Monday, October 31, 2011

What to Do During October Snow in NYC (or A Bit of Blogger Maintenance)

This past weekend we had snow in NYC:

What month is it again???
Yes, I'm as shocked as you are! I also heard on the news this morning that approximately 1,000 trees where lost in Central Park vs. maybe 100 from rainshower Hurricane Irene. Wow! 

My summer clothes are sitting in a pile in the corner of my bedroom while I keep putting off the seasonal switch out, but now it looks like I really can't wait any longer. 

Ughhhh.

Anyway, while I sat indoors Saturday watching the wintry mix come down I made a few cosmetic changes to the blog. I'm detailing them here for those of you who blog as well and may want to make similar minor tweaks to your blogs:
  • Imported my old blog posts - I recently found my first blog from 2006 so I went ahead and brought those posts here using this tutorial. You'll now see posts from 2006-2008 on my archive to the left which brings me to the next tweak . . .
  • Reverted back to expandable archive - I've always liked this archive format the best, but took it away cause I couldn't figure out how to bring back the bullets after I did tweaking on the background color a while back to better visually incorporate ads. I finally figured it out! Also, although I have LinkedWithin below each post, I think this archive format helps my readers see more post titles that might catch their eye.
  • Adjusted my sidebar width - ads were getting chopped off. Not a good look for my relationship with advertisers.
  • Fixed/cleaned up buttons - I can't stress enough to fellow bloggers how important it is check your buttons/links from time to time. For example, I had no idea my Picket Fence Blog button was taking readers to another blog I had never heard of. Oops! I also slid the Linked Within buttons down.
  • Added Comment Luv for Blogger - after getting a comment on a recent post that it was difficult to comment I decided to try this out. Let me know how you like it. It only works for new posts or posts with no previous comments. Old posts will have the traditional Blogger commenting format. 
    • The last time there was difficulty posting I removed Captcha - which I think all bloggers should remove as explained here - so I'm hoping this is another great step to #1: making commenting super easy for everyone and #2: making it easier for you to know when I reply to your comments. 
    • I also added a comment indicator at the top of posts courtesy of this tutorial, but I'm still having some problems getting it to sync with Intense Debate to tally properly. I've been searching around the internet and playing with HTML code for hours to no avail so if anyone has any suggestions on how to fix it please let me know! 
  • Added the social media toolbar - this is the one that most bloggers use to make it easier to share posts; I got rid of the Twitter button up above near the post titles. I've seen debates on where to place this for maximized usage, and I'm going to see if the bottom works out better.
I do have a few other major tweaks I'd like to make eventually such as updating my color scheme/template and I still keep debating moving to Wordpress, but for now I'm happy with these minor tweaks.

Let me know what you think or if you have any suggested tweaks I should try and as always this blog is best viewed in Firefox.

Happy reading!