The Single Parent Finally Talks: Blogger Template Improvements
Finally, I’ve just finished adding not so obvious changes on my personal blog. As some of you may have noticed, I own another personal blog related to my single parenting experience. I was working on that blog layout for two days. That’s a long time to do such modifications on a template, but I was working on the blogger server all time.
Anyway, these are the visible changes:
- page navigation: The template had a built-in page navigation that’s easy for any blogspot blogger to add more pages. I have to make some new pre-dated posts so that they could function as the pages of that blog. You should be able to see a more descriptive “about me” page, and I thought of putting up a separate page for a small “shop” as well.
- photos: Remember the Slide.com widget that I put earlier? That’s now gone – I’ve decided to put that on a separate page. That would speed up the loading time of the home page. I also changed that one to a bigger widget.
- contact me: You can now send me emails through by using that contact form.
- shop: I suddenly got this idea of putting a series of affiliate products on another page. I think it is a neat idea.
- FAQ and about me: I wrote a new about me page for the benefit of those new readers who like to know me the fast way. I decided to include that FAQ page – one of the most commented posts in that blog.
- advertisements: I got ads installed at selected section of the blog. There’s an ad right below the main blog title, as well as the sidebar. There’s also an in between the end of the post and the comments and also before the comment form.
- favicon: I got that working before, then lost it and now I got that fixed.
- feeds: This was a pleasing surprise for me – my feed reader subscription jumped up to 60 readers from just merely 12 readers. I just made sure that I am using the provided Feedburner feed link for that single parenting blog.
- read more: I decided to put a “continue reading” link to cut down long posts. This allows me put two more recent posts, so that the latest five posts are shown on the homepage. I will not be putting “continue reading link on sponsored reviews and short posts.
- SEO: Some may have noticed that I had done some on-page SEO. I hope to attract some search engine traffic. PinoyCopyWriter’s How to do Basic Keyword Research using Google Keyword Tool was one of the helpful resources I used to carve that blog to those keywords.
- invisible background: If you look very closely, I had removed the background from Entrecard, the stats and some other ads.
- recent posts: I also got that recent posts working fine just below the blog. I hope you like that one.
- quick update: I was hoping that the widget is easy to put up, but it was not. It had no background when I first added the widget. I had to play with the CSS codes to get the effect that I was looking for.
There are also some non-visible changes that I had made on the blog. I believe that the quickedit tool that accompanies every blogger gadget leaks pagerank juice to blogger, so I decided to remove all of that.
Those who dressed up their blogspot blogs with the same template would surely appreciate the effort that I put into modifying this template. It is not really easy work.
Anyway, I just hope you like the new changes to this blog’s layout. The next thing that I need to do is to work on this blog. That experience helped me a lot in leveling up my freelance skills. For the meantime feel free to leave comments.
[BLOCKED BY STBV] Blogjoints.com Trackback | Rate this Article
January 29th, 2009 at 6:57 am #
The Single Parent Finally Talks: Blogger Template Improvements…
I had made improvements on my blogger blog these past days. You might want to consider one or more ideas I used to improve your blogger blog….
iceah
January 29th, 2009 at 8:04 am #
nagtaka ako nawala yung EC mo doon sa kabila?!
iceah´s last blog post..My Voice Dialing
Calvin
January 29th, 2009 at 2:41 pm #
nice nice. ayaw ko rin ng slideshow sa front page. bumabagal loading time. anong ginamit mong continue reading na code? hosted javascript? the one i tried before bumabagal loading ko kaya tinanggal ko na lang.
Calvin´s last blog post..Pinay in American Idol Season 8 made it to Hollywood
[Blocked by CFC] Gem
January 29th, 2009 at 8:22 pm #
Thanks! I still don’t want to remove the blogumus widget. At least there’s one less flash widget to deal with.
Here’s the link to “continue reading” or “read more” code: How can I create expandable post summaries?.
berryblitz
January 29th, 2009 at 11:17 pm #
I super your your new header menu. Ang cute!!!
berryblitz´s last blog post..Ivan and the Pillow
Gem
January 30th, 2009 at 2:29 am #
Hmm.. thanks. Yun nga lang, kasama na sa template yun hehehe.
PinoyCopywriter
February 3rd, 2009 at 3:47 am #
Thanks for the mention, Gem.
PinoyCopywriter´s last blog post..Join the Excreta Fanzine
frenchy
February 3rd, 2009 at 10:03 am #
Hi! Been reading your blog but don’t have much time to do commenting kaya ngayon lang. Nice blog you left there in blogger. Thanks for that quickedit complete removal tweak you shared. I never knew that it could leak PR on blogger. I also like this live commenting plugin you have here. Will try to download that for my niche blogs on WP.
Gem
February 3rd, 2009 at 1:55 pm #
Yap, there’s no “nofollow” tag on it, that’s why I decided to remove it. I prefer to work on the template itself most of the time.
Gem
February 3rd, 2009 at 1:59 pm #
You’re welcome! I see you got new posts pouring in!