CommentLuv Gives Your Blog Heart

CommentLuv can be used to promote your blog in many ways. Lucky for me, I can use CommentLuv here on this Blogspot blog thanks to a plugin from IntenseDebate.
Unfortunately, at this time CommentLuv is not available as part of the commenting system on my WordPress.com blog due to the limitations placed on all WordPress.com bloggers that exclude the use of scripts. If you're a WordPress.com blogger don't let that stop you from opening an account and registering your blogs for CommentLuv.

"There are 3,014 active ComLuv blogs (blogs with CommentLuv installed and working) and 24,821 registered ComLuv users (people who have registered with CommentLuv to be able to choose on of their last ten posts or use default links)."

My advice, regardless of  your blogging platform, register your blogs for a CommentLuv account today!

Right now there's a fabulous contest going on over at CommentLuv which is sponsored in conjunction with another one of my favorite blogs FamousBloggers (you can see the Grand Tour of FamousBloggers here). This contest is offering over $3,550 worth of cash prize awards that will be shared with at least 20 bloggers. I'm glad that I don't have to decide the winner of this contest because the quality of the posts is exceptional and there is no shortage of bloggers that can attest to the benefits of using CommentLuv. This #FBCL contest is bringing the best out of everyone involved and each submission is a classic example of what I mean when I say "CommentLuv Gives Your Blog Heart."
It's one of the most friendly, fun"luv"ing competitions I've seen with each blogger supporting each other's posts by commenting, retweeting and promoting them on every social network on the planet!
One of the contest submissions (I'm not going to say which one until the contest is over) inspired me to create this video. In the video I demonstrate how to add a default link to your CommentLuv account. You see, adding a default link will give you the flexibility to include links from your older blog posts in your CommentLuv signature. That way whenever you comment on a CommentLuv enabled blog (like this one for example) you have additional links to choose from including your favorite post, no matter how far back it is in your timeline! This also gives you added flexibility to include one of your links that's more closely related to the content of the post you're commenting on.

In the video I promised to tell you how you can get credits for your CommentLuv account. There are really four ways you can do this, but this one is my favorite:

"Write an awesome tutorial on your own CommentLuv enabled site about how to use the features of the ComLuv site or plugin. Especially if it has step by step images."

Give your blog some heart and sign up or add default links to your CommentLuv account today! I suggest you follow Andy Bailey, Gail Gardner from GrowMap and Hesham from FamousBloggers on Twitter. If you have questions, holla at your girl (that's me).

Now you can watch my CommentLuv Video Playlist containing every video tutorial I recorded on the topic  can be found in CommentLuv Video Tutorial Playlist on YouTube.

Smooches! ♥
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Top 10 Ways To Improve My Blogspot Blog

Blogger users have recently seen a great number of improvements to the free blogging platform from Google. But the service has a long way to go compared to self-hosted WordPress or even WordPress.com blogs. Personally I'm on a mission to find ways to improve this Blogger blog and I'm using several hacks that are making a big difference (especially the Intense Debate, CommentLuv enabled commenting system).

Good News for Blogger Users

Image via CrunchBase

I'm sure by now you've heard about the improvements happening for Blogger blogs. Even WordPress users can feel the excitement that's been generated by the introduction of Blogger's new Template Designer. This short video clip from Blogger in Draft has the right music to get you pumped!


There is one word of caution that I must pass on to you, please remember that any customizations you added to your original template will be lost. According to the Blogger in Draft Blog:

Customizations to widget templates will be cleared when applying a new template to preserve the new layout. If you have made changes to your widget templates, save them first by going to Layout > Edit HTML and clicking “Download Full Template.” You’ll be able to copy them back in as needed after you apply your new template. 

I changed my template as soon as these new features became available without realizing that I would loose the Intense Debate Commenting System that I installed awhile ago. I reinstalled Intense Debate with CommentLuv and some other hacks like the Blog Engage Vote button too (I ♥ Blog Engage).

Now I'm debating if I should install the Tweetmeme Retweet button or not. I think that most readers find it easy to use the Wibiya toolbar to retweet my posts. BTW - when I updated my template I did not need to reinstall the Wibiya toolbar, which was really nice.

What do you think, should I install Tweetmeme or will you retweet this post from the Wibiya toolbar?
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Best Blogger Hackers

Creating a blog using Google Blogger has come a long way in the last few months. I've gained a new respect for using this free blogging service because of the upgrades Goggle has made. But I really owe a lot to the dedicated bloggers are that constantly seeking new ways to improve the performance of Blogger by using hacks for Blogger customization.

Get The Wibiya Toolbar For Your Blog

I first heard about the Wibiya toolbar from Rahsheen in his post on Black Web 2.0 called How to Wibiyafy Your Blog.

I remembered seeing these toolbars at the foot of some blogs before but I had no idea how easy it is to install.

I found out more about the Wibiya toolbar in a post from Joella Molson of Blog With Wings in her post titled Ready to Review the Wibiya Toolbar Did You Play With It? Here's some of what Joella had to say about Wibiya in her review:

I found the toolbar to be very versatile and highly configurable by the user. It stays pinned at the bottom of the page where it is mostly out of the way and can optionally be closed by your readers. Users can instantly access applications that encourage users to stay longer, gives them various ways to promote your blog, provide you feedback as well as options to connect to and interact with you and your other visitors.

I agree with both bloggers that you should at least give it a try and here's a video I recorded Using the Wibiya Toolbar - Ms. Ileane Speaks Episode #014

As you can see in the video, I installed the toolbar on my Blogger blog using a widget. If you have a self-hosted WordPress blog you can download the Wibiya plugin. If you don't want to install the plugin you can find an alternate set of instructions from Wibiya Community Powered Support on Get Satifaction


Joella points out one important option that will help with load times. From your Wibiya dashboard in your account be sure to go to Troubleshooting and check Activate Toolbar After Page Load.

Rahsheen's post covers using Wibiya Badges and you can follow the Wibiya Blog to stay up to date with new features and changes to the toolbar. I think it's a great addition to the blog. How about you, have you tried it or do you plan to try it in the future? I value your feedback.

UPDATE: Wibiya has introduced a great Buzz widget that you can add to your toolbar. This Buzz widget lets visitors see your latest Buzz, ReBuzz your Buzzes, follow you on Buzz and add the blog post they are viewing to Buzz!

Blogger Commenting System Is Not On Stable Ground

Historically Blogger, the free blogging software from Google, has received less than favorable reviews for their blog commenting system. IMO this is one area where Blogger pales in comparison to the blog comment software that comes preloaded on free blogs from WordPress.com.

The truth of the matter is, with the standard Blogger commenting system, comments are quite often  lost as if they are being sucked down into the black hole of cyberspace. Blog visitors can carefully craft a witty or helpful comment, select from a pre-filled list of methods for identification, hit enter and - puff their comments are lost and a second request for id verification is launched.

A word of advice to anyone that has decided to use Blogger for their blog. I recommend you install an advanced blog comment system like Intense Debate or Disqus before you publish your first post. I decided to install the Intense Debate commenting system on this blog a few days ago and I’m pleased with the outcome. I was so excited to install Intense Debate that as it turns out I rushed through the process without exploring all of configuration options.

Lucky for me I read several blogs during the course of a day and I came across this post Apply CommentLuv for Blogger Blogs from ICT Trends. As the post explains, what I didn't notice when I signed up for Intense Debate post is that you can install various plugins with your setup including the CommentLuv plugin.

If you are not familiar with CommentLuv, I recommend you read about the importance of adding it to your blog in this post from Kikolani's blog Reasons to Love CommentLuv Blogs.

This is one case in favor of choosing Blogger over WordPress.com for your free blogging software. But no matter what type of blogging software you take advantage of, you should sign up for a free account at CommentLuv so that your posts will be recognized when you leave comments on other blogs with the plugin installed.

Let me know what you think about Intense Debate and CommentLuv and rather you have it installed on your blog or not.

UPDATE: Due to popular demand I created how-to video instructions for installing the Intense Debate commenting system and CommentLuv plugin on Blogger in this post How-To Install CommentLuv on Blogger 

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Fix For Annoying Commenting System on Blogger

Did you ever try to leave a comment on a Blogspot blog and after you hit submit your comment vanished into cyber space? That used to happen on this blog. If it's any consolation to my readers I can say that it would even happen to me when I replied to your comments. I found it very annoying.

That should change after today, because I just installed the IntenseDebate commenting software to help improve audience participation and the increase the level of engagement here at Ms. Ileane's Blog.

Please leave a comment and let me know what you think.

Blogging Goal - Helping New Bloggers in 2010

I started blogging in July of 2009 and I’ve been encouraged by the positive feedback from my readers to continue blogging well into the next decade. In case you don’t know, I have a WordPress.com blog called Ms. Ileane Speaks where I offer tips for blogging, podcasting, Twitter promotions and talk about “anything else that comes to mind”.

Since I was new to blogging at the time, I had no idea what the difference was between the various free services like Blogger and WordPress.com, so I started this blog to discover the advantages of each platform and to keep track. The whole concept was actually a challenge from my long-time friend Kissie who remains committed to her Blogger appropriately named Ohhh....K! but gave in and created a blog on WordPress.com too called Say Whatever I Like. I'm very thankful that she encouraged me to start this project and we help each other every day.

As I began to consider my blogging goals for 2010 I thought about changing the focus of this blog or eliminating it altogether. In the end, I decided to continue this blog with the goal of helping other new bloggers, or newbies as they like to call us, to become familiar with the features of WordPress.com, Blogger and perhaps other free blogging platforms like Posterous. I’d also like to promote this blog more, with the hope that through the use of video tutorials and comparison articles, I can make the decision process that much easier for the next newbie to come along.

One tip that I would like to share now with the readers of this blog (newbie or not) is the benefits of joining the Blog Engage community of bloggers. Blog Engage a site exclusively dedicated to helping bloggers. Here’s the description from Brian, owner of Blog Engage:

Blog Engage allows you to submit your Blog Article(s) that will be reviewed by all and will be promoted by me or our visitors to the main page.

Take a look at the video I created 2 weeks after joining the Blog Engage community in November. This is by far the most popular video on my YouTube Channel.

Let me know what you think, or share your resolutions and blogging goals for 2010. If you are a new blogger who has questions, share them with me and if I don't know the answer, I'll help find it.

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Blogger Struggles Against Offerings from WordPress

I continue to run across blog articles discussing the pros and cons of using  Blogger and WordPress (both free and self-hosted). Though it might not be fair to compare the paid WordPress to the free Blogger platform, some of the points made in this first post apply to WordPress.com, (the free service) also.

From Blog Godown - Why You Should Convert Your Blogger Blog to Self Hosted Wordpress provides an argument that I don't see often:

Multi-Author Blogs and Guest Blogging

Guest Blogging and Multi Author blogging is a mess in Blogger, because there is no way to moderate posts submitted by other authors. In comparison to this, Wordpress has the ability to moderate posts and also assign roles to content submitters as Authors, Contributors or Admin. This way you can easily control and decide which authors should be moderated and which should be allowed to have full control.

 Gautam, the author further explains in his reply to my comment:

That is because i have faced problems with guest blogging in blogger and wordpress has a lot of features that make it a better platform for guest and multi author blogging

Another point from Gautam's post addresses the issue of SEO which enables your blog to be found by users of search engines like Google and Bing.

In Blogger, you can do SEO for images and Posts by adding the the meta keywords and alt tags for each post manually. 

For those that are familiar with meta-tagging, please let me know how that is working for you.

In a post from Robert Bravery of Integral Web Solutions Which is better Blogger.com vs. Wordpress.com? cites ease of blog importing as one of many reasons to use WordPress.com

Blog Import: In Blogger - limited availability to import and export only in the same blogging platform; in WordPress - you can import from several other platforms, including from Blogger.

Michael Aulia of Craving Tech wrote an article for NuffNang Australia called Better Blogging - Wordpress vs. Blogger offers another free Blogger vs. paid WordPress comparison. However, he points out something worth mentioning, about adding "static pages" which is also true for the free version of WordPress.

• Static Pages

With WordPress, it’s easy to add custom pages such as “About me”, “Contact”, and other pages. All WordPress themes automatically display all pages so you don’t have to do anything to display your new pages on the blog.

I'll end this post on a lighter note with an argument from my friend Kissie, from the Ohhh.... K!
in a post called What November Taught Me. Let me explain first that in this excerpt is taken from Blogger and she is talking about...well see for yourself.

I purchased business cards to announce a vision, promote this site, aim for an audience, and have my contact information handy to share. What I didn’t consider when I added the site was everyone who gets the card could very well visit the site….that means I can’t WRITE ABOUT THEM and boy do I have some things to say. Of course I dedicated this page to my grandchildren so I have to be nice and sweet and try to always share a nugget of wisdom. So, the lesson is to start a new blog and not tell my friends and family about that one. It’s on now! (That’s slang for I am going to let it rip.)

I'm looking forward to Kissie's move to her new home at WordPress.com. Feel free to share any insights on the Blogger vs. WordPress issue in the comments below!

Please visit my primary blog Ms. Ileane Speaks and follow me on Twitter @Ileane 

Tag Surfer - Blogger vs. WordPress.com

I'm more familiar with WordPress.com, therefore it will be better for me to discuss the WordPress.com features that I find useful first. Eventually I might find that Blogger has similar tools that I am not aware of. I'll start things off with my Tool of the Day - Tag Surfer.

In WordPress.com you can create tags which appear at the end of your post. You create them yourself, so you can spell them however you like, but if you make a typo it's on you. Adding and deleting them is quite simplistic. The very first post you add tags to WordPress.com will automatically put those tags on your tag surfer list but you can change them as you wish.

From the My Account dashboard click on tag surfer and you will see a list of posts from other WordPress.com bloggers using the same tags. This is great, because it gives you the opportunity to read what others are thinking about the same topic that you have interest in and it's a great way to connect. The biggest advantage for me is that you can also add something to your tag list that you are thinking about blogging about or that your friend is blogging about or - just anything else your heart desires.

In the last 2 days I found 2 very resourceful blogs this way.
http://theoldsilly.com/
http://bloodywellwrite.com/
I would not have found these without the tag surfer tool, well at least not as quickly and easily. You can set the parameters of the tag list, such as how many posts will be returned and how many days in the past you would like to search. I like this flexibility because I had way too many posts appear when I tagged Jupiter (turns out there are tons of Jupiter lovers out there), and John Coltrane. So I just deleted them from my tag surfer list (which did not remove the tag from my posts) and added something new to the list like Bing.

If Blogger has a similar tool, I can't wait to see the results. But at this rate, I'll never find it because I am going back over to my WordPress.com blog. Bye for now.

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Blogging Tips Website

I found an interesting website that I'm sure any blogger will enjoy visiting. BloggingTips.com has beginner's guides, books, forums, useful links and more.

But most importanly they have a post called - you guessed it Blogger or Wordpress. After all, this is why you came here, isn't it? I want you to hear it from all of the blogging authorities, not just me.

Blogger or Wordpress provides the pros and cons of both formats to help you make the decision to migrate or stay right where you are.

The posts on this site are great for retweeting too.

Have a blessed day and stop back soon.

6 Reasons Why You Should Use Blogger (NOT!)

I ran across this post today called 6 Reason Why You Should Use Blogger on the Windows Talk blog. The first sentence starts "The most popular blogging platform available is Wordpress."

Duh!

But the really funny thing is, the article has a post date of Sept. 1, 2009 and today is the 5th of Sept. So far NO ONE has tweeted this post, take a look:

Here is a vote for WordPress from Lisa

Blogger vs. Wordpress

I started blogging about 2 weeks ago using wordpress.com. My friend is using blogger and doesn't have time to explore all of the features right now so she challenged me to investigate and share my experience in a blog. I'd love nothing more than to be known as the Blog Queen of my inner-circle so extra time is the least of my worries. In fact my biggest (computer related) problem right now is trying to remember all of these frigging passwords! But I digress.

For the next few weeks (or however long it takes) I will set out to compare the two different blogging platforms including their themes, templates, tags, gizmos, comments, gadgets and widgets to see which one I like best. Ironically I know that my friend will end up sticking with blogger no matter what the outcome of my findings are. So now you are thinking that this just might be a waste of my precious time....


NAW.


That's what friends are for.