Customizing Your Blog

This page contains tips on how to customize your developer.* blog to make it stand out more as *your* blog. I'll be adding new content to this page as I think of new tricks and add blog-related features to the site. Please feel free to post or email your comments, requests, or suggestions.

--Dan

How to set up a blogroll

Note: this is not quite working yet.

A blogroll is a list of links that appears on the same page as any of your blog posts. Generally, a blogroll is formatted as a list of blogger names and/or blog titles, each of which is a link to the main page of the blog.

To create or edit your blogroll (which is empty by default), go to your user profile and click the Edit tab. Once inside your profile, click the Blog Information tab. The Blogroll field is a large multiline text field.

To create your blogroll, you will need to type in a little raw html. It's pretty simple, though. We ask that you restrict your code to the two tags illustrated below:

<div class="blogrollhead">Daniel Read's Blogroll</div>
<a class="blogrollitem" href="" title=""></a>
<a class="blogrollitem" href="" title=""></a>
<a class="blogrollitem" href="" title=""></a>

The first tag is a div tag with blogrollhead set as the class. Inside this div tag you can put a short title for your blogroll.

The other tags are a tags (three of them), which at the moment are empty to make it easier to see how they're structured. (Also, you can copy and paste the above code to start your blogroll.) Notice that the class attribute of each a tag is set to blogrollitem. The link goes in the href attribute, and optionally you can put something in the title attribute.

If you want to do your fellow blogger the most good SEO-wise, link to the main page of the blog (not to an individual post), and put something interesting in the title attribute, using some good search keywords if you can, but not forcing it too much by just listing a bunch of keywords.

Here's the same example filled in:

<div class="blogrollhead">Daniel Read's Blogroll</div>
<a class="blogrollitem" href="http://www.abcblog.com" title="ABC Blog is All About XYZ">ABC Blog</a>
<a class="blogrollitem" href="http://www.myfriendbob.com" title="My friend Bob's software development blog">My Friend Bob</a>
<a class="blogrollitem" href="http://www.mybosshasablog.com" title="My boss's blog - please read it">My Boss's Blog</a>

After you have filled in your blogroll, save your profile. You can test it out by browsing to one of your own blog posts. If you are working on the blogroll iteratively, you may find it easier to open two browser windows. Also, beware of browser caching if you are repeatedly editing the same form.