Impetus to Reflect

I had a very successful Zoom session with a member of our local family history group earlier in the week. This member wants to start a blog and, as a more cautious soul than me, wants to be prepared prior to launching her blog.

Rosie (a nom de plume) had been doing lots of research on blogging and, prior to our session, sent me a list of questions to be answered. This was a most useful session as we were able to focus her learning on her needs. Rosie went away with many of her questions answered.

The session was also beneficial for me, I am the sort of person who often dives into tasks without much thought and when giving advice on blogging I suggest that others "Just do It". Working with Rosie made me realise that my trial and error approach to tasks doesn't suit everybody.

Going through Rosie's list provided me with an opportunity to reflect on my GeniAus blog which is steaming towards its 12th birthday. I have identified several areas that can do with a tune-up so, this morning I have been carrying out some maintenance on the Topics widget in my left sidebar.

As Blogger doesn't offer a Categories feature I use the Labels Gadget which allows one to display up to ten Labels/Keywords, as a de facto Categories component. When I blog I make sure that I always add one or more of the ten labels featured in the Labels Gadget to each of my posts. On looking at my ten labels I decided that they were no longer as relevant as when I set them up.

I feel that the labels I am now using describe the general themes of my blog. I have introduced two new labels in place of the retired "Family", one is Ancestors (soon to become Our Ancestors)for posts about  deceased members of the family and one is Our Family for posts that refer to living family members. I am in the process of relabelling of posts that fit into these new categories.  I also need to tidy up my up my labels for Blogging and Geneablogging, I can't decide which I prefer to use. I'd like to add an Events label so I think Libraries may be on the chopping board.

Your thoughts on this are most welcome.

Trove Tuesday - Titles and Tags

One of the things I bang on about is being able to find and retrieve things. It's no good having a great collection of stuff on the internet if it can't be easily retrieved or appear high on a list of hits from a search engine.

Today several geneabloggers have written wonderful Trove Tuesday posts. For these to be easily retrieved by others and to get high up on Google's results pages the term Trove Tuesday needs to appear in the post (and preferably not once just in the body of the articles we write).

I don't know much about the algorithms Google uses to return hits to us but I suspect that if Trove Tuesday appears in the title of a post then that post will rank higher in the list of hits returned to us. Similarly if a post is tagged with Trove Tuesday it might move higher up in the list of hits returned from a Trove Tuesday search on Google. So when I write a Trove Tuesday post I will put Trove Tuesday in the title, include the term in my post and add a tag for Trove Tuesday.

I just did a search for Trove Tuesday in Google and here is what I found:

You will notice that my two posts about Trove Tuesday are near the top after Shrove Tuesday (go figure). Maybe this is because I have mentioned the term three times. Merron's post makes the list further down. Where are the other fabulous posts?

Let's help to make Trove Tuesday posts more findable by adding appropriate Titles and Tags.

A new approach to tagging

I have written before that I am a Tag Queen, this penchant for tagging is not restricted to my photo collection. I also tag my collection of links on Delicious, my books on Librarything, my resources on Zotero and my blog posts.

Until recently I had all of the tags (labels in Blogger) for this blog listed  in a Gadget at the bottom of my blog template. I had been dissatisfied with this arrangement for a while and created a separate blogger page to display my tags but I just haven't been able to get the html code right to have my tags display on the Blog Topics Page. The untidiness of the huge list of tags on my template has continued to disturb me.

Other geneabloggers have a number of blogs for different topics but I find it more convenient to keep most of my posts in one blog. I therefore need to make it easy for readers to identify posts of interest to them from within my blog.

General Blog Tags

I will continue to add specific tags to all my posts but I have created a more general set of around 10-12 tags that I will display in the Tags Gadget that I have moved to the menu on the Right Hand Side of my blog template.  Having reflected on my blog I will use these general labels: Android, Australia, Blogging, Events, Genealogists, History, Libraries, Resources, Rootstech, Social Media, Societies, Technology. Hopefully these will give an indication of my posts' content.

In the future I will try to add general tags to all posts and, if time permits, will retrospectively tag older posts.