February 29th, 2008
by
Brett Bumeter
So you have graduated from Blogger to your own domain but you do not want to lose all those readers coming to your old blogspot address. How can you establish a simple redirect so they will automatically be sent to your new site?
Well, the new blogger code makes the redirect slightly less than straight forward if you are unfamiliar with xml. Most html redirect tips you will see will tell you to use the following code
<meta http-equiv=”refresh” content=”2;url=http://www.my-new-domain.com”>
However, with the new blogger you are working in xml and you will get an error stating that you can not save your template as the xml is malformed.
Its simple, you just need to ad a slash before you close out your tag code for xml so that it looks like this.
<meta content=’3;url=http://distributionbusinessarticles.blogspot.com’
http-equiv=’refresh’/>
Told you that was easy!
I had to figure that out myself earlier today when I was working on a new client project looking at keywords for bedding. That was pretty mundane and before you know it I was cleaning up some loose ends on a blogspot blog that I transferred over a year ago and forgotten to redirect.
February 24th, 2008
by
Brett Bumeter
I ran into an interesting problem this evening. I was working on a different website where I push blog articles via a feed to one of the main pages on that website.
Occasionally, banner ads or images are included in these articles. The images are typically aligned left or right an the banners are usually at the bottom of the article.
I did not realize it, but when these articles are viewed with full html, as opposed to text, in a feed or when pushed somewhere with buzzboost, those banner ads that are not left or right aligned mess up the alignment of the article that follows it.
Above you see the banner ad with the article that it was included with above it. Then the second article follows it, but gets shifted 400 pixels to the right approximately. The entire article and everything else in the feed also gets shifted to the right.
To fix this I came up with 2 trial and error approaches that seem to help.
First I try and shift the banner ad up into the text and then left or right justify the banner.
Alternatively if there is not enough text, such as might be the case in a 150 word article, you could include a few extra blank lines after the image as well.
Now, I’m not a big fan of ads, but I am a realist. They do pay the bills and keep websites in the black. As I was considering the perspective earlier today that the design of the website might be less important in the future than the design of the content that is held in the feed, it gave me a fresh perspective here. Maybe next time before I drop that ad for wholesale fashion jewelry, I will reconsider if it really fits with my feed design as well.
