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Sometime back, we published a post on starting a free blog. In response, we got some queries that show that new bloggers often confuse between .blogger , .blogspot and Google blogs . So comes this post. Google is not only the biggest s earch engine, its bouquet has a lot many products and services. Among them is Blogger , a bogging platform, on which you can open any number of blogs, all for free! When you open a blog on Blogger , you get the blog's name with .blogspot at the end of it. For example, there is a blog with the name http://indiantopblogs.blogspot.com When you make a blog on Blogger , it get .blogspot. com as the ending. Interestingly, when you open this very blog in a country where Google has installed a server, you often get the same blog with the country ending! So don't get confused if in India, you get the blog in the above example as http://indiantopblogs .blogspot. in . In short, a ' Google blog' is the same as 'Blogger blog' or...

Updated in November 2020 Broken links and dead links are hyperlinks on webpages, which do not link to the destination. Broken links arise due to many reasons, the main ones being: The linked content's URL has been changed. The author of the website / blog typed the URL wrongly. The URL has gone private. The host server has gone bad temporarily (e.g. down for maintenance or attacked by a malware or overburdened due to sudden spike in traffic) or permanently. The URL has been blocked or removed due to its controversial or harmful nature. Links to user-generated content (e.g. answer to "SEO expert near my office") can generate temporary URLs that vanish immediately after use.  Webpages that need logging in cannot be browsed by non-logged-in users. Bad or broken or dead links get multiplied on blogs and many other CMSs by replicating the same URLs in many places. For example, a bad link might come up on the search pages and category pages in addition to the pag...

You have a Blogger (or Wordpress.com) free blog and now feel that you should rather have a traditional website, right?  You have two options, to convert the blog itself into a normal website  to create a new website and take your blog’s resources there. In the present post, we’d tell you how to convert the blog into a normal, simple, website that does not look like a blog. The procedure to redirect the blog to a new website is dealt with in this earlier post: Independent domain name, webhost and migration . Before we tell you how to convert the blog into a website, let’s spend a few minutes on why (or why not) make a blog look like a normal website . WHY SHOULD I CONVERT MY BLOG INTO A NORMAL WEBSITE? This blog has a simple page as the standalone homepage. A custom redirect (Settings> S earch P references...) makes it the homepage. There are some real and some perceived advantages of having a normal website rather than a blog. The main ones are: A...

We recently published a post on how to start a blog and how to maintain it. We also created a slideshow on how to create a great blog in just 30 minutes . Yet, certain things remained unsaid. For example, what should you consider even before you take a plunge to make a new blog (or website). These are very important because they map your mindset... they let you test whether you have the potential to become a 'successful' blogger in terms of money or storytelling or making an archive or furthering your professional interests or whatever else is your blogging goal.  We have divided this pre-blogging checklist into 5 segments as follows: Do you know well the rewards and the pitfalls? Knowing what you can get and at what cost is important before you start blogging. Do you understand your own strengths and  weaknesses? You must be conscious of your skills / knowl edge / energ y / time / experience / etc and also what all you lack. Can you overcome the shortcomings? Wh...

Blogging is sinful to Islamists in Bangladesh, if it promotes secular thought A publisher has now paid with his life for keeping and propagating secular thoughts in this Muslim-majority nation.  Publisher Faisal Arefin Dipan was killed by Islamic extremists last week. Himself a secular blogger, his publishing house Jagriti Prokashoni has published books by Avijit Roy, a US citizen of Bangladeshi origin was killed earlier this year. There have been massive protests in Bangla Desh against this attack, but like earlier attacks on bloggers, we keep our fingers crossed whether there would be any check on the attackers. In fact, they have updated the hit list they issued earlier and have threatened to kill them all. A very popular blogger, with about a million following his social network pages, Imran Sarkar, has also received a death threat a few days back.  One more publisher, Farid Ahmed, of Somoy Prakashan publishing house, has also received a death threat this...

Thoroughly updated: November 2020 This is sequel to our post on ' How to start a blog '. If you have not yet made a blog, do read that and take action, and then come back. In addition, we have posted an article ' 9 Blogging myths that bloggers must avoid '. We suggest that you read both the articles together so that intentional or inadvertent mistakes do not come in the way of your nurturing the new blog into a big, reputed blog. If you already have a blog, you can cover most of the lost ground by following best practices and undoing the mistakes.   Blogging mistakes that beginners and new bloggers make.   1. Bad URL, bad bog title, bad blog description. On the web, you can see numerous examples of bad blog meta data or basic information. Many bloggers start with giving the blog a domain name that is not related with its subject or is difficult to remember. They also give it an irrelevant title and a lengthy (but value-less) description.  These are not BIG blo...

Not many of us might have seen a research paper on the value of blogs as historical archives, by Dr Deborah Gabriel. So we thought, let's share it with blogger friends this week. The paper analyses blogs by African Caribbean bloggers living in the UK and finds that blogs pay an important role in capturing key historical moments as they help generate new levels of understanding on the experiences of racial minorities.  To further quote the paper, Blogs function as an important medium that enables African Caribbean people to create and interpret events as counter-narratives in opposition to dominant discourses. This is of major significance since power and privilege are unevenly distributed across all cultural and social arenas and as such can only be challenged through ‘democratic practice’... The findings demonstrate that the bloggers featured in this study appropriate blogs as a medium for self-representation, leading to the cultivation of symbolic power through their own...