How to make an All-Posts List

Great! I finally got a decent All-Posts list, you can see it to the right of this article. It's not quite what I wanted in that I was looking for something that could be arranged alphabetically, but what can you do? The main thing was to get rid of the ugly Blogger "Archive" gadget. However, now that I've got the All-Posts list, I think I'm going to leave the Archive gadget up there. All you have to do is change the style from Hierarchy to Flat List and you get a nice little option where visitors can click on a month and are taken to a page that displays every post from that month (and it doesn't look ugly):



But anyway, getting back to the All Posts list. I wrote to The Blog Doctor (another great resources page, although I sometimes have problems with how it loads up). Within about 10 hours (a very fast response time, props to them) they sent me a link to a great set of instructions for putting up your "All-Posts" list. This page has links to two other pages, one which builds the code you need an another which styles it.

Sometimes the instructions you find on web pages assume that you know way more than you do and can thus be frustrating. That wasn't the case here, this instruction is fairly self-explanatory. I'm not going to go through it since that would be stealing content. The only problem you could potentially have is if you have established a RSS feed or ATOM feed different than the default one which comes with Blogger. If you haven't done that, everything mentioned on The Blog Doctor works great.

Good luck with it!

Getting Your Blog Started: Step 1 Open a Blogger Account

All you have to do is make a quick search in google for "About Blogs" or "Blog information" and you'll quickly find yourself inundated with so much material that you'll probably feel like trotting off somewhere to hide your head under a blanket. Before you know it, you'll get forwarded to articles on incomprehensible things containing bewildering terms like how to "hack" a "template" (or some other nonsense) and you'll probably find yourself sitting before your monitor with a glassy-eyed stare nodding vaguely in agreement as though you were trying to convince a third-party observer that the conversation hasn't left you completely behind.

Sometimes it feels like everybody else in the whole world has already achieved the rank of "Enlightened Grand-Master Blogger" and they're able to do magical tricks and pirouettes with their web pages that just leave your head spinning.

Needless to say, it's discouraging.

That's the way I felt a little over a month ago when I decided to try my hand at this Blogger business. Like most people, I wanted to throw in the towel in the first few minutes. However, I've stuck with it, and now, only a short four weeks later, I feel pretty confident that I can find the solution to just about any blog problem that arises.

The first trick you need to learn is to simply not start thinking too far ahead. Take it one step at a time and solve each problem as they come to you. When you start being concerned about an issue that isn't even likely to be an obstacle until you get fifty miles down the road, you tend to lose heart and prematurely abandon an otherwise completely sea-worthy vessel.

So that's my main point for this article. Commit yourself to starting small and taking baby steps. Soon the sense of frustration that you feel at all the blog issues people are talking about will turn into exhilaration for all the new things you have to learn about and explore.

But getting back to baby steps, and these are some ultra baby steps (this is the "Idiot's Guide" after all now isn't it?).

How do you start up your blog? Well first of all, I would recommend getting an e-mail account at www.gmail.com. Although you probably already have an e-mail, it's a good idea to set up a new one for "blog-related" things (it just keeps you more organized). G-mail is Google's e-mail service and it is a great e-mail option. For those of you used to yahoo, G-mail has some features that you're going to really like.

Once you have your G-mail account, go to www.blogger.com. Another popular blogger is www.wordpress.com. In fact, most of the discussion groups I have looked through seem to suggest Wordpress is better than Blogger. However, Blogger has the advantage of being owned by Google. What that means is that when it comes time for you to start up your Adsense account, you get it activated a lot more quickly if your blog is with Blogger (if you don't know what Adsense is, don't worry about it, but trust me on the fact that you're going to want it eventually).

Starting up your actual Blog is easy. All you have to do is type in a name (if the name you want has been taken, try a variation), pick a template (don't get too bogged down with the choices, just pick one so you can get started...you can change it later), and start posting. Congratulations! The Blog is up and you're on your way.

Before you try to do anything else, just play around with the basics of blogger for a while. Get a feel for writing things and putting them out there. Just remember that anything you put on a blog is available to anyone who's got access to the internet (yup, pretty much the whole world). Even though you aren't likely to get too many visitors to your web at first, you should still use some discretion.

So there you go. The Blog is up and running! See, that wasn't all that hard at all. But never fear, there's plenty more to come that will befuddle, challenge and...yes...probably frustrate you. When you start feeling overwhelmed, just keep your head up and try to remember how boring a world it would be if everything was easy!

Getting a decent Archive List

I don't know about you, but I don't really like the one archive list that is provided in gadgets. I mean, I suppose it's a functional enough list, but don't you find it a bit limited? Storing all your posts chronologically by month just isn't as sexy as some of the other options blogger has to offer.

I've been looking around various tutorial pages and a lot of them have a really nice sidebar list which neatly organizes all their posts alphabetically. Well, I dug around in the code and it turned out these pages were just using a "link list" gadget (or widget I suppose).

Ok, Ok, that seemed to work well enough, but who wants to constantly be typing a link into a list option? Sure, it's not much actual work, but it's still WORK and there should be a program available to do this for me.

To be clear, what I'm looking for is an archive type widget that automatically makes a list of all your blog posts in alphabetical order. Although something like this isn't going to be useful if you have, say, a thousand posts, I think it would be great for a year or two (in which time you can see which posts are popular and switch over to a "100 most popular" list widget or something...does that even exist?).

Well, like I've said before, I'm not a programmer (I read an HTML codebook once years ago but that's it...oh, I also wrote a program in my High School Pascal class that made the computer spark and shut off never to be turned on again...my teacher had insisted such a thing was impossible, but my success didn't earn me the "A" I thought I'd deserved, or any kind of passing grade for that matter). However, in this case, it seems that some kind of programming on my part is required.

I've noticed that the links widget can be set to make a list alphabetically, and the archive widget has some sort of command that simply creates links based on the page content. So, I decided to dig through the two codes and do some cutting and pasting to see if I could combine the alphabetization with the post link creator. I really doubt it's going to work, and even if it does the world needs some sort of real programmer to put together a few more archive widgets with more options. Actually, I'm sure such things already exist, so if you stumble across them please, post a link in a comment.

In the meantime, I'll get back to you on how well my hackjob effort is working.

Update:

Wow, I've been spending the whole day on this stupid project with no results. I did find one page that claimed to have a hack to make an alphabetized index page here, but I can't get it to work. I even opened up the code on the link page where they claim to have the hack working, but searches for elements of the hack came up empty, so go figure.

Google has another gadget called "labels" that you might be able to rig to work, but there appear to be some inherent difficulties to that widget as well.

The thing is, in looking for information you often find other things that are quite a bit more interesting. I've made a half-dozen additions to my favorites, and I'll be exploring those pages and articles in future posts.

About the Idiot's Guide to Blogs

Let's get one thing straight right away. I'm not a computer guy. I don't know how to program, I don't know what HTML is, I think Java is something you drink. What I am is a writer. I was one of those stupid people who studied English Literature only to find out later that it has no practical applications. Worst of all, it was only upon graduation that I realized how difficult it is to get people to actually read anything that you write.

Sure, sure, sure, I get the occasional article published on Living in Peru, or Silent Sports, or, of course, in my own blog Streets of Lima, but I don't make enough to pay the rent now do I, so therein lies the rub.

Enter the necessity to learn how to blog.

What I've discovered is that there's a huge amount of information available on the web. The page that I've found to be the most useful in tweaking your blog so that it looks the way you want it to is Tips For New Bloggers. "Tips" deals mainly with programming issues and they give great step by step procedures as to how to change your HTML code.

However, I find that as a blog manager, you end up having to set up accounts in a myriad of sites in order to list your articles, draw traffic, make money, etc., and it would be extremely useful to have links to all those sites available in one place.

Hence, the birth of The Idiot's Guide to Blogs.

My plan is to put the necessary links (adsense, analytics, etc.,) on the left hand side of this page. In the middle, I'm going to post frequent essays about my efforts with the various blog issues that keep crawling out of the dark, enchanted forest and throwing themselves at me. I'll tell you what silly little trick I'm currently working on in order to increase traffic, and I'll post updates discussing how effective it seemed to be. Hopefully all these articles will be tinged more with devilish humor and irony rather than frustrated rage (but I'm not holding my breath on that account).

In my experience, the main problem regarding confusion with blogs is this: programmers are not writers, so though they know what they're talking about they often can't communicate it. My problem is that I know how to communicate, I just don't have any expertise. So, I'm going to go through my muddling efforts of following an expert's procedure step by step, with the hopes that I will be able to clear up any inherent communication problems on the way. See what I'm getting at? The Idiot's Guide to Blogs is going to be an amalgam between the writer and the programmer, a perfect union, a divine acropolis (it's too infrequent where you can correctly use the word "acropolis" in modern times, it's also worth noting that the previous sentence does not constitute an accurate example).

We'll see how it goes, could be this blog will be dead in a month, but you never know!

Good luck, and good blogging!