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I have begun a 31 days to build a better blog challenge.

Today I am working through the preliminary information before starting the daily tasks.  As I bought the entire 31 day work book, being me, I may take the tasks out of sequence, and do them within my own time frame, along with a few ideas of my own, within these 31 days and I will share these under my ‘Blogging’ tab, so other learning to blog, users can read ‘how I am doing it’, and I hope they also will head over to the problogger.com web site and read up as they are the experts at this, not me, I am just the beginner at this, sharing my  learning curve.  

During this preliminary phase of the challenge, I purchased my own domain name for my artslim, ‘The art of living and slimming blog and I chose, artslim.org  and I contacted Melbourne IT the company I purchased  my kathy-shell.com domain from many years back when I was a professional artist, and I’ve so far succeeded in having my weebly,  kathy-shell web site redirected to Melbourne IT, and I am now going through the paper work and need to go out today to fax a request for my Registry Key recovery so I can redirect this Kathy-shell.com domain name to my pro weebly  account, domain.   I now own three of my own domain names outright, artslim.org, gray-nomad.com and Kathy-shell.com and the remainder, are all free domains with .weebly.com as the ending.  I own each of these purchased domains for the next 5 years, I’m all for the discounted special priceJ.

LOL, if you are ‘lost’ with that talk, just attempt to understand Technorati blog geek jargon. I tried very hard to do this yesterday as part of my focused 31 days to improve my blogs, and I have today decided after achieving a part way success with inserting Technorati tags, to put it all in the ‘too hard basket, at this stage and to make faster advancement in areas that speak in language where you do not need to know ‘how to do it’ in order to understand the directions on ‘how to do it’.  I have always preferred the KISS Principle.

So getting into areas that I do understand and with the assistance of the easy to use click on and drop into place, interface within my weebly pro web and blog hosting account, I have been able to put in an easy to use and gain weekly reports from, free web site hits counter, using sitemeter . I have no idea if this is the best one, I was recommended it by a friend, I found the weekly emailed to me reports of how many people are looking at my web sites and how long they look and how many pages are viewed is all I need to know, I find it easy for me to use and non invasive of my readers privacy.  I simply placed this meter in the side bar of each of my web site-blogs using the html, click on and drop tool in my weebly  hosted web site and blog.  You can try out a weebly web site and or blog for free.  If you tried it once before, months ago, take another look, I am a very happy user, I paid for a 2 year pro subscription that gives me 10 professionally hosted web sites or blogs for ‘coffee money, and when I think of the almost a thousand dollars a year I paid each year for the professional hosting by Web Central, before I understood about these lower cost, US based web and blog sites, I am laughing.    OK, to Web Central’s credit they have an excellent 24 hour/7 days a week, technical problems help line.  The shopping cart add on was expensive and weebly has made shopping carts available as an extra, included in the cost I have already paid for my pro weebly account.  

 Before I found weebly, liked it, got used to it being slower to work in, than the high priced web sites, I also tried the US based godaddy , using WordPress, but again I found that system too complicated for my simple minded where computer speak is concerned, ability.  Weebly is simple to use and effective, J, Go weebly.   Now in WordPress’s favour, I do realize that if I was using WordPress I might not be finding it so difficult to learn how to insert Technorati tags in the form I had hoped to.  LOL, well one of my friends tells me that Technorati is ‘on the way out’, LOL, I can’t find any evidence to that effect  and I should not get too hopeful, it will possibly be replaced by   super blog geek speak TechnorKathycan’tunderstandorati J, LOL.

Back once more to what is within my KISS understanding range. 

OAs part of the preliminary actions for my 31 days to build a better blog challenge I have been advised to insert Google Analytics into each of my blogs.  In weebly, this is easy, I simply go to my Settings tab at the top of the page and there is a Search Engine Optimization (SEO) tab to click on and in that there is a box where you drop in the code that Google analytics, makes for each of your blogs, and you simply drop that into this box, made for this purpose, within your weebly blog or web site.  Easypeasy J, the way I like it.

Now I have no idea if weebly is the best blog site out there, I suspect it might not be as it’s far from the most commonly used one.  I wanted more than what I could get on a free blog site and something that was easy to use yet looked good and provided what I needed at the time I started blogging, which was only back in Autumn this year ~ 2009.  There will no doubt be many ore great blog sites, it’s best to look around, ask and search for a few opinions and try the free versions before you commit because once your sure of your site, it is usually cheaper to pay for several years hosting, I got my monthly hosting cost down to the cost of a cup of one coffee a month to run four predominately blog sites and four shopping cart based web sites, from the one pro weebly account, per month and I think that that was the best web bargain I‘ve ever come across.

Back to the preliminary tasks for this 31 day challenge:
It is suggested that you enrol yourself as a member of the forum and use it.  That’s always great advice when you’re learning anything.  I looked for advice on how to insert those Technorati tabs but haven’t found that information in the forum, I’m hoping it will be explained within my work book I have purchased.
 


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