Step 1: Tweaks, Comments, Feeds & Firefox

I have been doing a few things to the blog since we last spoke.

a) I have played with the color scheme a bit. The green of the template just didn't do it for me, so I went for a violet scheme. Now I have a confession to make: I am relatively familiar by now with changing css templates due to my previous blogs. Not that familiar, I should add, but enough to tweak the template around a bit. So my Advice Number 1: CSS. Unless you are madly in love with the blog templates out there, it pays immensely to learn some basic css and html. Nothing fancy, just basic things. A good way to learn is to play around with a few things. But, Advice Number 2: If you do this, and you're not entirely sure what you're doing, download the initial template first. This way if you screw up massively (I have done on several occassions!!!) you can refer back to the template and restore the code. Advice Number 3: Personalize your blog: try to customize the blog in a way that expresses who you are. Of course, unless you're some guru it's hard to know who you are, so just follow your gut instinct and initial reactions. Advice Number 4: Customizing only goes so far if you go with a pre-drawn template (I STRONGLY advise you to go for those. Unless you have millions of hours on your hands, templates do at least half of the work for you.) Anyway, at some point you have to 'let go'. Spending huge amounts of time customizing your template detracts from your time to build the content and promote your website. If you are generally pleased with it, just get it out there. Hopefully you can get some tweaks in later.

b) I have took the comments off. Some smart bloke I read, and I can't remember his address :( - I will try to look it up tomorrow as well, he had some really great things to say about blogging. If it's very likely that you won't have a lot of comments in the initial stage it's better to take them off at the beginning.

c) I got my feed through FeedBurner. What the hell is a feed? Well, it's basically this little programme that allows your reader to subscribe to the blog and receive all updates. In other words, it's like a standard newsletter you receive. Now, this is the good news about the feed. The problem is that, apart from the yahoo email, I haven't noticed any other email programs that import the feed directly into the email . I don't want to scathe anyone, but for me traveling to some other page (like Google Reader) to see a feed is too much for my time, patience and opened tabs. I'm not paid by Yahoo to promote their email service (oooh I wish), but they don't have to: it's my favorite. I have accounts with two others and they don't compare.
FeedBurner - I'm testing this. I'm a bit wary that Blogger induced me to sign up for it (the almighty Google has spoken), but I will give it a shot. I heard several testimonials that it was great. We'll see.

d) Oh! one other thing. Again, no advertising included (the gods of Yahoo, Google and Firefox and IE are completely oblivious of my existence), but I use Firefox. I used to be with IE like everyone else, but then again, I followed Firefox because of their ability to open a gazillion number of tabs in one browser window. For a person that frantically searches the internet like I do, it's mighty important. Plus, they offer the option of saving your tabs till next time. Every time I open the IE browser, it takes me back to square one. It's like Sisyphus for me. There are other pluses (like the built in download manager) but the two mentioned above made me opt for Firefox.