because it’s a little more difficult to do with wordpress depending on your theme.

First thing you need to do is create your own background. You can either create your own in a photo editing software, like photoshop, or find one on the internet. I highly recommend checking out istockphoto.com for background. They have so much to choose from right there. You’ll want to search for a “seamless background” What this means, is the background can repeat itself over and over again and you don’t see the seams.

Here is an example of seeing the seams:

But if you find a seamless pattern, you can put it up and it will duplicate itself over and over and you’ll never see the seam.

Once you have the background you’d like, you will do the following:

1. You will first login to your photobucket account and upload the background graphic. You need to do this to be able to host the graphic for your blog. This will in turn, provide you a direct link code which you will need later.
2. Login to your Blogger account.
3. Go to Layout>Page Elements.
4. Add a new gadget and select the html gadget.
5. Paste this code into your new html gadget:

<style type=”text/css”>
body {
background-image: url(YOUR DIRECT LINK HERE);
background-position: center;
background-attachment : fixed;
}
</style>

6. You will then copy the Direct Link code from your photobucket account, and replace it above.
7. Hit save, and you should now see your background.
8. And just a note, that if you want your background to scroll when you scroll down on the page and not stay fixed, you can remove the line: background-attachment: fixed;

That’s it! Easy peasy!

Want to add an etsy widget to your blog to automatically feed the items you mark as favorites?  Well, if you are like me, and love handmade stuff, you do.  So here’s how:

Login to your etsy account.  If you don’t have an account, sign up.  It’s free and you don’t have to sell anything

Once logged in, click Your Account at the top.

Then click Etsy Mini on the left hand side.

Select the options to suite your needs.

Copy and paste the code into a text (wordpress) or html (blogger) widget.

Save… and you’re all set!

Twitter Tools is another great social media plugin for wordpress. This one is for you, the blogger, whereas the previous 2 that I’ve covered are for your readers.

This plugin allows for you to select the option from your dashboard, when creating a posts, to notify twitter that you’ve posted a new blog post. The second you hit publish on your posts, it hits twitter. So if you use twitter to bring traffic to your blog , which let’s face it… most people do, then you’ll want to let your followers know when you’ve put up a new blog post.

Tweetmeme is another really popular social media plugin. You’ll see this on lots of blogs. This plugin allows your readers to easily hit the tweet button to tweet a link to your posts. Perfect for keeping things very user friendly. Again, this plugin is easily configurable through your wordpress dashboard. You can select it to be on posts, pages, home page, archive page (categories), and many more. If you’ve seen this around and never knew which plugin it is, now you know!

With the huge popularity of social media these days, most bloggers want a way for readers to be able to easily share their posts on outlets such as twitter and facebook. With that said, there are tons of social media plugins that are great for your wordpress blog.

Sexybookmarks is one of them (and I’ll be sharing a few more). While I’m not really a fan of lots of plugins going on in a blog, this one is very sleek and not very obtrusive to your blog or design. It’s extremely easy to configure with a settings page directly in your wordpress dashboard after activating the plugin. Depending on your wordpress theme, you may have to manually configure this to appear on all posts of your blog which would mean getting into the coding. If you aren’t comfortable doing that, I’m always here to help.

Well, if you are still on blogger, then you know that when you upload your images, blogger automatically resizes those images for you. Thank you, but no thank you. I really don’t like that they do this. Especially for bloggers who like to show off their photographs! So here is a quick how-to on fixing this issue:

Once you are in blogger, and ready to edit or start a new post, use the image uploader to upload a new image. Make sure you are set to upload the Large image.
Upload everything as normal.
Once it’s done and in your posts, switch over to the html mode.
You will then see this:

Next, delete the parts that you see in red above.
Then, where you see width=”400px”, change the 400 to whatever width you need your image to be.
That’s it!

Please note: If the original image you uploaded was not larger than 400px wide, when you change the number above, your images will get distorted.

If you are like me, you probably have lots of blogs you keep up with on your reader.  But how in the world do you possibly keep up with it all?  I use an app on my iphone to stay up to date.  Most people who read this blog, are probably busy moms, who blog or own a business.  So your time at the computer is normally your most productive time working while the other time is spent with family, children, cooking, cleaning, and the list can go on and on.

What I do is subscribe to all my rss feeds using my google reader.  Then with my iphone, I have an app called NetNewsWire that will automically pull all my feeds from google, and update them accordingly.  So at night when I’m getting ready for bed, waiting for water to boil in the kitchen, or just simply have a moment of peace and quite, I open this app and it will update my feeds and I catch up real quick.

NetNewsWire also has a desktop application that you can download, if you have a Mac, that is great too!  I don’t personally use this, but I’ve tested it out and works great!

How do you keep up with it all?

That title is pretty funny. But it’s so true. If it weren’t for being able to schedule posts, there would simply never be posts here. During the week, I’m generally consumed with completing all my design projects, family, etc to even think about blogging. So I like to gather a bunch of blog posts at one time, schedule them for 1 a day, and let them go! Easy! And content is here when I’m not. How’s that for productive

So, for those of you who are avid bloggers and don’t use this,  umm, I highly recommend it.

Don’t know how to schedule a post?  Where have you been?  Just kiddin’.  Here’s how:

In Worpdress:

When creating a new posts, you will see on the right hand side “Publish: Immediately”  Then next to that, you can click on Edit.  Click that and put in when you’d like it to post.

In Blogger:

When creating a new posts, down at the bottom where you insert your labels, you will see a link for Post Options.  You can then fill in the blanks for when you want your blog post to actually posts.

But then, you just have to remember when they are going to post.  Like this posts I’m writing currently will posts on Thursday.  Happy Thursday!

ETA: Wow! I’m surprised there are lots of people who didn’t know about this! I’ve had several people email saying “Thank you so much!”. So glad I was able to bring this to light, because it’s so very helpful!

This is by far my number 1 most asked question from people moving their blogs from Blogger to WP. So I thought I’d answer it here for you Aren’t I nice?

Let me first start by saying, that in order to move your followers widget from Blogger over to WP, your blogger blog must have been on your own domain. If you were still using the blogspot address for your blogger blog, all your followers are subscribed under that url. And when moving to wordpress, your url will change.

Soo.. with that said, you will need to do a few things:

Go get this plugin.
Install this plugin with the instructions from this post.
Activate the plugin.
Then to go Appearance>Widgets>Add the Google Friend Connect Widget wherever you’d like it to go.

Then login to your blogger account.
Then go here.
Once in your Google Friend Connect account, find the feed where you see the number of followers you have.
Select ” Add the Member’s Gadget”.
Skip to step 3 and hit “Generate Code”
Once the code pops up, scroll all the way to the bottom. You will see code that looks like this:

{ id: ‘div-0000000000000000000′,
site: ’00000000000000000000′ },

Instead of all those 0′s you will see your special numbers for your account. You need to copy the entire number, not including the ‘, after site: .
Then go paste that code into the widget from above where you ask you for your id code.

You should be set after that!

Need help? Contact me for a quote.