BlogSpreading

It’s a good deal! Start it immediately and you will get a lot of useful experience:)

You need some basic knowledge to avoid all traps. The best way to get such basis is reading what other people write about blogging . There are a lot of blog experts in the net who sometimes write own secrets or just useful articles.

First of all you should choose right tools for your first blog. Use free service like blogger or wordpress.com? Or maybe buy own hosting and install standalone Wordpress blog engine? In second case you should pay for hosting and learn some new stuff, but you will get a lot of advantages like full control over your blog and much more flexibility. Also having own website is  cool, really So, I suggest you read this article about choosing right tools for your blogging needs.

Second that you should do is to make nice interface for your blog, so visitors should not close browser immediately after look at your page. So read this tips on Good User Interface design and make you blog user-friendly.

After interface, you should set eyes on plugin, if your blog engine supports it (wordpress supports!). I’ll write about userful plugins in next posts, so be sure you already subscribed to my rss

P.S. And certainly I recommend to use a free Blogspreading utility to spread your blog!

Do you want to optimize your blog homepage?

Some brief advices:

1. Use the correct header tags - H1 only for header of blog, not for each post title.
2. Only Display the Content of 2 Recent Posts - I did not understood why you should do this, I think that to show 10 or even 15 posts (full text) is better way. But you can have other point of view…
3. Give Blog Goals a Priority Position on your Homepage.

Wanna to know more? Read an original article 3 Ways to Optimize Your Blog Homepage from Nathan Rice

Unfortunately, Outlook 2003 doesn’t allow inserting data from a file into the signature. You should store the entire signature in the external file. Thus, if you use Outlook 2003, you should specify the full signature in the Blogspreading template (including your name, address and goodbyes).

To add the signature generated by Blogspreading to your messages in Outlook 2003, do the following:

1. Choose “Options…” from the “Tools” menu.
2. In the dialog box that appears, click the “Mail Format” tab.
3. Click [Signatures…], [New…]
4. Enter a title for this signature
5. Click the “Use this file as a template” radio button.
6. Click the [Browse…] button and locate the signature file generated by Blogspreading.

Your signature template for Blogspreading should look like this:

–
Best Regards, Nikolay Tyushkov
  http://flashpaste.com/
  http://softvoile.com/
 Last post in my blog: %title% - %link%

Unfortunately, Thunderbird doesn’t allow inserting data from a file into the signature. You should store the entire signature in the external file. Thus, if you use Thunderbird, you should specify the full signature in the Blogspreading template (including your name, address and goodbyes).

To add the signature generated by Blogspreading to your messages in Thunderbird, do the following:

1. Choose “Options…” from the “Tools” menu.
2. Check the «Attach this signature» box.
3. Click [Choose…] button and locate the signature file generated by BlogSpreading.

Your signature template for Blogspreading should look like this:

–
Best Regards, Nikolay Tyushkov
  http://flashpaste.com/
  http://softvoile.com/
 Last post in my blog: %title% - %link%

Unfortunately, Outlook Express doesn’t allow inserting data from a file into the signature. You should store the entire signature in the external file. Thus, if you use Outlook Express, you should specify the full signature in the Blogspreading template (including your name, address and goodbyes).

To add the signature generated by Blogspreading to your messages in Outlook Express, do the following:

1. Choose “Options…” from the “Tools” menu.
2. In the dialog box that appears, click the “Signatures” tab.
3. Check the «Add signatures to all outgoing messages» box.
4. In the “Signatures” section, click the [New] button.
5. Click the “File” radio button. Click the [Browse…] button and locate the signature file generated by BlogSpreading.

Your signature template for Blogspreading should look like this:

–
Best Regards, Nikolay Tyushkov
  http://flashpaste.com/
  http://softvoile.com/
 Last post in my blog: %title% - %link%

In the file, you can store either the entire signature completely or only the information about the latest blog post. In any case, simply add the %PUT=«Path to file» macro in the necessary part of the letter template in your mail client preferences. The Bat will automatically replace this line with the file contents.

To edit the letter template, go to the mailbox configuration and select the necessary template: Template->New Message or Template->Reply.

Examples of template:
In Blogspreading specify only the part of the signature related to the latest blog post:

Last post in my blog: %title% - %link%

In The Bat specify other part of signature and include data from our file:

–
Best Regards, Nikolay Tyushkov
  http://flashpaste.com/
  http://softvoile.com/
%PUT=”E:\Private\signature.txt”

The second variant is to store the entire signature in Blogspreading:

–
Best Regards, Nikolay Tyushkov
  http://flashpaste.com/
  http://softvoile.com/
 Last post in my blog: %title% - %link%

Correspondingly, specify the file as a signature in the mail client.

%PUT=”E:\Private\signature.txt”

You can use Blogspreading running with command line parameters. When you install Blogspreading on your PC, installation application creates three shortcuts in Start menu:

• Blogspreading - run as usual, GUI mode.
• Command Line Mode - Will start Blogspreading in command line mode without GUI (”-с“). Aplication will update the signature template and show message when done.
• Quiet Mode - This mode requires no user intervention and has no user interface. Update signature template without any message if it was done successfully (”-q“), but notify about error (if any).

Blogspreading supports the following list of parameters:

• -h, –help - Describe command line options.
• -c, –cmd - Run in command line mode without displaying user interface.
• -q, –quite - Silent mode: don’t display user interface and don’t display success message.
• -l, –local - Use the configuration file and all other data from the current folder.

There are a few simple steps you should follow to make BlogSpreading work for you.

Configure:

• Enter url of RSS  or Atom feed of your blog - Specify the address of the atom or rss feed of your blog.
•  Specify file to export your signature  - Specify the file in which your signature will be stored.
• In the input field below you should specify the template of your signature. Enter the text of the signature you usually use and add a line, which will display information about the latest post. Use the %link% and %title% macro, which will be replaced by the actual link and title of the latest post. Press “Get Data” to get data and generate the signature file.

Configure your mail client to use the signature file generated by BlogSpreading. Create a new message and see how great it looks.

Update:

Now all you need to do is to launch the program each time you made a new post. Blogspreading will automatically check the rss feed and update your signature. You can launch the program in the command line mode if you don’t want to see annoying windows. You can even add a shortcut to the Quick Launch panel or launch BlogSpreading from the Start menu. Your signature will be updated in no time.

Hello guys

BlogSpreading 1.0 is out today.

BlogSpreading is a small utility, which automatically appends a link to the latest post in your blog to your e-mail signature. This will easily catch the recipients’ interest and convert them to the readers of your blog. Make a web of links to your posts and you will get a lot of new readers.

This is first public release. So, I want to hear all that you think about it. You can send me any questions or comments via our contact form or using comments to this post.

Hope you will enjoy Blogspreading:)