Category Archives: Weblogs

What I learned in 14 years of website “building”

Technology, Weblogs
I built my first website in 2001. “Built” is probably a little too creative of a term. It was more like hacking through the jungle and getting stuck in a swamp, because I was trying to use Microsoft Frontpage. The damn software was next to impossible, but I bluffed my way through it and had a skeletal site with a few forms.
WordPress became big and I switched to it about 6 years ago for both my website and my blog (this site).
I was just reading that Google is going to penalize websites that are not mobile friendly this month. Here is where you check to see if your site is mobile friendly.
As luck would have it, I just upgraded my site to be mobile friendly a few weeks ago. I thought about hiring a web designer to help me this time, and I emailed three or four of them. I got exactly zero responses even to the fancy “hire us” forms on their websites.
So I decided to do it myself again. I still use WordPress, but I switched to using a theme by Elegant Themes called Divi. It is a great, drag and drop theme that is about 200% easier to use than Frontpage was.
 I really like Divi and would highly recommend it. If you are moderately tech savvy you can put together a nice looking mobile friendly site in no time. And then Google won’t treat your site as second class.

How to Read Many Blogs at Once

Weblogs

It took me a while to figure this out (guess I’m a little slow…) Blogs are great, but you don’t want to hop all over reading each one that you like every day.

It’s best to use a blog reader. I use Feed Demon It only costs $25. There are free readers out there too.

Once you install it, add whatever blogs interest you. Go to the blog that you like (Feed Demon as a brower that looks like explorer.) Go to the “Syndicate this Site,” “XML” or similar symbol at the blog you like, click it and then click “Add new channel” in Feed Demon. The blogs are grouped by topic in Feed Demon, like “Legal” or “Wine”. You can read each blog in each topic individually or, cooler yet, group all of those under one topic as a “newspaper.”