Monday, June 08, 2009

New Blog Design for OCThen.com

For those of you reading OCThen via RSS, take a look at the website because I changed a lot of stuff around...

http://www.octhen.com

Primarily, I migrated it over to New Blogger, which Blogger actually refers to as just "Blogger". This means OCThen is now hosted on Google's servers. It used to be running Classic Blogger, via FTP, on my server.

The migration gives me access to several new features, which I have running right now...

    Improved Search - search results shows you the full posts, instead of links to posts

  • Recent Comments - this shows you the last five comments our visitors made. This was sorely needed, because the real gold in OCThen are the comments people make. Now you'll know where the latest comments are. Check back everyday because there seems to be new comments everyday.


  • Comments RSS - If you already read OCThen via RSS, you can now get a separate RSS feed for just the comments. Click here.

  • Form Commenting - There's now a comment form on OCThen. Previously, you had to click a link to open up a form window. This just eliminates the step of clicking the link.


  • Instantaneous Commenting - Now, when you post a comment it will appear on OCThen instaneously. Previously, Blogger had to upload the comment to my server via FTP, which could take several minutes.


  • Reorganized Archives - I reorganized the archives so that there's now just two sections, one for "Communities" and another for "Subjects". Previously, I had something like 20-30 different sections.


  • It Looks Different - That's because I changed the design. It now resembles something like an old newspaper, giving it that nostalgic look. Hope you like it.

1 comment:

  1. .Hi - love the new look-- must have been a big project - good job!

    Suggestions - go to feedburner (free, google owns it) - burn your feed there - then use their free tools to add an RSS subscription link, AND and email subscription link to the main page.

    Then, sign up with Twitter, and then go to Twitterfeed - also free -- and feed your blog feed to Twitter. You don't have to go to Twitter and tweet unless you want to, but every new post will automatically show up there.

    Also, then add a Tweet This button to your blogger-formatting-post-template, and readers can easily Tweet what they like.

    Those steps should generate more traffic, and will give you better SEO.

    Good luck -- Marianne Dow msdowantiques.com
    .

    ReplyDelete

Custom Search