The message reads as follows:

Update your templates

Your templates include links to files hosted on Google Page Creator, a service that is soon migrating to Google Sites. Do you want Blogger to update those links now? Learn more

There is a ‘Update and review‘ link at the bottom of the message. Once you click it the new domain,’bloggerhosting.appspot.com’ would ask you to allow permissions to access your account. Just approve it.

Once done, you will be redirected to a page that will show all your blogs and check which one’s have references to googlepages (in their template.)

If any of your blog has a reference to googlepages in it, just click on the ‘Update References >>‘ link. It will now ask you to download (and backup) your template.

After clicking on ‘Next‘, all your references (like the scripts or css files or images) will be automatically uploaded to bloggerhosting.appspot.com. For eg. my script, that was previously hosted on http://myfreehouse2.googlepages.com/lightbox.js would now be moved to http://bloggerhosting.appspot.com/serve/myfreehouse2.googlepages.com/lightbox.js

Now all you need to do is click the ‘Update‘ button at the bottom, and your template will be modified with all the new links. Pretty neat!

So don’t wait much, as it seems the Google will now hurry up the closing of GP, and you wouldn’t want to lose any of your data, eh?

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1. 8 Ways to Implement Related Posts in Blogger
2. Easy to Install Related Posts Widget for Blogger
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4. Add a Google-type Live Search Box Widget to your Blog
5. Use Google URL shortener service Goo.gl from FireFox

Tagul, a site that is currently in beta, is a free service (currently) that will help you to create wonderful flash-based tag clouds. After you sign up, agree to their ‘terms and conditions’, enter your blog URL or text words and click on Fetch the Tags. Thats it! Your tags will be auto-matically fetched and you could create your tag-clud in an instant. Do remember to change the tag links pattern to link the tags to your blog (for eg. http://techwithric.com/tag/$tag would link a tag ‘browser‘ to http://techwithric.com/tag/browser )

Of course that is an array of customizable options like the shape of the tag cloud:

You can also customize the colors as well as font-family of the font:

Its so simple! After you’ve created your tag-cloud you could preview it (by clicking on the Preview tab) or create it and embed it on your blog. Here’s a demo of the tag cloud created for this blog:

Currently you can create 10 clouds on one account and you can set it to auto-refresh (and include new tags automatically) for 12 or 24-hour periods. You can visit Tagul from here: Tagul

So did you like it? Do share your experiences by commenting..

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5. Submit Your Blog’s Sitemap to Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask

Its very easy to add this search box to your site. In fact if you don’t prefer to install it directly and want to test it, just go to their site sikbox.com and enter your blog’s address. There is a live preview search box, using which you can test the results. A live preview of makeuseof.com yielded the following results:

To add the widget to your blog just go to http://sikbox.com/ and fill in the preview form. Then just click on the ‘Get the Code’ button. Now you will be asked for your name and email. Fill it up and click on the ‘Customize and Generate Code’ button. Now you can customize the search-box (actually you customize how the results appear) and then select the code generated below and add it to your blog.

Advantages:

• Free and fast
• Ease of use, no complexity
• Easy to install and use
• No programming required
• Extremely fast and lightweight
• Fully customizable via skins or CSS
• Image search support

Disadvantage:

The only disadvantage that I found was that for the search results to appear properly, your site must be indexed by Yahoo. This is because the  widget uses Yahoo API to get the results. Otherwise its a great plugin

You can try it out by visiting sikbox.com

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The process of submitting your sitemap is quite simple. If you are a blogger user (blogger.com) the link to your sitemap would be your-blog-address.blogspotcom/atom.xml. For eg http://myfreehouse.blogspot.com/atom.xml

But theres one problem here. A standard sitemap must contain all the links in your blog. However if your blog is hosted on blogger, your sitemap will contain only the 26 most recent posts. But there is a simple workaround to this.

Suppose that your blog (taking an eg. myfreehouse.blogpsot.com) contains 200 posts. So for the first 100 you can use http://myfreehouse.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=100

For the next 100 you can use http://myfreehouse.blogspot.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=100&max-results=200 and son on.

If you are a wordpress user you can just install the Google Sitemap Generator Plugin for WordPress. Your sitemap will be auto-generated at your-blog-address.com/sitemap.xml. For eg. http://techwithric.com/sitemap.xml

Submitting your sitemaps:

So now to the main part Submitting your sitemaps. Just follow the following steps. Remember to replace the text in red with your sitemap’s address:

• Google

  You can follow this tutorial to submit your sitemap to Google.

• Yahoo

  1. http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/updateNotification?appid=SitemapWriter&url=http://techwithric.com/sitemap.xml
  2. http://search.yahooapis.com/SiteExplorerService/V1/ping?sitemap=http://techwithric.com/sitemap.xml

• Bing

  1. http://www.bing.com/webmaster/ping.aspx?siteMap=http://techwithric.com/sitemap.xml
  2. http://webmaster.live.com/ping.aspx?siteMap=http://techwithric.com/sitemap.xml

• Ask

  http://submissions.ask.com/ping?sitemap=http://techwithric.com/sitemap.xml

If submit your sitempas to the major search engines, it is more likely that they will crawl your website more quickly. So do it! Hope you liked this tutorial. More to follow!

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5. Is Google Buzz for You?

When I started out blogging a couple of years back, I used to just rant about stuff that didn’t matter at all. (I still do that though, keeps my mind fresh!) Back then there were few quality articles that would state what needs to be done to keep up a good blog. So here are the tips that I have compiled through my experience.

• Don’t get disheartened

  Its pretty easy for a first-timer to give-up quite fast. Even I did. But give it a little time. My first blog didn’t even have 20 regular visitors for the first 6 months!

  Even if people don’t come to your blog initially, they will do so later. Just blog dude, no worries.

• Post regularly

  One mistake that most bloggers tend to do is to post about 10-20 posts within the first month, and then only update it like once in 2-3 weeks. Fresh content is what search engines look for. The more fresh your content is, the more will be the people to come to your blog.

• Find your niche

  What’s a niche first of all? Well basically its a category (of a particular product or service) that you would want to focus your attention on. For eg. TWR is focused on the tech niche.

  This is a pretty tricky step in any bloggers life. Its okay if you start out with a broad niche like tech, but as you go further along you need to figure out what your good at, and focus your attention towards that. The more you focus on a single niche, the more great content you can generate.

• Build a community

  Never ever leave your visitors high and dry! Your blog readers are everything to you. Reply to their comments, provide email or RSS-based subscription available for your visitors to follow your blog are among certain things you can do.

  If you can, then building a forum and providing support to them is also a good idea.

• Submit your site map to Google, Yahoo, Bing

  Well it all comes down to one thing, Blog Marketing. If you don’t market it well, you don’t get anything good in return. If you follow the above steps religiously the majority part of your marketing process is covered.

  Submitting site maps is also one great method to increase your organic search ratings. You can read this tutorial on how to submit your site map to the main search providers.

Well hope you liked these tips. I’ve followed them, and tasted success for sure. How about you?

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