Drive Interest to Your Blog

Nowadays, almost everyone has their own blog whether for personal or business purposes. They can just post about anything from what they are doing in their career to what they do in their personal life. There are just too many blogs out there and people cannot possibly keep up with each and every one of them. It is similar to having a hundred conversations at once and this is not possible to do.

If you are the owner of a blog and you want people to read it, you want to make it interesting first. So how do you make your own blog interesting in a way that the traffic that it generates will keep coming back for more?

Avoid Writing About Yourself

Most of the B2B blogs by companies have dominant information regarding their products and services, updates, upgrades and benefits. Almost all of us bloggers have made this kind of content, and while some of do belong in a blog, it should just be sprinkled as a topping lightly and nothing more. There is no one outside of your business that is going to make it a point to have your self-focused content read all the time.

That is why if you are blogging not based primarily on your products or services, then start going for your target prospects instead and what they want to see. Identify the topics in this area that you know something of and provide information that you think will benefit your customers and help better understand what your company does.

Commit to a Schedule

Being consistent in posting regularly and having a schedule will keep your blog up to date. Even if you are just publishing short posts, make it a habit that you need to accomplish and stick to this. If you are more concentrated on the usual topics that you are blogging about, you can just save these interesting topics that you find over time.

Have Your Own Point of View

Being opinionated even if it is going to turn some people off is important when blogging. Try to critique something if you have an expertise in an area. Have your own strong point of view even if the topic is controversial. It is important that you define your own company’s voice in the community and this is going to prove essential when you are creating content that you want people to discuss and share with each other.

Center Your Content in Factual Data

It is the backbone of a lot of popular blogs to have solid information that can be placed in visual form. One of the best sources for interesting data that you can center on in your blog posts is through surveys and polls. If you do not have the time to spare in collecting data for your own needs, there are a lot of public sources that you can utilize in order to obtain the data for you to draw from. Although the data that you present may not be original, placing this in a chart will add value that readers are going to appreciate.

The Author

Norris Lasay is a writer on business, the high speed Internet and broadband at Broadband Expert. Norris spends his free time contributing ideas for other blogs related to these niches.

Understanding Responsive Design And Using It

Responsive Design, it is what you will hear all around in a forum of web designers/developers. Some people don't even have any idea about it and most of them are business owners who just want their website's work to be done.
If you are a business owner or just a pro blogger in any field you may want a better look for your blog/website and that's when you will search for a local web design company but have you ever tried to know if they are building up your site with the latest and advanced technologies available ?

The problem is both with the client and the company, the client isn't a web geek so he probably doesn't know what's right or wrong to be used to build their website, so the client is innocent here but the web design companies that promises to offer good website is the problem, they have some certified web designs (took a 6 month course, got a job and now building dull sites) who don't even have the idea about the newest technologies. You probably don't want a site thathave lots of table elements in it to build the layout and which looks like websites used to in the 90's.

That was a huge argument about those so called web designing companies, coming to the point, we were talking about the new technologies for designing website and those are HTML5 and CSS3 for sure. Many option in these new standards are amazing, and if you use it in the right way you can take your website design to a next level. Especially the responsive design, but what is it ?

Responsive Design can make your site responsive !

Here, the meaning of responsive is little different. What it's exact work is to make your site layout fit on different layouts but don't you wonder how it was possible even when these technologies weren't available ? Yup, it was possible but was very impossible and needed a lot of work on the server side. First the web developer needed to create different files for different devices and then to instruct the server to load different files for different devices and that's how it worked before but now on a single HTML file you can set layouts for different screen sizes, here it depends on the screen size, not the device and that has many advantages as you don't have to create new designs for all new devices launched, that would be time wasting.

Making Your Site Responsive

If you are a blogger or business owner then you shouldn't get into it, what I suggest you is to hire a good web designer who have good knowledge about it (I have some) and $1000 is worth the work, anyway you can talk to the design about it, but don't contact a local web design company about it or they will just make a huge flash homescreen and that's what they will want thousand of dollars. Always be careful before you hire a web designer, it's the question about your website and business.

Responsive Design is normally achieved with CSS3's Media Queries but sometimes weird guys use JavaScript too for some more dynamic responsive design. It's a little logic thing, like you first have to decide what to do when the screen size is this and then give suitable styles for the surrounding elements too else it will be all messed up. The whole game is about the metrics of elements and you have to do some maths too and as I already said, applying some logic will give you better results.

Fluid layout is not exactly similar to responsive design but it's another advance technology, as the name suggests, it can make a layout act like a fluid, means it can fit in any size or shape and that's it work.

If you are a young or passionate web developer willing to learn these new techniques then there's a one trusted source of information, the MDN website, see this page to learn about Media Queries https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/CSS/Media_queries

Good News for Blogger Users : I have created many websites with responsive and fluid layout but never for Blogger template but in a few days I am going to launch the Blogger's first responsive Template, so sign-up for our newsletter to keep yourself updated. 

Stramaxon Celebrating it's First Birthday

I am very happy today, it's been 1 year since I started the blog and running it successfully. 
I posted the first article on Stramaxon on 13 October 2011 but made this blog public on 16th October. 1 year ago I started this blog as a start of my new online career and started writing on this blog weekly. I had no big expectation from my articles or writings, all I was doing was a way to gather everything I knew about web design/blogger. I learnt more and wrote more and to my surprise people started to visit my blog (mainly from Google searches) and I was glad to know that they were helped in many ways.

This blog is for my readers and without you all, I wouldn't have achieved such distinction. Thanks to you all and hope continue to post on this blog to help you people in every way possible.

There were no post from a long time because I was busy with some web design works but now when I am done, I will continue to write more on this blog. Plus, I wanted to share a web design project, which you can find here https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/demos/detail/changing-screens-with-media-queries.

- Deepak Kamat 

Blogger Interface Has Become A Complete Mess

Since I started Blogging, Blogger CMS was my first choice, because it performs better than any CMS out there. But from some weeks, it's behaving strangely and doesn't work smooth as it used to before.

If we go back in the past, the only problem people faced with the New Blogger Interface was some BX Error Codes and it doesn't used to appear instantly, it was rare, only appeared when you make some invalid move on the CMS. Which we can call the client side mistake.

But some Weeks or month the Blogger CMS has become more unstable, I don't mean the whole Blogger CMS but only the New Blogger Interface. Both interfaces were coded differently but do the same job. Anyway, back when both Interface were available, we had the option to revert into Old Interface if we faced problems in the New Interface but now we can't even do that because Old Interface has been removed permanently from Blogger.

These problems have decreased the fun writing on Blogger. It's very messy when the post don't get Published even after click the Publish button, it throws error every time.
        

Post Publishing/Saving Issue

The first job of a Blogging Tool is to save and post that content on the website smoothly without any problems, it was really smooth in the past but from a month or two it has gone wild and doesn't save nor publish the post at the time we push the Publish button. (Even at the time of publishing this post, I faced the problem).

Also when you click the Publish button multiple times, it post multiple posts in the background and also create extra Drafts and that's very messy to work with.

Some Settings Are Not Saved

I don't even want to make any changes to my blogs settings, as it have gone mad too. You change some settings and after that you click the Save settings button, you see a message saying "Settings Save" but no, the setting haven't changed.

I am facing it and very disappointed because my blog is not available at http://stramaxon.com (Without www.) First I thought it has some with the CNAME records, I went to my Domain management Dashboard and it's all well.I returned to Blogger and saw that I haven't check marked the option in Settings that says
Redirect stramaxon.com to www.stramaxon.com.I checked the option and Save the settings, but no matter how many times you save the settings, the check mark never stays there, it disappears and the settings is still the same as it was and because of that I am not able to redirect stramaxon.com to www.stramaxon.com 

Do You Face any other Problems ?

If you have some different problems related to Blogger or the New Blogger Interface then drop your comments and also remember to use the Send Feedback button on the bottom right corner of Blogger Dashboard, it can help your problem reach the Blogger team. 

Is Feedburner Down ?

Shockingly Feedburner is acting strange. Readers are gone from the Feedburner account.

Yup, it's not only for my blog or yours, any website or blog or Feedburner subscription isn't working now. It was very strange when I saw my readers count go 0 but sadly it's a truth and not only mines but any one using Feedburner have lost their readers from Feedburner. Big or Small, any type of website has now feeds showing 0 subscribers, that's really sad.

But Why ?

The question is obvious and can rise in any one minds but I don't have any clear answer for it. I searched for the exact reason and in many results I saw News of Feedburner shutting down. It will be very hard to say goodbye to one service that has always been a way to reach a larger audience directly through emails to send feeds.

Google is shutting it down soon but the Feedburner website is yet available for login and etc. All you don't see is the readers. I don't see any reason Google should shut down Feedburner.

Yesterday, Goolgle/Blogger removed the Old Blogger Interface permanently and today it's turn for Feedburner. I really can't accept the truth that Feedburner will be down in the fire. Google has announced that Feedburner will be shut down by 20th October

Say Goodbye To Old Blogger Interface

I came to know that reverting option to old Interface is no longer there where it used to be and that means Old Interface is now just a history


Blogger released this new Interface last year but both the interface were available back then and even after 1 year of it's launch the old interface was yet there for users because the New UI (user interface) has many bugs that needs to be fixed before making it the only interface.

Blogger Help forums were filled up with complaints and bugs of the New Interface, the most common were those mysterious BX errors but to their relief Old Interface was still there to get things done smoothly.

From months Blogger had been announcing about the removal of Old Interface but many users including me think that this decision is not necessary at all. The reason told by Blogger about the permanent removal of the  old interface was because both Interface are hosted on different servers and that's just a waste of server bandwidth to keep two interfaces, but my question is "Can't Google afford to keep one extra CMS in their Servers ?".

Revert back to Old UI?

Aah, hope Old UI was there forever. As I was using it since I started using Blogger and it was one of the most fine CMS I ever used. Many people yet don't understand the concept of New UI and they feel uncomfortable with it. For them I wrote a tutorial which even works today (20th Sept.) but I am not sure if it will keep working because the Old Interface will be permanently removed from the server. Anyway, here's the link, using it you can still use the Good Old Interface
http://www.stramaxon.com/2012/06/how-to-get-into-old-blogger-interface.html

Why permanent removal ?

"Change is a part of Life"
That's the bitter truth but it would have been so good if New and Old UI both were available together. One reason I love Google more than Facebook is because when Facebook launched Timeline they completely removed old profile page but when Google/Blogger launched new UI, the old interface was available at the same time but Blogger wants to lose it's reputation itself. Sadly.

Lastly, I hope Blogger keep up the good work and improve the New UI to fight wit bugs and errors so people can use it without using my tweaks :)

Transformation of Stramaxon to a Web NEWS Blog

This is a personal note, I don't usually write personal notes in a blog post but this is going to be a big change for this blog and also the readership.

When I started this Blog, I used to write latest NEWS that aired on TV but soon I found that I wasn't doing well in it so I started learning Web Designing and at the same time I join Blogger Help Forum, so the first transformation of this blog was a from a NEWS blog to a Web Design and Blogger Help blog.

I got a very nice response from the the few readers but to make my life from a blog that was not all. I didn't posted on this blog since September 5 but meanwhile I have learned some more ways to run a better blog.

Does that mean I won't post any Blogger or Web Design Post ? No, I will still post on topics I used to write but the change is about adding more topics to my blog where more readers can join and I get a larger audience for a better future of this blog.

Change is a part of Life.