Friday, January 18, 2008

31 Days to Building a Better Blog: Day 4

The challenge for 'Day 4 of the 31 Days to building a better blog' involves going back to old posts and do some interlinking so that one post leads to another. This encourages readers to travel more extensively around your blog.

This challenge is obviously going to take a few days. I intentionally interlink my posts now by both putting links in the post itself and adding labels/tabs at the end of the post. However, I have only been doing that for the last couple of months. It will take a little time to go back to my early posts and do some linking. However, I think it will be well worth it because there were some interesting discussions that went on about topics such as lurking in online communities, virtual identity, and how a teacher presents his/herself to students.

What I have not worked out how to do is to get to first post of this blog and work my way forward in time to my current post, so if anyone can tell me how to do that I'd be really grateful.

Image: 'rusted chain link' zen Sutherland
www.flickr.com/photos/54289096@N00/13211677

12 comments:

Carolyn said...

This is obviously going to be a super-blog. I took one of your tips and put a CC license on my blog. I am not sure what some of the other little gadgets you have included are. I don't know where you are finding the time for all of this Sarah. Well done.

Sarah Stewart said...

Sue Waters told me about them via my post about Day 2 of this challenge. The feed widgets come via Feedburner, so you need to get an account there.

Kate Olson said...

Good luck on the linking, I think it's tough to do. It's hard for me to do links since in Internet Explorer/edublogs, I have to go into the code section to do links. So, it's fairly time consuming. My blogging time for the day is typically only the time between showering in the a.m. and leaving for school!

Sarah Stewart said...

I dont think I could be bothered to do that. At least with Blogger, the linking is extremely simple. I don' t think I'll spend too much time on this challenge. The main thing I think is that we link in our posts from now on.

Carolyn said...

Just a wee thought Sarah. I find scrolling down your side bar to find things quite a challenge, as there is so much there. I wonder if you found another blogger format that gave you more usable space if this would solve some of that problem. What do you think? there is a lot of screen space wasted in this template.

Michelle said...

Your blog looks so much more sophisticated than mine! LOL! I'm glad to join this group on the 31 day journey. I'm only a couple of days behind, but I have SO much to learn!

Sarah Stewart said...

Ahh, Michele, but I have been at it for a few months now so have a head start. What I have learned is blogs are growing, evolving things and you keep learning about/from them all the time

Anonymous said...

I think I'm learning quite a lot about blogging from watching on the sidelines of yours sarah - especially as you do this challenge thing. There is so much to it.
Rae

Sarah Stewart said...

You'll have to start a blog of your own. You can keep it simple - you don't need to go to quite the same extremes as I have. It may be a good idea for you to use it as a place to reflect whilst you do your thesis this year. By making your reflections public, rather than keeping a private research journal, you may get more support than you otherwise would. It will also be role modeling blogging for students.

Sarah Stewart said...

Yes, I find it a bit tricky sometimes when using terms. I am conscious I have the potential of two readers: the e-learning savvy and non-savvy person. So I seem to be writing two types of posts and am responsibly happy with that. I try to explain things in easy terms if I want the non-savvy person to understand them. But at the same time, I don't want to bore the people who do know these terms too much. Quite a balance at times.

Anonymous said...

yeah you have tried to cover quite a bit of ground in your blog i guess. Just as you do in your chosen career.
Rae

Sarah Stewart said...

This is fascinating stuff. Since I have gone back and increased my internal linking, according to my stats,the number of page loads has doubled although the actual number of readers has only increased by 10.