Category: Blogger template

قالب جديد للمدونة

مرحبا عزيزي القارئ وأهلا بك في تدوينة جديدة.

لقد قمت أخيرًا بتحديث قالب مدونتي للشكل الحديث، ربما تتساءل عن السبب الذي دفعني للإبقاء على الشكل القديم لفترة طويلة؟


في البداية: القالب القديم يعجبني للغاية (ولا يزال يعجبني في الواقع)، لكنه قديم الطراز للغاية.. وأنا متأكد أنك تعرف المثل القديم: كول ما يعجبك وألبس ما يعجب الناس. لذلك إن أردت تعزيز المشاهدات يجب أن يكون قالب مدونتي ذا شكل مقبول وعصري.

الشكل القديم للمدونة، أرقد بسلام يا حنفي

ثانيًا: لدي العديد من التخصيصات التي أضعها على القوالب الخاصة بي، والتي إن لم تتوفر في قالب فسأهجره مهما كان رائعًا، وهي على سبيل المثال لا الحصر:

 أهم التخصيصات التي تجعل القالب مقبولا لدي

1. طريقة لعرض التدوينات المشابهة أسفل التدوينة الحالية، الطريقة الحالية ليست مثالية، لكنها أفضل من لا شيء، أفضل الطرق التي تكون من داخل المدونة ولا تعتمد على روابط خارجية تسرق تصنيف الموقع.

2. صفحة اتصل بي مهمة جدًا لدي، ويجب أن تتواجد في كل قالب.

3. عرض الاعلانات بطريقة جيدة وواضحة.

4. بقاء الشريط الجانبي واضحًا طول وقت عرض المدونة لأن كل الادوات عليه.

5. الشريط العلوي الذي يعرض أهم الصفحات والروابط.

6. أفضل قوالب غوغل، لأن القوالب المجانية المصممة من طرف ثالث تكون ثقيلة ومحملة بالاعلانات.

باختصار أفضل الشكل الذي يجعل المدونة أقرب للموقع منه للمدونة الشخصية.

بعض التغييرات الجديدة

لن أستعرض عدد مشاهداتي للعلن بعد اﻵن، لكنني لن أكسر عادتي القديمة في الاحتفال بالمشاهدات المهمة.

المشاركات الشائعة قد لا تعود للظهور كما كانت، ليست مدونة الجوازات والمولدات!!

اللون اﻷزرق واﻷسود يسود الموضوع، ألا يذكرك بشيء؟

عملية التعديل ليست بصعوبة تصميم موقع ويب من الصفر، لكنها ليست بسهولة فتح صفحة فيسبوك مثلا..

في الختام

إن كانت أي من التغييرات تروق لك وتود إضافتها لمدونتك، فأذكر ذلك لي في تعليق وسأرسل لك كيفية تعديل قالبك بالشكل الملائم.

ما رأيك عزيزي القارئ؟ هل تفضل هذا الشكل أكثر؟ أم الشكل القديم؟ شاركني برأيك في قسم التعليقات في المدونة.

How to be a consistent blogger and have fun doing it?

Many of my long time readers keep asking me this question: How do you manage to stay consistent with blogging? To be honest! Blogging isn’t as easy as sending a tweet or updating your Facebook status! But it is very enjoyable and more self satisfying than the two!

The excitement of beginnings

Let’s face it, many people get so exited at the beginning, and would spend hours on end choosing the blog template and colors, customizing it with cool widgets, some go as far as setting a proper sitemap and getting their SEO on. And then nothing, for weeks then for months!! What happens is that early burst of excitement ended and they found themselves with an empty blog with no topics and no readers, and then they abandon the blog once and for all! I know this happens very often, because I’ve been there more than once!

The joy of a new beginning

After a strong start people tend to lost interest fast and drift away from blogging.

Over the next few steps I’ll cover some things I had to overcome to be more consistent which I believe many people face whenever blogging and would like a little help with that.

Success doesn’t happen overnight

If success would happen over night it wouldn’t have been so satisfying would it?
Like many things in life blogging needs some work before you can see the results, luckily it doesn’t take much for your blog to stand up on it’s own and gain interest, besides blogging is so much fun that “work” isn’t actually work when you look at it!

 

Goals and success

 

Set goals for yourself on your blog

Like a successful career or a successful family life, you need to plan your blogging and set clear goals, your goals could be some of these: Create more posts. Reach a certain number of posts. Reach a certain number of page views. All of the above! Any thing you like! And you need to celebrate achieving your blogging goals! (I’ll be talking about it in a bit).

Blog about your passion subjects

If you are interested in sports, fashion, media or politics. Then it is your lucky day! Each of these subjects make a great blog! And those are just example! You can blog about almost anything! And since you are passionate about it. Then writing would be so much fun! Writing about a passion subject is a great deal of fun, you will look forward to blogging and it will be something you look forward to on a busy week!

Link blogging with a daily habit

It’s always a good idea to link an existing habit of yours with a new one you are trying to develop, if you are a coffee person then maybe you want to try to write a post while having a tasty cup of Joe, or maybe blog after coming home from a good run and a cold shower! Soon enough the two habits will become one and you find yourself sitting to blog without even thinking of it. Make sure to keep your drink (coffee or tea) away from the keyboard/laptop or you might spill the contents of the cup on the laptop, ouch!

Enjoy your coffee while blogging
Enjoy your coffee while blogging

Dealing with some minor nuisances

If you feel blogging is a heavy chore then you need to read on! Clearly identify what bothers you and makes blogging less enjoyable. Could be that your chair is uncomfortable and causes you back pain? Or that your computer is painfully slow and makes blogging a living hell, I’ll be posting soon on how to speed up your computer with little to no cost! 
Or that simply you don’t like the place you sit at, then simply go somewhere else!  Now that we took care of the annoying bugs that many bloggers have or suffer from silently on daily basis, lets get to the fun stuff!!

Create a flow

Once you got your minor issues worked out. You can finally sit and work on your blogging. Either it’s the living room shed on lazy afternoon, or your favorite coffee shop downtown, or a park near you that you always feel good when you visit or drop by it for an afternoon walk. Where ever you feel motivated to sit and create is fine!
As long you create a consistent habit that happens naturally without forcing then you are on the right track.
Setting the place and time will help you stay consistent with your blogging!

Don’t chase perfection

It’s unachievable! And you will achieve nothing! Being a blogger is different from being a writer or a journalist as you get a chance to edit your work without the world falling on your head, and since you use a blogging platform you can edit as many times as you like without “stopping the press” and causing a problem! Stop procrastinating and publish those drafts, they are good enough!

 

Perfection
Nothing is perfect

 

Something to add to your resume

When preparing a resume its always helpful to add some interests and hobbies to give a little bit about your personality to your potential employer. Any human resource manager would be impressed to see that you blog on regular basis. Not only that you will gain respect for what you do (as many people aren’t consistent enough to do that) your chances of getting certain jobs will increase compared to others with the same level of skill and experience! (coming from a personal experience).

Did someone say money?

Money is the power that moves the world. Love it or hate it we all need money to live. You can make money off your blog with some basic advertise strategy such as Google Adsense. If your blog is a heavily visited one then you can make a decent amount of money doing what you love and having fun connecting with your fans. That’s inspiring 😉 Even without money involvement, the sense of satisfaction of knowing that your writing could inspire another human, help them solve a problem or change their lives to the better is the best feeling ever! Blogging will help you reach people you never dreamed you could ever reach and have a positive impact on their lives!
Write with good intent and good things will happen!

Money
Money $$$

Be proud with what you do

You work hard on your blog, so its OK to brag a little about it (don’t be a jerk and ruin it for the rest of us!) It’s a blogger’s duty to offer a helping hand to his readers and be sociable and modest with them Encourage other people to blog too! You might think you aren’t that good, but compared to an absolute novice you know a lot! Get them started on the basics and offer some support and that is guaranteed to rekindle your love with blogging!

 

Connect with other bloggers

Seems like a given, but some  bloggers isolate themselves from society and don’t communicate enough with fellow bloggers. It would be a good idea of get together with other bloggers who share your interests, it will inspire you to write more and grow better as a blogger in general!

Connect with other bloggers
Connect with other bloggers

Reward yourself

It maybe silly! But offering yourself a little reward after writing a post and publishing it could wonders! It depends on you and what you think of as a reward. It could be something simple like a candy bar or something more meaningful as a walk on the beach (if you happen to live near one).
If a reward can encourage a student to study, why not you?

Have fun blogging!

Blogging should be something you enjoy doing! An escape from everyday stress and drama and a change from your daily working pace (unless you work as a professional blogger, then I have some bad news for you!).

Blogging is fun
Blogging is fun

 

You are making a difference

Since you are blogging about the experiences you had and your journey through life, you are helping someone else without even knowing it! When blogging the world is your stage and you may never know who read your post and felt better about themselves and decided to change their lives for the better. Therefore you are making a difference and it’s only a matter of time before someone tells you that! It will make your day, trust me 😉

I hope these pointers help you jump start your blogging career! Share them with your friends and family, and let the blogging spirit spread!

75,000 views!

Today I reached 75,000 views!

Today is one of the days I feel my hard work is paying off!
It’s an important step towards a goal I set for myself, the 100,000 views, three quarters of the way.

reaching 75000 on my blog

I’m also really close to reaching 15,000 followers on Twitter, which is a huge part of my promotion success!
Since I don’t want to be overly talkative on the blog, I wanted to use this post as a total update, I’ve been experimenting with several templates lately, and until I can find something decent I’ll stick to the basic template, I’m afraid I’ll be sticking on it for a while!

As for the domain issue some of my readers reached out to me saying that the domain is down, and that’s true! My LTT hosted domain went down and I’m yet to fix it, I’m still unsure how to add it to the blog, this makes me rethink the whole “third party domain thing”.

An update

I haven’t been able to restore the domain, so I just configured it to redirect to here until it expires, and I don’t think I’ll be renewing it.
The contact page hasn’t been working for a few days (thanks for letting me know!) And I fixed it by not touching it at all!

The simple template proved to be far too simple, I had to change it a little bit, I found a perfect template but had some issues I had to fix, and the developer wasn’t replying to anyone who contacted him, so I came up with the one you see now. I hope you like it.
Last but not least, linkedwithin.
For some reason, linked within is showing posts with the new domain and the old one together, and even tho I made a redirect, it doesn’t work with the posts, just the home page.
I tried contacting them several times, but they didn’t respond to my initial e-mails that I sent over a year ago, and didn’t respond now..
So Linkedwithin had to go to. 


Thanks for being a part of this journey! See you at 80,000 views

Tell me what you have in mind in the comments section below, if you can help with the domain issue or have a cool template for me.

LinkWithin not showing similar posts fixed!

LinkWithin is a widget that appears on your blog and shows similar posts to the post you are on, it’s a good way to show more content and get the users engaged, I tried adding it to my site and it didn’t work!
It wasn’t showing any posts!
In this post I’m going to show you how to fix it with one easy step!



This tutorial doesn’t explain how to install LinkedWithin, it’s explained thoroughly on the site itself when you are installing, so take a moment to look at it before jumping in!

 Cause #1: Third party domains

At first make sure you are using a blogger domain! Don’t use the domain you bought from the hosting company, your blogspot blog must be a sub domain of blogspot.com in order for Linkwithin to work!
Seems basic? Check your settings again!

Cause #2: Must be placed directly under the post!

There are many places to place widgets in blogger, at first when you add Linkwithin it will be added to the sidebar, drag it and place it under the post, not in the footer! Under the post as in the image below!

This should fix the problem right away! And LinkWithin will show posts in minutes!
For me it worked, too much I’m afraid!
LinkedWithin was showing posts on the home page, something I didn’t expect! And the fix for that is also very easy!

3. Fix LinkedWithin showing posts on Home page

Go to Blogger Your blog Template Edit HTML
From there search for LinkWithin, and go inside the widget and you will find this line of code

<b:includable id=”main” <data:content / </b:includable
 
Replace it with this one, and you are good to go!
<b:includable id=”main” <b:if cond=’data:blog.pageType ==&quot;item&quot;’ <data:content / </b:if </b:includable  

 4. HTTPS redirect

If you are using HTTPS for added security on your blog then you are going to have to sacrifice using Linkwithin, the widget only supports the usual version of the domain “http://” and not “https://” and won’t even show it on the blog unless you change the settings. 

Go to settings HTTPS and switch from on to off.

 

Switch HTTPS from on to off
Switch HTTPS from on to off

I hope you found this post useful, I will be posting tips on how
to increase your blog views soon enough
Share with your friends and family and have a good day!