Tag Archive: post

When is the best time to blog?

Fairy Blog Mother: blogging help

Fairy Blog Mother

Everybody has different body clocks, so they choose their own time to write their posts. Some people get their inspiration first thing in the morning, others late at night once they’ve been suitably stimulated by various happenings during the day. Of course you can write your post whenever suits you, only to save it in draft for later editing or, if you’re sure it is ready, schedule it to go out at a more appropriate time.

So when is it a good time to publish? I find this varies quite considerably, according to which particular media I have ‘fed’ my blog post to, so it can be read by the audience that populates it.

It all depends when my readership is more likely to be participating on social media. With Twitter the pace is so fast your post could easily be superseded by other news as soon as it hits the Twitter-stream – unless your followers have set up their own streams which includes you in it. That’s how I keep abreast of the worthwhile Twitters so I can interact with them and follow their blog posts whenever they are published.

You need to work out when is the most favourable time your fellow social networking friends are going to be around to read your posts. Do you catch the early birds, the mid-morning browsers, the lunchtime feeders, the afternoon skivers, or the evening perusers. Ideally you need to schedule your post’s feed so it either catches the most popular time, or multiple entries to get a better chance of being read at another part of the day.

Feeds to other social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn will allow your post to be visible for longer before it is usurped by its successor, and subscription posts that are sent to email inboxes or search engine reader pages will languish there quite happily until they are read.

And a post’s journey is not finished with the subscriber – the practice of sharing posts, through Twitter, social bookmarking sites and natural referral techniques will prolong the life of a post so it can reach another form of readership.

So the answer is to find that ‘optimum’ time that will spark off the chain reaction to send your post on its merry way, as it transverses across the world wide web in pursuit of both new and tried and trusted audiences.

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What does a forward slash signify?

Fairy Blog Mother

Driving to work today, a relevation came to me. For years I had just accepted the forward slash as being parts of a URL or web-address which I didn’t need to question. They seemed to be like the mortar that held the bricks together.

But now I understand them as gateways for the server (the hosting area where your domain name is held) to direct visitors (or spiders) to another portion (file/section/page/post) of your blog.

For example, the URL for this post http://fairyblogmother.co.uk/what-does-a-forward-slash-signify/ shows the domain name (the web address of this blog) followed by a door (the forward slash) to go to the page (the blog post) which contains the above title. (Don’t forget that each post has its own page and therefore a URL allocated to it.) The forward slash also allows these elements to be separated, comprehended and archived.

Let’s look at this URL for the beginning of my WordPress.com blog course: http://fairyblogmother.co.uk/com/create-a-blog/.  First is the domain name of this blog, with a door (slash) leading to the parent page ‘com’, with another door/slash which leads to a child page ‘create a blog’, with another slash ready should a grandchild page become available.

If you wrote the full URL without slashes, the server wouldn’t understand that a) the information was separated and b) which areas (page or file) it was to go to, and there would be no methods of conveying the blog user in the right direction.

Well, that’s my interpretation of the forward slash – what’s yours?

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How to put a video onto a WordPress.com blog

Fairy Blog Mother

One thing about a WordPress.com blog is that generally it doesn’t accept HTML code or script if you want to add in special features such as a sign-in box for your newsletter in the sidebar, or a coded badge for your Twitter-stream, for example.

refers to .com blog

But there are exceptions. One is for the chicklit logo for RSS so subscribers can follow your posts through a search engine reader, and another is to post in videos from YouTube.com.

So how do you add a video to your post in a WordPress.com blog? Well, first you need to upload your video into YouTube.com because once this is accomplished, you will be given a URL for your video and code for your website (and also your blog).

I’m going to use an old video I made for my business many years ago, which I have buried away in YouTube.com.

Click on ‘Edit’:

And then ‘View on Video Page’:

And click on the ‘Embed’ button:

This is where you can get the code for your video. If you are posting it into your website, you can play around with the colour scheme and screen size too!  But now we need to go into your blog’s dashboard (see ‘How to accessing a blog’):

Here is the WordPress.com blog I use to show the examples in my visual blogging e-courses you can access from the Free Resources Library in my sidebar. Let’s create a post (see ‘Writing Posts’):

I’m going to concentrate on using your video’s URL given to you by YouTube.com first. You can upload that via the Video icon at the top of the post-writing box:

Once you’ve clicked on that, go to the ‘From URL’ tab:

And you will see a space for your video’s URL. Go back to YouTube.com:

And copy your video’s URL from the browser at the top of your webpage. Then go back to your blog and post it into the URL box:

Click on ‘Insert into Post’:

Where you will see the URL correctly displayed. (If you just paste the URL directly into your post-writing box without doing this procedure, it will just become a link that goes directly back to your YouTube.com page which contains your video.)

Now click on ‘Preview’ to see the video window:

If you would like to use the code given by YouTube.com as an alternative method, here’s how. Go back to YouTube.com:

Highlight and copy the code of your video, and go back to your post-writing box in your blog and paste in the code where you want your video screen to be:

Here’s when WordPress.com allows HTML script to happen properly. Click on ‘Preview’ to see your video screen:

Although it looks the same, you’ll see the sentence before reminding you I’ve used code instead of the URL.

Now all you need to do is to finish writing your post, add in your tags and allocate your categories, and publish!

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