Hicham Maged's blog Inquisitive curiosity paves knowledge path

A New Look for the Blog

Assalam Alaikum wa rahmat Allah.
Peace be upon you dear visitor.

Blogger: New Look for the Blog

After few months of blogging, I finally got a “new look” for Stairway to Heaven (my blogspot blog over blogger). Let me start by saying that I do not usually complain from Blogger’s default templates collection; however I did not feel that they are matching with me since everyone has his (and here) own style as you know, therefore I decided to personalize a template on blogger.

In this blog entry, you shall find my a small guide in the form of my blogging tips on how to get a new look by personalizing blogspot blogger templates, blog syndication, publicizing your blog, and finally blog listing.

A. Blogger Blog Templates
If you are looking for new templates, I suggest the following two sites:

• Blogger-Templates.
• Blogger Templates.

B. Blog Syndication
Syndication is a process of generating a feed for contents of any page found on any website that have a platform supporting this operation. The benefit is simply providing your blog’s content for reading on “news aggregators” software or on-line news feed services.

The two popular formats are “Atom feed” and “RSS feed” , so wherever you find any of this icons, you can figure out that this site provides feed/syndication service for its contents. Google Blogger service is providing atom syndication (.xml) for all the hosted blogs by default; you can reach it by placing atom.xml after your blog’s url (yourblogurl.blogspot.com/atom.xml) However, if you want to have an RSS syndication (.rss), blogger suggests “FeedBurner” which I tried myself and it is great. Here are the links:

• Blogger Help on Syndication.
• FeedBurner.
• Wikipedia: News Aggregator List in English.

C. Publicizing your Blog
After by, you can subscribe in “web-based readers” which make anyone read your blog whenever it is updated. It’s great, free and based on the syndication services and more customized with the RSS feed generated via FeedBurner. These are online based services and hence no special software is required to download for running them. Here is the list:

• Bloglines: www.bloglines.com
• Bot A blog: www.botablog.com
• NewsGator: www.newsgator.com
• Pluck: www.pluck.com
• Rojo: www.rojo.com
• FeedPark: www.feedpark.com
• Yahoo! RSS: publisher.yahoo.com/rssguide
• MSN RSS: rss.msn.com/more.armx

D. Blog Listing
You can list your blog for free within special directories which deal with blogs listing only. This one is based on the syndication of your blog, so when you register your blog under your desired category, you can use the default atom feed .xml or the .rss feed generated by FeedBurner. Here is the list:

• BlogArama: www.blogarama.com
• BlogCatalog: www.blogcatalog.com
• Blog Top Sites: www.blogtopsites.com
• Globe of Blogs: www.globeofblogs.com
• The Weblog Review: www.theweblogreview.com

Finally, this is my humble journey while searching for new templates for my blogger blog. I wish everything is clear now for anyone who is interested in giving a his/her blog a new look.

Enjoy your time while blogging time

Salam,
Hicham

Important Note: This post was originally written when I was hosting my blog over Blogger (blogspot), so the information placed might be outdated or links for some services might be changed or even stopped.

Tags: blogging tips
Categories: Tech
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