MusTech.Net!

I had a great time and experience while in Michigan.  I got to spend time with good friends and meet new friends and colleagues.  I spent a lot time with V. Keith Mason.  We have had a number of conversations but have never officially met. 

The presentation about R.S.S. went very well.  I was a little bit anxious about it as it was very “cutting edge” material -however, the folks in attendance told me afterward that it was a great session.  I plan to post a web version of the presentation very soon.

I have a number of draft posts beginning to pile up and with the start of the college semester “off and running”,  it may be awhile before I get to them all BUT, I’m planning on posting the current, OFFICIAL list of ME bloggers tomorrow… Stay TUNED! 

If you are a ME blogger or planning to be one,  don’t forget to check out the official repository of ME blogging information from time to time here:
http://www.mustech.net/100-me-bloggers

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Just a quick note.  If you have a WordPress.com site, you have just been given a 60x increase from 50Mb to 3000Mb for free.  It is interesting that I just mentioned in a post last week that they will most likely increase the 50Mb in the near future…   This is the highest amount of free storage given on an free WordPress site.

Check out more about this here:
http://wordpress.com/blog/2008/01/21/three-gigabytes/

Ken asked me a great question about using the new ME Blogger Logos in the sidebar of a WordPress.com site.   Although it is easy to post a graphic in a regular post by using the upload featureof a WordPress post, posting a graphic in the sidebar is a little bit trickier.

This post will feature a step-by-step graphic tutorial of how do accomplish this using any standard (free) WordPress.com site.  In addition, I will include specific information for posting the ME Graphic in your sidebar while having it reference back to the 100-ME-Blogger Informational page located on this site.   I will also start a thread in the forums (ME HELP) to work with anyone who is having any problems following the tutorial.

Note: This is a LARGE post and you should print this if you are going to work through the following tutorial.

Part 1, Uploading the graphic file to your WordPress.com server

Step 1: PREPARE

Make sure you have downloaded the logo(s) you would like to use in your sidebar to your (local) computer (put them on your desktop or in your pictures folder so you remember where they are).  In the case of the ME bloggers, you can find these pictures here:
http://www.esnips.com/web/mebloggers

Step 2: Log into your WordPress.com account and click on the Write Tab

Step 3: Create a “Dummy” picture holder post

Once your in the WRITE location, choose “Write Post” and create a new POST called: Upload Picts (Do Not Post). Make sure you put the (Do Not Post) after the Picts so that later on you will remember not to post this.   You will be able to use this one “Dummy” post in the future to continue to upload pictures that will not be used in an actual post but may be useful in other instances such as using in your sidebar.

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A few of you have already taken “us” up with regard to our challenge of 100 ME Bloggers before 2009.  I have a few start-up tips for those of you that have already started your own blog and want to know “what next”.   I hope to post a few of these “tips” every month for awhile!
One of the very first things that you need to do is to have at least 3-4 good posts up on your site.  They don’t need to be written one after another, but you need to have some relevant content on your site before you should submit your site to the search engines. 

Without your site being visible to the search engines, people will not be able to find your site, regardless of your content.   There are different ways to become visible on search engines.  The first way is to tell the search engines (google, yahoo, msn, etc.) that you exists through something called “site submission”.  Another way is to have your site “linked” to sites that already are indexed on other search engines.  This “linking” is one way that search engines rate your sites relevancy in the indexes.  That is, if more people are linking to your site, you must be more relevant and therefore your site will be returned “higher” in the search results when people are looking for content that can be found on your site.

This is why it is very important for the ME bloggers (or any blogger) to have their blogrolls populated by and with other ME blogger’s sites -to create a relevancy so that our content can be found by others. 

To get started I suggest manually submitting your site to the “big three” (make sure you have content before you submit or else when the sites actually  “crawl” your site for the first time there will be literally, nothing to index), Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

Manually add your site using these links:
Google: http://www.google.com/addurl/
Yahoo: http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html
MSN Live SEARCH: http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx

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